A quantification of minimum floor space requirements

In order to live and maintain life, people require some amount of shelter as protection against nature's elements. This paper investigates minimum areas required for shelter. To this end, standards of floor space for households consisting of one to five persons and available from the World Wide Web were obtained for locations in the United States, Canada, Scotland, England, Denmark, India, Hong Kong, Thailand and refugee camps. While some variation exists among regions, particularly for larger households, plotted data indicate a convergence to a minimum requirement of about 140 square feet for single-person households