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

especiales.eldiario.es

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

#371

Post by jjav »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #305
jjav wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more distance to cover for things like sewers, I don't know which one becomes more expensive per capita, but "more distance" is very simplistic metric. Think of how much money and time and coordination it requires to dig a 200ft trench somewhere in Manhattan. Street closures, permits with multiple organizations, coordinate with tons of utilities and other underground facilities, engineering surveys if you're diggin…

> I live in a suburb and I walk to one of three nearby ( That is an outlier, though. Not only are suburbs less dense and, obviously, services are not as close, but county and/or city regulations across the US are notoriously anti mixed use developments, which make things even worse.

> That is an outlier, though.

Can you point me at data?

This is always stated as truth but I always question it and have not seen anything conclusive yet.

Personally I've never lived in a suburb where I couldn't walk to supermarkets and other stores (and I've nearly always lived in suburbs).

I think the outlier is the suburb from where one can't walk anywhere. Would love to see comprehensive data on this.

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

#372

Post by Mawr »

estebank wrote: post #139
Mawr wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Ebikes let you cover great distances with little effort. - You can have someone ride on the backseat or in the cargo space of a cargo bike. [1] - You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. [1] Then there's the cost vs a car [2], which will likely make up for any inconvenience. Of course, you do need at least decent bike infrastructure for this to be realistic. [1]: https:/…

> You'd be hard pressed to come up with a shopping load that won't fit on a cargo bike. There's a side effect of car prevalence and land use in the US: everyone can be "expected" to have a car, so grocery shops tend to locate in places further away with cheaper land, which make it more convenient to make big shops, which require a car... I find that most Americans are not comfortable or even familiar with "I'll pop i…

Yeah, I didn't want to get that far into it. For example, today I visited a store, my favourite coffee shop, a pharmacy, and two grocery stores in the span of a little more than an hour. I didn't even cycle, I just walked. The first store was 10 mins away from home.

And that's an abnormal trip for me, I usually just pop into a grocery store on my walk home from work. If all I wanted to buy was milk, the overhead would be 5 mins.

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

#373

Post by candeira »

andyferris wrote: post #346

Great website. I lived in Spain for 2.5 years. I have to say, the appartment life there was fantastic. I'm back home living in the 'burbs and I still miss the "15 minute city" keenly. I know the status-quo in Spain, but the history presented here is kinda fascinating. I keep forgetting how dynamic these things are. Also... is anyone else shocked how little development there is currently? Maybe this is just because it…

The downturn was brutal, but the drop in development was also needed.

At the height of the property bubble around 2005-2007, Spain (pop ~44M) was building more units per year than Germany, France and the UK (combined pop. ~195M).[1]

During the GFC Spain suffered from population shrinkage [2], surfeit of available housing stock, and the economic crunch pushed into the market some of the housing stock that would previously have been kept in reserve, so yeah, it wasn't necessarily a bad thing that building activities slowed down.

[1] I don't have a source, because I learnt this from a bunch of attendees to a conference on concrete (yes, the kind you use for building) in Madrid in 2007. We exchanged impressions on how software conferences (PyCon forever!) are different from the ones in the building industry, and they shared some eye opening statistics.

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ESP/spain/population

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

#374

Post by jjav »

Barrin92 wrote: post #311
jjav wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a very happy apartment/flat/condo dweller, the suburban home life feels to me like being trapped in a tiny deserted island (the cartoon ones, with a single coconut tree), just a tiny personal plot surrounded by endless nothingness, with nowhere to go within reach. When in the suburbs I end up just staying in the couch all the time, because I can't be bothered to face the big journey necessary to go places, feels…

> Can you point at actual suburbs Not the OP but when I lived in the US as an exchange student I lived in a suburb that looked exactly like the one in this video[1], which seems to be a fairly typical middle class neighborhood. Like him I had the same experience of barely being able to walk anywhere, given how little space there even is for pedestrians. [1] https://youtu.be/39QOw4IL0Gk?t=509

In the middle of the aerial shot I see what looks like some kind of store complex and there's another commercial-looking building on the far left of the frame. Can't tell what kinds of stores are in these buildings, but they are within an extremely short walk from the houses in the video.

So I'm not sure how this is an example of suburbs where one can't walk anywhere.

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

#375

Post by mikebenfield »

jjav wrote: post #295
mikebenfield wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are sometimes apartments spotted around in a suburby area, but due to the nature of US suburbs they don't really get many of the advantages density should bring - everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there, etc. Any time you leave your apartment you go straight to the parking lot and get in your ca…

> due to the nature of US suburbs The US is a big place. Lots of different suburbs. > everything you might want to go to is still at least a moderate car ride away, there's no people out and about because there's no reason for them to be there Can you point at specific places like this? Google street view links? Every suburb I've lived in the US I can walk to just about everything I need, kids walk to playground and…

To be honest this is one of those Internet comments where I feel like the commenter is in a different reality than me. None of the dozens of suburban US people I've known has ever found it feasible to walk to much of anything - yes, maybe a neighborhood playground if they're lucky. They definitely don't walk to the grocery store, to a restaurant, to a bar, to the gym, to work, etc.

Here's a suburb: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.107277,-80.6508196,3a,75y,25...

Here's another: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3137771,-121.9844666,3a,75y,...

In the latter it _may_ be theoretically feasible to walk to a couple restaurants, if you don't mind a fairly unpleasant trip. In practice I guarantee you almost no one does this.

But those are just a couple arbitrary choices; in my experience they're pretty much all like that.

On the other hand, by being selective about where I live (walkable neighborhoods are scarce in the US), I've been able to live in several places where a great grocery store, a gym, multiple great restaurants, a bar or two, and other interesting destinations were within a 5 minute walk - in some cases literally right next door. If most of the land around you is taken up by single family homes with pointlessly large lots, it's completely infeasible for anything more than a tiny percentage of people to live close to these things, short of building a grocery store for every 100 people or something absurd.

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

#379

Post by huytersd »

balfirevic wrote: post #376

It's funny how everyone complains about other people being loud when living in flats. Does no one here like to bang on electric guitar or blast karaoke with friends until 3AM?

I love to wood work late into the night. Even in a suburb my neighbors would have eaten me alive. I really enjoy my 20 acres.

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

#380

Post by huytersd »

causality0 wrote: post #348
pantulis wrote: post #5

Spaniard here, I expected to see an infographic basically based around Madrid and Barcelona but it seems that special care has been taken to cover the whole country, kudos to El Diario team.

Always interesting to me that the Spanish get a special demonym. I am American and also an American, but a Spanish person is a Spaniard.

What would the standard demonym be here? Spainian? Spainese? Seems like the British, French and Polish also get unique ones.
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