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Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

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Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#231

Post by willio58 »

imiric wrote: post #211
willio58 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By condo you mean apartment right? Condos are usually just apartments you own. Apartments are not inherently bad. They allow for density which, if you went through the tour this site provides, you know allows for cheaper public services. I've lived in many great apartments and a few bad ones. It's not the style of building that's bad, it's the owners and the laws they are forced to or not forced to follow. Suburbs ar…

> Suburbs are _heavily_ subsidized. They require a ton of money from taxpayers to sustain their existence. That's highly relative. Urban areas have high maintenance costs as well, precisely because of the higher density. The infrastructure requires more maintenance, higher sanitation costs, law enforcement, etc. Not to mention that cramming hundreds of people per km², surrounded by concrete and no vegetation, in smal…

> Urban areas have high maintenance costs as well, precisely because of the higher density.

Urban areas cost more in total, but less per capita. If you don't take that per capita measurement into account, it's pointless to claim things like this.

Here's a good infographic on this: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

See specifically the massive (4-10x) increase in costs for things like roads, sidewalks, water, sewers, transportation, etc. when we talk about suburban environments.

> Cities destroy the environment just by existing, and they hardly have enough green areas to sustain wild life.

Do you have a source for this? Living closer to the things you need in life such as energy, food, water, friends, family obviously leads to less waste of energy in getting to those things or having them come to you. Around wildlife, guess where they could and used to live before suburban sprawl? Right where the suburbs popped up. Your solution to increasing wildlife is continuing suburban sprawl? I highly recommend you research and provide sources before making claims like that.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#233

Post by mardifoufs »

bitwize wrote: post #13
whalesalad wrote: post #3

Different strokes for different folks. I’m a very happy single family home dweller. Living in a dense city feels claustrophobic.

The Anglosphere is more car dependent and more prone to NIMBY policies and housing shortages than continental Europe, because continental Europeans are more comfortable with density. Density is the solution to many land management problems.

No, we just hear more about the anglosphere's problems because... we sadly live in an anglosphere obsessed world :). English being the dominant language means that we all hear about their problems but it's harder to internationally hear about say, France's problems.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#234

Post by dist-epoch »

glitchc wrote: post #219
Tade0 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define moderate climate. I'm currently in a building from 1990 in Eastern Europe which apparently was inspired by those in Barcelona, because it's the same shape and we have a common area with greenery and trees, but the latitude is 51° N and we used to have -30°C winters as recently as the late 90s, so I wouldn't call the climate (at least back then) moderate.

Do you get a lot of snow? How do you deal with snow accumulating in the centre?

The only way to deal with it is to make "mountains" in more open spaces (squares, large intersections, ...). You can't really take it out.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#235

Post by genocidicbunny »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #98
matsemann wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a modern apartment in Norway (2019). I guess some of our heat insulation demands make it so that we get extra thick walls and floors, but I've never heard any noise from neighbors. No tv sounds, no stamping feet etc. Maybe twice a year someone drills a hole to mount something on the walls and I hear that for a few minutes. Even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed. Point bein…

I live in a modern mid-rise in Dallas. Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound. Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.

Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite about a lot of the new 5-over-1's going up in the bay area. Several people I know that have moved into recently-built units have complained that they can hear far more neighbor noise than they used to in their old units. This also seems to track with my experience -- I live in an older unit and can only hear my adjacent neighbors when they slam their front door, or when they're having a very loud party on a weekend. Yet when I visit friends that live in newer units, sometimes I can hear the neighbors talking at normal conversation levels through the walls.

I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#236

Post by Scoundreller »

flagged24 wrote: post #15

I'm okay with these high rises so I can enjoy the quiet tranquility of rural Spain. Everytime we do stay in an apartment in Spain the lack of sound proofing really stands out. Perhaps even more so because everything is tiled, no carpets.

Dunno about Spain, but in France, a relative in a ?9 story building basically gutted their place.

Unlike North American condos, in France they own their windows and can replace them.

They also built out a “frame” to install noise insulation on top of the shared walls, losing a bit of interior space (and a huge free bonus to the neighbours). Can’t remember if they did the ceiling too.

Unfortunately, no flooring standards are an issue. In my Canadian condo, if you redo the floors, there’s some noise insulating requirement for your choice of flooring as it’s against concrete.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#237

Post by kwhitefoot »

matsemann wrote: post #52
mathieuh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in northern ireland in an actual house and the walls are thin enough I could dip my bread into my neighbours' soup. It is the number one reason I could never see myself living in an apartment, I'm very sensitive to noise and I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise. I'd be too worried about noise from neighbours.

I live in a modern apartment in Norway (2019). I guess some of our heat insulation demands make it so that we get extra thick walls and floors, but I've never heard any noise from neighbors. No tv sounds, no stamping feet etc. Maybe twice a year someone drills a hole to mount something on the walls and I hear that for a few minutes. Even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed. Point bein…

> even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.

My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.

It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#238

Post by btbuildem »

ShrigmaMale wrote: post #191
Lord-Jobo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is slightly aside, but the concerns over fertility rates in the first world really seem REALLY misplaced to me. Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years), and the population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focu…

you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false. sometimes it's for the better (in America, we have many well-educated immigrants from India and China). sometimes it's for the worse (see Europe's struggles with uneducated muslim immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East). importing large groups of…

You omit the masses of working poor immigrants that do a lot of the manual labour North Americans do not want to do -- predominantly in agriculture, construction, small manufacturing, and healthcare. They're the de-facto essential workers.

Europe's struggles seem to be caused more by a culture clash. Immigrants will always bring their way of life with them, and group together - it's a constant of human nature, this is how we preserve identity. Moving to a different country is a traumatic experience when done voluntarily; imagine having to permanently leave home under duress and on short notice.

As an immigrant myself, what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display. I'd sum up my knee-jerk reaction to it as "Bro, if X is so great, why did you leave?" -- again, this is spoken as a person who left their homeland, with first-hand experience of some of the complex issues that surround all that. I still don't quite understand what drives that "flag-waving", but I hope to one day.

Having said all that, I would encourage my adoptive country to be proactive in their immigration policies. Putting it harshly, "get the good ones before they go somewhere else". The geopolitics of the world will only become more chaotic as the impacts of climate change cause hardship in the less habitable areas of the planet -- big migrations are inevitable. If you want your country to arrive in the 22nd century while preserving most of your way of life, you can't be clinging to outmoded ideas.

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#239

Post by kwhitefoot »

cm2187 wrote: post #216
bluGill wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

British houses have a worldwide reputation of bad insulation. They live in a mild climate where you don't need to heat the entire house to ensure the pipes don't freeze, and don't really need much AC to be livable in the summer. As such it is really common for people who live there to only heat the room they are in.

Also a lot of them date from the XIX century or earlier and can't be touched.

Nonsense. Most of the 19th century buildings are perfectly ordinary brick terraced houses and the later ones have cavity walls. I lived in one built in 1890 in Southampton for four years. Solid house but not of any kind of historical importance. They can be insulated by blowing fibre into the cavity or filling it with expanding foam..

Re: Spain lives in flats: why we have built our cities vertically

#240

Post by KAMSPioneer »

prmoustache wrote: post #58
pja wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Spanish just don’t seem to care about noise at the institutional level. I spent a week in a small Spanish city last year & the local rubbish collection went down the street outside the door, pouring bins full of bottles from the local bars in the back at midnight. Midnight! Just when even the Spanish are trying to get to sleep. Co-incidentally, there was an article in the Spanish national press that week detailin…

I am living in south of spain and not only spanish do not care about hearing noise, I think they actually do like being noisy and hearing noise. They are basically shouting all the time instead of talking for example. At the beginning I almost felt I should have interrupted couples in the middle of their conversations. I thought they were arguing and were about to become physical against each other, shouting mere inc…

I am living in Andalucía (originally US) and have had the _exact_ same experience. I have gotten used to it...except for when my upstairs neighbors decide to make a glorious racket every night at exactly midnight, right when I'm trying to sleep.

Other than that though...!

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