this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

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There must be a city with the highest amount of floorspace per person, but nobody seems interested enough to compile that list (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 hour ago by FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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Like we have "largest city" lists,

  • most people would think largest city means most populous,
  • but some people interpret it as city area,
  • so in the former case Mexico City would be the "Largest" city in North america
  • in the latter case, LA would be (i haven't fact checked these, just roll with it)

Some cities are really populous, like Hong Kong, and it means people settle for very little living space just to have access to the opportunities there. Cities grow big largely on the basis of this principle - how many people are willing to slum it in one place together? And historically, the rich have done the opposite; when peasants are cramming themselves into as small a space as possible, the rich are building homes larger than entire villages.

So, to contrast a city of commoners and a city of wealthy people, one effective metric would be to look at the average footage (floor area) of peoples' homes. Ideally divided by how many people there are, to have it on a per person basis.

I bet the results would be interesting. We'd find loads of places we didn't know the names of, little hideaway towns which serve as getaways for the wealthy

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[–] snek_boi@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 minutes ago

I would guess cities with declining populations would make it high up in the list.

[–] Lehmuusa@nord.pub 4 points 49 minutes ago

This can be a surprisingly difficult thing to measure, for a little surprising reason:

The city with most floor space per person is among the cities with the lowest population density. It will be a city where the maximum amount of homes are detached houses. And probably one where the "urban" planning is less dense than in your standard suburbia.

It will be a very small city by population.

And that leads us to the problem: how do we define "city"?

There are several competing definitions for what constitutes a city, and since we're talking about cities at the very lowest end of the population scale, you'll get a big pile of different answers depending on what counts as a city fir whom.

[–] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 hour ago

How about Pripyat? Abandoned city near cernobyl, so dividing by population gives NaN.

[–] HocEnimVeni@lemmy.world 1 points 28 minutes ago

My money is on Big Sky, Montana

[–] lime@feddit.nu 2 points 1 hour ago

kiruna claimed to be the largest city in the world up until 2009 due to the city limits being colocated with the municipality limits as a result of a typo in the paper work. it has a population of 22k and an area of almost 21k km^2^ (~8k sq mi).