I think that ideally, everyone should live in cities. The reason being is that it is the most effective solution to housing massive populations in small regions.
A): There are environmental damages when people spread out such as suburban areas. For instance, it takes 1000 acres of land to house 2000 people when a sky scraper can house them in a 10 acre plot. Think about the deforestation, in efficient use of resources, and consumption of space in a small planet with a growing population.
B): Skyscrapers can last for a thousand years, where a house usually deteriorates in a few hundred. Thus, resources can be preserved efficiently.
C): You can have massive forests and lots of land for farming and wilderness with the saved space.
The cost of Burj Khalifa is 1.5 billion USD. The Sq ft is 3.3 million. Thus, price/sq ft is 454 USD.
Assuming a person can live very comfortably in 500 sqft, it would cost 320,000,000 people x 500 sqft x 454 USD= $ 72 trillion to house us all.
And the amount of land it would use ? Unfortunately, I could not find the exact footprint so I am going to take a guess. At
* Not that bad. Look at our 20 trillion Nat. debt and I think that you could save excess gov't revenue for 100 years and come up with the 72 trillion. I also think that with scale and mass production and innovative techniques/engineering costs will drop dramatically, so it would be more like 30 trillion.
