Is Europe Sprawling?
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- čas přidán 8. 05. 2024
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The United States is known for its sprawl, but what about Europe? Cities in Europe are sprawling, but differently than U.S. cities. How so? And what can they do about it?
Resources on this topic:
- Clifton, Kelly, et al. "Quantitative analysis of urban form: a multidisciplinary review." Journal of Urbanism 1.1 (2008): 17-45.
- journals.plos.org/sustainabil...
- www.sciencedirect.com/science...
- www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/10/2/127
- www.sciencedirect.com/science...
- www.sciencedirect.com/science...
Produced by Dave Amos and the fine folks at Nebula Studios.
Written by Dave Amos.
Select images and video from Getty Images.
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Super cool to have my alma mater as a channel sponsor! If you're looking for online classes on planning, Cornell's the place: aap.cornell.edu/academics/crp/urban-studies-summer-programs
@CityBeautiful It looks like all three sciencedirect links in the description point to the same paper: "How effective are greenbelts at mitigating urban sprawl" - apart from that tiny point, the video itself was great and I need to have a read of the sources you _did_ link to, which look interesting, and will check back for updates ;)
Is it possible to audit any of these courses? Or do you have to be a college / high school student?
@@smith22 Good question! I'd contact the Urban Studies program and see what's possible.
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It's funny hearing people say that "suburbs keep you closer to nature" while suburban sprawl is what gets rid of greenbelts, which literally keep people in cities close to nature.
Because it’s true! Berlin and Paris do NOT have as much nature as the suburbs
@@wtfdidijustwatch1017 Maybe they do now. But North American style suburbs? It's an asphalt wasteland
@@wtfdidijustwatch1017now it would be interesting what you define as suburbs. Let's focus on Berlin: Technically, the outer boroughs might be regarded as suburbs - historically, they certainly were. But there's massive amounts of apartment houses there, both wall-to-wall and freestanding. You don't actually get closer to nature when moving from there to the SFH suburbs and in some cases, it's even the opposite.
Still better for nature than living in a countryside, still more nature than living in an overcrowded city center. So you are only partially correct.
i live in a suburb, in a capital of my country. house is on a hill and there is a natural park with uninterrupted forest as far as i can see.
"Sprawl" is a funny word when you hear it ~20 times in quick succession.
"Semantic satiation" is when you hear a word or phrase so often in a short amount of time, it starts to sound like meaningless gibberish
because it is similar to 'Brawl' ?
SPRAWWWl
I got 45 seconds into the video before I thought to comment something similar. That was a lot all at once.
@@KyleJMitchell Sorry about that!
The UK definitely seems to be sprawling, my town is building numerous single use suburban areas on the outskirts with barely anything but single family homes. this is attracting a whole lot more car traffic since (this may surprise you) our public transit system is literally crumbling. nothing near american levels but still.
Same here, the only mid density housing we have seen recently is office spaces that have been converted into “luxury flats”
@@brads4449 yeah they built one or two small apartment blocks and a few row houses but nothing commercial in the same developments. I live in a terraced house or "row house" and you'd never see any of this size and density built today
exactly the same in Ireland..
I live near Cork city and everyday i see more huge housing estates being built, and all massive houses for only one family and space to park a 2 or 3 cars by every house, there's actually just kilometres of houses and nothing else outside of Cork
@@geographyfrog ive noticed that on google maps actually, the driveways is especially what makes me cross about it all. no use building cycle lanes or more public transit if youre still building houses that encourage everyone who moves in to own a car or 3...
Same here in Plymouth - they're sprawling into a 'new town' called Sherford, which has non existent public transit, and no cycle infrastructure. Recipe for disaster
Here in Iceland the Capital Region has already sprawled almost to it's limits. To the west we have giant lava fields that are expensive and time consuming to flatten. To our south and south east we almost reached the place where we get our water from the ground and beyond that are lava fields where this groundwater enters. To our east it's the same story with water and also mountains. To our north and north-west is the sea. Our capital Reykjavík now has a policy of "densification" or making the city more densely populated.
Definitely noticed that the last few times I visited Reykjavik. Aside from the city center, Iceland is actually very car dependent. Is there a physical reason for that or is it just because development happened when automobiles became popular?
Damn, new development being limited by lava fields is the most Icelandic thing I've ever heard.
@@yuriydee It's mainly because most of the city was developed after the 1950s and also climate.
@@yuriydee Iceland being car dependent makes sense as that whole country has less people than the city of Bristol, if whoever is reading this has not heard of Bristol that proves my point.
No matter where you live in the world we must protect farms, woods, wildlife, etc,etc, etc
OR OR OR BUY IN LARGE
@@AMPProf won't work.
Otherwise green spaces come at a premium, only for the wealthy.
Not sure about farms, but the best way to protect woods and wildlife is to build dense because that reduces the amount of land we need to develop
❤
What’s so crazy about places like Los Angeles is that they FEEL and function more crowded than far denser places like Paris because of the sheer volume taken up by every person’s car.
not really
@@publicminxyes really
I doubt it. Paris is in another league.
The problem of Urban sprawling is that low density area very expensive to maintain. It gets expensive 40-60 years after the initial construction, when you need to replace streets, sewer, power and communications lines. Compact medium to high density cities have a better tax income to expense ratio. So, these can be sustainable. In the US a lot of low-density counties have to expand, to get cash from selling new single-family homes, to pay to repair the older areas. You can only do this Ponzi scheme, as long as the cities keep growing.
If you lived in Rome (I also did it for 2 months) you are forever changed, you just can't accept that cities have to be ugly, it is just so very obvious it can be different. I also like their solution for medium height density further from the center, not so much boulevards or streets as in Paris or Amsterdam but 'palazzi,' medium sized apartment blocks with space for green in between.
Actually in Italy the ugliest are bug cities the prettiest and most livable are sprawled villages and small cities to medium size cities that sprawl hundreds of km from bigger cities !
In Italy they don’t have green areas and parks are ridiculous. If you want good parks from my experience go to Germany Austria Poland something like that
@@michaziobro5301 Rome has great parks
Living in Rome has made me realize how much i hate living in big cities, gonna go back to a small centre as soon as i can
@@michaziobro5301germany is so grey compared to to italy actually. not to mention the weather
Most major European metro area are ammalgamations of older towns, which have a density of their own. The Barcelona graph is interesting, because right at the 18km mark there are a group of historic cities with their own independent growth, which, over time have ended up in the Greater Barcelona area. The scarcity of land forced towns to merge in a dense manner than in America, where there is endless land pretty much.
In France, this problem is know as "périurbanisation" (peri-urbanization).
This is a well documented development and a problem for the past 40 years, and because of a law in 2021 that ask for no more artificialization of soil but to have the part of the artificialization constant (like you can destroy a building and build another in another place but with the same surface of concrete), the cities are renovating every single building instead of building new ones.
So this fixed the sprawling of cities everywhere (but some mayors didn't know about it and did go to court) but can be a burden in prices both for cities and for the people because the demand for more housing is growing faster then the construction.
PS: The law is "Climat et résilience" (climate and resilience) of 22 august 2021, with the objective of pure neutral concreting by 2050 (but they want results very fast)
Edit: typo
Btw in France to try to solve the problem of housing, every single "commune" (the smallest administrative autority over a part of territory lead by public democracy) need to have at least 20% of social housing. If they have less, they will pay a fine.
This is applicable with the "Solidarité et renouvellement urbain" law or "SRU" law (Solidarity and urban renewal).
Not sure when it was but it must have been in the late 1960s or late 1970s. In less then one decade the french urban area (settlement) did increase by more then 40% due to many more single family homes getting build in the country side around larger cities and towns.
@@BYROXI5000 the Philippines also has this same law since 1992, allocating 20% of new housing units as low-cost housing. Somehow it worked.
@@ianhomerpura8937 Didn't even know that .
@@BYROXI5000And you have sooooo many communes happy to pays fines rather than ever have poor people. Wanna talk about the ENTIRE west of Paris? (For a bit of context, the west of Paris and cities in the west are the rich part of the region, with former President Nicolas Sarkozy famously having been mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, a haven for rich people).
Also the Climat et Résilience law is a bunch of bullshit, like every attempt at climate related policy from a government that COULD NOT CARE LESS EVEN IF IT WANTED about climate change.
I could go on about how land owning/real estate goes with the hypercapitalist viewpoint of this fascist adjacent government but I don't have the time nor the energy.
(Yes, I'm a leftist, no I don't endorse LFI/Melenchon, which I think are woefully incompetent and populist, I'm more a Besancenot/Poutou kinda guy)
Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.
I live in the UK (near London) on greenbelt land. There is a golf course opposite my house and a developer is proposing to build 200 houses on it because as the golf course was built, it is now technically "brownfield". Sprawl sometimes happens in Europe, despite greenbelts because developers are really good at finding loopholes in laws. Governments need to look at and try to close loopholes like this if they want to prevent sprawl.
Isn't it because 90sq m flat in London costs on average like 33 average yearly incomes? I strongly suspect that that can play the role and then the developers have to find various loopholes because they can't do that the proper way.
@@MrToradragon Yes, London is very expensive and needs more houses to be built to meet demand. Developers are all too happy to meet that demand, and they simply go for the easiest and cheapest to build opportunities first. There are plenty of "proper" brownfield sites that could be built on, or converted to make better re-use of land, but developers won't want to pay for demolition or conversion of an old building (i.e: expensive) if there are loopholes that allow them to build on something like a golf course. They go for the low hanging fruit first.
There's an ongoing debate about what to do with golf courses specifically. Golf as a sport peaked in the 00s and is in decline. The land has landscape value, sports/health use and some ecological value but, unlike a park, it's actually private land that is exclusively enjoyable by the members, often the rich. A golf course is actually an impermeable, extensive no-go area preventing access to the countryside for most people. In times of housing crisis, it's hard to argue that this 'brownfield loophole' should be a priority for elimination.
Thank god for that loophole then. Converting golf courses to housing in times of a housing crisis is absolutely a good thing. "Proper" brownfield housing sites are always going to be more expensive (which will absolutely show in the price tag) by comparison.
@@root_314 I wouldn't object to it being turned into a public park.
Dutch suburbs are still fairly dense and consist mainly of two story (+attic) row houses. In the US you would call this 'the missing middle'.
It's dense, but still it's sprawling. But this might be the case due to urbanization on an EU level.
@@worldeconomicfella3228 I would call it medium density. But the alternative would be to squeeze everybody in high rise buildings. This was tried in the sixties, but that was not a success. Middle density suburbs have the advantage that they can support local facilities like shops, medical practices and small businesses, so that you do need a car for everything.
@@harenterberge2632 if it's also low rise and mid rise apartment mixed in and some of these aparments also being mixed use than yes probably isn't too bad.
2:20 the paper uses a logarithmic transformation in their density model....it's comparing the *ratio* (density in a "metro" from the center to some distance away) rather than *absolute* densities between different metros. Their model is illustrating how to measure "sprawl" which is what it shows (a linear regression between density and distance from the city center - which has relationships with travel behavior, etc), but it doesn't really illustrate any absolute density metrics.
I think 😅
In other words, I'm not sure it's correct to say that their model shows "Barcelona is denser at its center than LA," but it shows that there's a smaller share of Barcelona's metro population per 1km from the city center as compared to LA and NYC. Put another way: it's weighting for distance.
NYC is extremely dense. It has 42% of its respective metro area population. Barcelona's share is about 24%. However, this doesn't account for the differences in the size of both administrative subdivisions. Barcelona is smaller in area than NYC and I presume it's Metro area is as well.
This doesn't show density; it shows sprawl. Something like gridded, average density calculations (there are plenty of models you can google and look at) are similar and more useful for what you're attempting to show here, I think.
It sounds semantic - and again, I'm not sure I fully understand their methodology. I just often struggle with "density" being used as a proxy for "sprawl." Density in general is a bad metric, because it's not normalized to any standard thing (i.e. your unit of analysis can vary wildly). The authors want to show the relationship between where people live in a metro area; however, I would like to see how they account for the wildly varying sizes of these units. It could be they're exaggerating these differences, which is what I suspect.
I was wondering about that, too… how NYC should be much less dense at the center than Barcelona or Paris. But if they show a ratio, how can the numbers still be above one and the unit say „persons per hectar“?
Yes, that plot also stood out to me as being a very poor misleading illustration. Thanks for pointing this out!
did you link the wrong timestamp? i dont get it... how can it be logarithmic when the spacing of the graph is the same in the units? 100 population per hectar is the same sized step as 4km?!
@@mugnuz The formula they're using is log transformed. I'd link the paper but YT doesn't allow it. It's called, "Quantitative analysis of urban form: a multidisciplinary review."
They describe how they caculate this on page 24. Still haven't finished reading it all tho. They may address it later on.
@@the_koschi because the numbers are more like showing the ratio of total population per hectare. Not absolute.
Another way to think about it is that they're showing "intensity" rather than "density."
Like, if you have two 10m^2 rooms, and in one there's two people sitting on one chair with another 3 circling them, 1m apart.
In the other there's 10 standing exactly 1m apart.
Which room is *technically* more dense?
The first would be Barcelona and the second NYC (just as an analogy, not exact 😅).
Just...people don't think about density this way so it's not a good word to use here.
Even in Europe, the "grass is greener on the other side of the fence" phenomenon cannot be avoided, for example, engineers in Finland have long taken a model of how cities are planned and implemented in the United States, because in Finland the American way of zoning and planning cities is seen as better and more cost-effective than the European way.
🥴😢🤮
That’s awful
And yet, for some reason, bikes are still much better to use in cities like Helsinki and Oulu.
I live in Finland, and in my experience Finland is closer to North America than many European countries in some aspects:
- lots of cars
- sparsely populated
- many single family homes
- residential and commercial zones are often separated
Still, it's denser than North American cities. But even if you live in a suburban area, having a car makes your life a lot easier.
Also your typical villages are more scattered around in Finland than in most of Europe (and examples that you see in this video). This is MOSTLY due the Great Partition, which distributed lands differently from 18th century forward. This didn't take place in most of Europe. So in finnish countryside, the center of MUNICIPILATY, which is typically named as Kirkonkylä (church's village (the village where the church is located)), is walkable, but rest of villages aren't. And the distances between village "centers" (5-10km) aren't walkable either --> so you need car more than in some other European country's average village (unless you live in absolute center of municipality)😅
Canada sometimes does leapfrog development, when our greenbelts are too thin. *cough* Ottawa *cough*
Which makes sense I suppose. Leapfrogging only makes sense if the city center isn't particularly attractive compared to the rest of the citiy, you have extremely high housing costs in the city pushing people to sprawl, and you are already a frequent driver, that there are enough of these people to justify building ammentities to support these leapfrog communities, and that these leapfrog communities have space to actually grow without bleeding into an urban area of another nearby city, all of which are far more common in Canada than eu
@@sahitdodda5046 I mean, yes. But, also, if your greenbelt is only, like, 2km wide, as Ottawa's is at points.
Thankfully the greenbelt was saved, to an extent.
Waterloo Region is on the few regions in Ontario or even Canada that put up hard urban boundaries a few years ago.
Omg yes the Ottawa case is crazy. SOmetimes I wonder if it makes sense for there to be a greenbelt if people will then just commute in from even further away.
@@brownbear1657 Exactly why I'm skeptical of using greenbelts. If you paint a greenbelt around cities with high demand and then don't build enough housing within the city, all you're doing is moving the necessary construction to nearby urban areas and creating more commuting traffic. Greenbelts need to be implemented a lot more smartly with a host of other concurrent policies than they currently are.
Leapfrog development doesn't make much sense in Europe because people want to live in the city/town where they are at and once you go to a leapfrog development you are essentially in a different place that's not really emotionally connected to the city/town that you came from. It gets it's own identity and community. Heck I have people living 30 minutes by bike from me (7-9 KM) that wouldn't feel connected to my city/town at all. My neighborhood is part of the actual city and while those people 30 minutes away might still come to "my" city for all the big things, they don't consider themself part of this city.
Then add in that every neighborhood/town/city in Europe has most everything you would need to live if you were to live in a leapfrog development there would be no reason for you to do anything in the city apart from the very rare events, but in those cases it would be no different than going to a distant city for a event/daytrip. So once you leapfrog you lose most connections to the initial city/town, so at that point you might as well just build a new city/town to stand on it's own instead of a few homes to serve the initial city/town.
Meanwhile we here in America all hate each other and want to get as far away from each other as possible. Surely a recipe for long term success and fulfillment!
Except work. You missed that one vital thing that people do 5 times a week. If their work is in the city, they commute, either by driving or taking public transit if it's available.
Still we do have seen plenty of it by know in europe too.
In the UK this is mostly due to strict greenbelt regulations.
In Germany similar reason that you do have greenbelts around the city proper and cause it is more simple to build in 'Vorstädten'. Thid is why many cities to have areas the have reasonsable growth potential beyond the urban core.
Traditional towns a few kilometers away from traditionell city centers are now merging slowly and have seen much of the urban growth. In the past decades.
@@paxundpeace9970In my country we have something similar, the red contours of the provincial development plans. Every town and city has those and it is extremely difficult to get permission to build outside the red contours. Only replacement building is easy, demolish a house and build a new one, or close the farm, demolish the stables and you can build one or two houses as replacement. Or building in designated expanding development regions, mostly around cities and bigger towns. It makes it extremely difficult for young people to get a house in their small town, so they have to move away, making small towns greying towns as we call them (only older people live here).
Leapfrogging doesn't make sense in Europe because you may enter the jurisdiction of the neighbouring town.
GIS is so valuable. Most jobs in archaeology now encourage you to have a GIS certificate or experience at least.
What happens when someone wants to build a house and they find archeological artefacts on the site? Do they have to call the authorities? By how much time does that delay construction?
Most of Europe may have greenbelts, but the Netherlands has bluebelts
Love your videos! There are so many people I talk to about the principles of "good" urbanism. I do find there aren't very many videos on these basic fundamental concepts, even on your channel. They usually jump into a concept assuming your are already bought into the "good" urbanism approach, and already biking, taking buses, and love walking. It would be great to have these concepts explained in a fair and dispassionate way to help people build bridges of understanding with those that often seem to see things so differently.
- Building cities for cars vs. walking
- Comparision of low, medium, high density housing
- Public vs. private transit
- Europe vs. American cities comparison (walking, transit, density, health)
I was seriously considering applying for those Cornell courses, but checked the pricing first - over 5000 dollars for a few weeks of online lessons!! As a Finnish person used to free university education I find that just absurd. I did, although, now get the motivation to look for free courses online relating to urban planning and geography, which there actually seems to exist quite a lot of! At least Coursera and Classcentral list a ton of free courses about urban planning etc., even from extremely acclaimed universities such as MIT and Harvard. Those courses seem to be mostly video based, some of them may have exercices etc, so they aren't the same as those Cornell courses where I guess you'd get to chat with teachers and get a personal experience. But for free, I'll surely give some interesting ones a try.
This is pretty much the status quo for academia in north america, but growing up in the shadow of Cornell I've come to despise that entire greedy organization. Especially with their crackdown on free speech among students and faculty recently, it's about time to closely examine why a college with such a massive endowment needs to charge such an absurd amount of money for an online course.
2:23 dann, that's a good graph. There aren't many urbanisation-related viasualizations that I haven't seen before, but this is definitely one of them.
Take a pause and take it in 😵💫
I screenshotted it because I haven’t seen a graph explain sprawl so well and in comparison to US/EU cities. I’m surprised Manhattan doesn’t have a higher people per hectare value though.
@@dwfidler I was surprised by that as well. Perhaps it's because Midtown is mostly offices and residential density isn't that high? Especially dense areas like the Upper East/West sides might get deluted by Central Park in this graph.
Belgium, the Netherlands and Nordrhein Westphalen in Germany are in fact a metropolitan area, with huge potential as the heart of the blue banana.
It is easy to convert some "rust belt" formerly industrial areas with good transit (that carried workers into the industrial area before) into areas with affordable housing, city services, officers, some commerce. With enough parks, playgrounds, etc. and a good and safe urban environment, these areas can be more attractive than some suburbs and this can help to reduce sprawl problems.
4:59 - I wonder what Not Just Bikes would say about your “Amsterdam is Houston, basically” joke!
that graph at the start is awesome. Makes it much easier to compare.
8:30 onwards especially mentions a problem that has been rampant in germany;
There is a huge crisis for young people too find affordable housing because on one side giant real estate companies earn more due to the scarcity, on the other side building has become prohibitably expensive, even more so due to strict landuse policies and expansionlimits which in turn drive property values upwards. Combined with the government essentially dumping all its social housing in the 90s/early 2000s due to cost cuts and you're looking at a generation where people cant study or work in the cities they want to bc. they dont find a place to rent, and people mid 20s/30s unmotivated to do much in their career because they will never be able to afford their own house,
"Amsterdam is basically Houston, confirmed" sure _feels_ like a troll targeted at Not Just Bikes, but I'm just not certain.
They’re mates. I think it was just a general joke, as Houston is seen as a meme of bad city design within the urban planning space.
I don't know what it is about the urbanist youtube channels, but CityNerd and this channel have the smoothest ad segues I've ever heard, anywhere.
Belgian here and I am not surprised we're topping this list. Back during the building boom lots of land near connecting roads between towns got parceled up for individual homes instead of getting larger plots of land to create neighbourhoods. This created something I'm going to translate as "ribbon sprawl" where you get long ribbons of single family homes that make it impossible to see where one town ends and another begins.
Sprawl has been a big concern here in Switzerland since the 70s, leading to various measures to protect prime farm land and the countryside character of periurban villages. Already back then policy makers were wary of the country turning into a single megalopolis akin to the Japanese one.
Despite the implementation of many conservatory measures, the very high immigration led population growth is causing much sprawl in the dynamic urban areas and their periphery, with small villages coalescing into the cities, and 2nd and 3rd tier cities converting into residential suburbs for the main center.
Since we entered Schengen area in 2008, at the same time the EU countries were hit by the financial crisis, we went from 7.4 to 9 Million inhabitants (purely immigration driven, natural growth would otherwise be negative). The dynamic for the country is probably more akin to that of a major metropolis than anything else, due to the relatively compact size of the country, and the dense transit network making the railways more and more comparable to a subway network.
We do have a good example of leapfrog development, which is in part due to regional and crossborder political differences : Geneva has a strong City-State identity from before joining the Confederation, with a dense inner city surrounded by its own countryside greenbelt, which it is intent on preserving. But as at the same time it is now a World-class metropolis with a very dynamic economy, much of its workforce is pushed to live in surrounding France, and/or in the closest 1st, 2nd and 3rd tier Swiss cities accessible via train or motorway. Basel probably shares some similarities, counpounded by it being a City historically divorced from its countryside, and sitting at a triple border, drawing commuters from both France and Germany.
As a side note, a more extreme and interesting phenomenon is the use of HSR like TGV in France, converting distant 2nd tier cities into extensions of the Capital, the best example being Bordeaux, almost 600 km away from Paris, but only 2h away center to center since the inauguration of the line in 2017, which is competitive enough for people to consider moving there while holding a job in Paris.
I live in one of the fastest growing reagion in the Netherlands (Brainport region) and the urban area has expanded and it seems it will not stop any time soon. but whilst it is growing outwards it is also growing inwards. In my city of Helmond we have created new neighbourhoods very recently (Dierdonk, De Akkers and most famously Brandevoort). And recently a plan came out to build the Brainport Smart District in the North of Brandevoort. But these new neighbourhoods are very compact compared to us sprawl. And with us growing outwards we are also densifying with there being half a dozen project in and around the city center adding hundreds if not thousends of new homes to the city. Currently in Eindhoven the intire station area is undergoing a massive change where dozens of skysrapers will be build around the station, mostly in the car centric north.
Chill guys. At least North American city planning is better than Indian city planning. If you North Americans visit India, your cities will seem like paradise and you will be thankful for it.
yeah but the problem with India is wild, illegal urbanization, not bad urbanization laws (at least as far as ik)
Yeah but that is not a good comparision like literally any place in the first world is better than the third world in basically any aspect
You barely touched on this but from all my Europeans friends and aquaintances I can tell you there is some downsides to the reduced urban sprawl.
Don't get me wrong I'm not advocating we should develop like America but I've had SO many conversations where a European told me it's basically an unattainable dream to own their own place, and while there is a housing crisis in NA, I know many young Americans who are working towards their own place. Reducing urban sprawl is nice but when many cities in Europe make it virtually imposible to redevelop you end up with outdated apartment buildings that don't meet demand and are extremely expensive to maintain.
Strong renter protections and public housing systems mean that not owning your own home is not as bad in Europe (especially central Europe) as it is in Anglophone countries.
Actually I think that’s more related to the sheer population density in Europe compared to the US and the fact that people want to live in the city center
I think that someone living in Miami, NYC, LA or SF would have the same issues.
just some advice the blue moving back ground around the sprawl study was very distracting otherwise great video as always.
Hi, german urban planning student here!
I thought I might share some instruments we use to counteract sprawl.
"Double priority for internal development":
In §1 of the Federal German Contruction law (BauGB), you find what concerns you should especially weigh against each other when making decisions about land use.
Among those with priority, you find the protection of nature, climate and animals. Further §1a was added some years back, which reinforces that land is to be used sparingly and with care. Infill and brownfield development take priority.
Now comes the clue: for every m² you build on, you have to protect an equivalent m² of nature within your constituency. This leads to problems for constituencies without much surrounding land, but those are beinf ironed out. Sadly they made it so you can just compensate with money instead of land now, because nobody had any green land left. But this means that lots of green space is protected as a compensation-area for prior construction activity.
"EU circular land economy 2050"
Does what it says in the title. If states dont reduce their land taking to basically a net zero until then, there will be heavy fines. Fines are scary. Germanys current goal is to get the land taking of unbuilt-on land to under 3ha/day, we're doing "eh" at that currently.
"Innenbereich vs. Außenbereich"
Every constituency is made up of an "inner area" and "outer area". The inner area is whats built up "in junction", the outer area is the rest. What you can build there is regulated by seperate paragraphs, allowing you to build next to nothing in the outer area except for solar and wind power plus agricultural facilities.
If you want to make outer area into inner area, you need a B-Plan (Build plan). This doesnt make it impossible to build single family homes on greenfield sites, but it imposes significant hurdles because a B-Plan has to be done by at least a planning bureau, or the local administration. And its subject to the weighing process from §1 BauGB. The most significant hurdle is that thr process can take some time and money and you cant just throw up a house, and another one, and another one...
As i said, all this doesnt mean that bad decisions arent made. But in comparison with for example switzerland, germany sprawls less id say (based on observation).
In addition, we have significant federal funding programs for things like renovation, remodeling and reconstruction (Städtebauförderung). Its genuinely a very very good program, maybe you could take a look at it, maybe even a video?
American Sprawl is why lot of people i know from India prefer it including me, its probably a trauma response from being packed like sardines back home, thgh as ive grown up, ive appreciated high density infrastructure, i feel the key is striking a balance.
There is a hugh difference between the population density of Mumbai and the sprawling suburbs of the United States. Of course, there are a lot of other aspects that make a city livable and sustainable.
Truuu
@@barryrobbins7694 I know, that is why i said a trauma response, because its understandable but not fully rational.
@@navin750 I understand. I also agree with striking a balance. It is just that range between living in Mumbai versus an “E.T.” like suburb in the United States is so vast that it is hard to know what striking a balance means.
Indian governments don't allow tall buildings to exist, even in places like Mumbai.
FSI is very low compared to other countries. They have this brain-dead logic that more people in the building means more congestion. When it's complete opposite.
It would also reduce scarcity. This could be a solution to slums too. Unfortunately real estate developers and investors wouldn't like that.
It's something I've noticed in Sweden, and I've definitely been worrying about it
This is the first time I see my house appearing on a CZcams video. :)
Here in Flanders I feel it's all but a big sprawl, most of the region has the cities melting into the countryside
Yay, nice to see Prague mentioned. I don't know, if the less sprawl here was measured only in the city of Prague or the whole region, but i guess it is the first one. So yeah, Prague is indeed getting denser (and we are starting to build housing on brownfields after many decades), but many towns and villages around Prague have like +250% population in the last decade.
Yes, because Prague is unable to process enough projects for housing, while it keeps attracting various businesses and people want to live reasonably close to their place of work.
Not surprised Belgium is one of the most sprawling places in the world: we got our very own type of sprawl called ribbon development. Somebody thought it was a good build houses all along the big roads connecting little villages, instead of expanding the village itself. The result is so many houses built along busy roads, quite far from the places people want to go, and difficult to organize public transport.
Glad I live in a proper city.
I think the sprawl in Europe happened mostly _after_ World War II, especially in parts of Europe that were heavily destroyed by Allied bombing like Germany. If you compare most German cities pre-war and post-war, the post war versions of many German cities tended to be more sprawled out even with decent public transportation. Probably a really good example is Frankfurt am Main, where they ended up extending their U-bahn and S-bahn networks just to deal with the sprawl, and even more U-bahn and S-bahn extensions are coming.
Paris was going to be spread out quite a bit anyway due to severe restrictions on building height except in certain areas like La Défense.
While Belgiums Sprawl isn't really growing it has still one of the worst kinds of spawl that we call 'lintbebouwing'. It translates to Line development. People built housing along main roads which costs allot of money. It is also one of the reasons Belgium has worse roads than the Netherlands. Main roads have much more traffic which degrades roads faster which would need replacement.
Because there is housing there, sewage pipes, gaslines and electricity all need to be taken in concideration which slows down the replacement of the roads.
Japan also does that but they don't even have a problem with building on main roads .
Definitely worse roads but a much better housing situation than the Netherlands.
@@root_314 Housing is allot cheaper yeah but is way worse quality aswell.
I would love to see a video that touches on the Quad Cities region!
I love living in the middle of a high density city, but it is very tempting to just move further from the city and get a way larger place, with green spaces, a swimming pool, and all for the same price or even cheaper than an old apartment. The biggest disadvantage for me is the commute (living in the center of the city already takes me from 20 to 40 minutes (walking or in public transport) to go anywhere, so having to commute 1 or 2 hours on top of that just to get to the city is a big no.)
Stockholm, and I suspect a lot of other swedish cities (I noted a cople of them in the graph about greenbelts, in the "dont have it"-section) might have a higher degree of sprawl because our "kind of" greenbelts. They're not belts per se, rather wedges going from the sourrounding countryside towards the city center. That gives the cities a spoke-structure where the only way to build is out in the urban "spokes". It also gives access to nature even if you live very close to the city center.
Stockholms spoke-like mass transit system just adds on to this trend, since it's much easier to extend the metro a couple of stops from the existing lines than to build all new lines to all new areas. Basicly the entire rail network in the Stockholm region is built this way, the light rail, the subway and the commuter rail. The only exception is really the "tvärbanan" light rail that acts like a light rail/tram ring road just outside the city center.
A few example in Germany can be seen in Bavaria. Many small towns have allowed the development of areas below 1 hectar (2.6 acre) to get around some land use regulations.
Still this results in only a few single family homes getting build.
While you can see decay in the town center with a lot of old buildings standing empty.
And to people really want to live in those and are those easily repairable? I can Imagine that the flats there might not exactly be what people are looking for and that there could be some (ridiculous) regulations that are making repairs quite expensive and not worthy so owners will rather left the building to deteriorate to such extant that they could pull it down and build something new.
Very interesting topic!!! Oh my gosh that picture of you in 2004; we must be around the same age... we were so young then!!! 😭
Would love to see more research and time being spent on rural planning issues. I guess that highlights the rural to urban migration mindset. However, there are a lot of crossover areas like zoning as a tool for urban growth boundaries and adding residential density to mixed uses in downtowns as a way for limiting development into Ag/Open Space.
You content has just gotten better and better over the years. Keep up the good work! Dont feel beholden to any upload schedule - we all prefer quality over quantity!
3:06 never tought i'd find my home region on this channel lol
I grew up near a large German city. In this area, there is a new village roughly every five kilometres. Interestingly, those villages are all between 800 and 900 years old. Not sure if this would have counted as sprawl already back then.
Particularly since WW II, these villages have grown significantly, with maybe 200 m wide developments added to their edges here and there every decade or so. But these are compact developments with usually a mix of single family and multi family homes (duplexes and row houses are common). Along some major traffic infrastructure, a few places have fused together, being separated by as little as a large cemetery. But in most places there are still several kilometres of farmland in between.
5km is quite a lot though. I live in an Area with 1200 years old villages and the centers of each are usually 2-4km apart from each other with some cases below 1km.
@@lukasrentz3238 I’ve just remeasured things, and it actually is 2 to 4 km (from center to center) in my case too. Not sure where I got my 5 km from, maybe I was using the bike distance, which wasn’t taking the most direct route.
Although I've definitely seen some newly built sprawl here in Belgium, I've seen far more high density housing (appartement blocks) being built where other buildings were in the city, as well as infill or just houses being torn down and replaced in existing sprawl.
the two castles in the limitis of my city are perfectly fine, one is a design school and the other an art gallery
Europe known for it's charming villages, castles ... and everything else that you ever heard about in your life.
The city where I live (Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia) is located between the Danube River and the southwestern slopes of the Small Carpathians. I watch with concern as new development projects cut off Carpathian forests and former vineyards with advertising slogans such as "modern living close to nature". Forests are one of Slovakia's most beautiful treasures.
Oslo has a very interesting case of its sprawl: the forest that surrounds the city on most sides is protected, creating a barrier against sprawl. So does the seafront. But these barriers don't envelop the city completely, so it sprawls in three very specific directions: Northeast, southeast, and southwest. Much of Oslo's population growth is actually occurring in the neighbouring counties, since the city itself has nowhere left to grow.
Nice graph at @2:10! I wonder if it makes sense to add up the area under the curves and get a single scalar value that represents spraw and is easily comparable across cities.
🤔
"Madrid is the second largest urban area of the EU" nah-uh there is the Rhine-Ruhr Megalopoly
10 million germans going from bonn and köln all the way to dortmund
not the same.
Madrid is a single metro area of 7-8 million people.
Ruhr is many cities close to each other.
@@joaquincimas1707 that's literally the definition of an Metropolitan Area
I live in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. In the last 10-15 years many people have moved to nearby villages, which will likely be merged with the city at some point. This isn't very regulated and is causing a lot of issues. There isn't a lot of new housing that is dense and has access to public transportation and usually is very expensive.
What GIS software are people using at Cornell?
Its kind of necessary now, in Prague for example, the price of appartments and houses in the city is growing rapidly, and you can have a 2 story house with garden and pool, 20 minutes from the city for same price as a 2 bedroom appartment in the city. Also, there are not enough new flats, so houses are being built around prague
7:04 When I bought an office space in center of Prague and converted it to living I would never have thought that it would make green dots on some map :)))
In Stockholm at least, I don't think sprawl is a huge issue. Even suburbs with mostly single family home have decent public transport like buses or even a metro station nearby. Lots of kids also cycle or walk to school etc.
A question for you and your viewers: Is the 'verdozing' of the Netherlands and other parts of the Western-EU part of sprawl? "Verdozing" refers to the proliferation of large, box-shaped distribution centers and warehouses across the Dutch landscape. This phenomenon is driven by the growth of e-commerce and the need for efficient logistics infrastructures. Critics argue that "verdozing" leads to aesthetic degradation of the countryside, reduces the space available for agriculture and nature, and can have negative environmental impacts. These large structures, often situated in or near scenic rural areas, are seen as eyesores that disrupt the traditional view of the Netherlands' open fields and orderly rows of crops. The debate over "verdozing" involves balancing economic benefits such as job creation and improved logistics, against the loss of cultural and environmental values.
I see the same things happening here in the area around Milan
I spotted my hometown Dijon at 4:13 🤩😎👽
Could you do a follow up video on Greenbelts in NA? I live in Ottawa and our Greenbelt which was instituted in the 1950s has caused major leapfrog development and has really exacerbated our sprawl. It also led to a "megacity" when the separate suburbs were eventually integrated into one massive "urban" area, much like Toronto. Surely there are other examples of this?
08:24 Leapfrog is happening in Ottawa Canada!
Ayyy good job Prague
My limited time living in Europe the one thing I have noticed is that there seems to be a cap (whether it is official or not) of all the cities in Europe at a certain level. It would seem to me that allowing developers to add on another 4-8 stories to the existing neighborhoods would add a huge amount of space for people to live. I'm going to be in the Netherlands soon and I am looking at housing to rent and the prices are incredibly high even with subsidies because there is limited housing availability. It does seem like Europe needs to address this concern sooner then later to avoid having to make major prompt changes later because no one can afford to rent or buy.
The town that I live in now did a leap frog thing when the oil boom happened.
In my city they're rezoning alot of the central area to allow for higher density housing. Aswell as reusing old industrial property for social high density housing.
Nice video!
3:04 This is the region in Belgium where i live. Waw. I live just about 20 km north of it.
8:13
Madrid doing such a good job (+400% in urban sprawl)
PD: Its still growing to this day.
A friend of mine has just refurbish an old house in Peguerinos, a small village in Segovia 75 km away from Madrid. I told him that in a few years he will be able to sell it as a "cosy individual house in the outskirts of Madrid"
What is your opinion on situation, when city limits how dense you can build (setting maximum number of floors you can build and maximum percent of land that can be occupied by building)?
You should look at the centre for cities, loads of grest info on urbanism there.
Europe is definitely sprawling but it always was. However as cities grew we used to replace sprawl with high density housing but that is harder and harder to achieve. Rich people used to live in city center near castle/market or in mansions far away from city dirt and smells but now the upper class often occupies the immediate sprawl making it costly to buy out and replace with high density...
2:38 the population density of the EU is 111.9 people per square kilometre. Europe is probably similar.
Okay but why is there a Pidove at 6:48 ?
In Balkans we can definitely see different type of sprawl. Residential homes with two or three stories. What's bad with that are private investitora lobbying for greenery removal so they can build more real estate
Yep! That's Romania for you! Thx neoliberalism for this crap. 🤦🙄😒
Do they have the same map plot of sprawl but for the US?
Short answer: yes!
In Switzerland, there is a hard green-belt law in place for a few years now. (It was also voted passed by the people in a referendum.)
The rule is, that new construction zones can only be established if it can be reasonably used within the next 10 years. Because before, sprawl was indeed getting out of hand. Not in the cities themselves, but in the towns in the "middle lands" and even rural areas with high touristic value.
One thing that has to be acknowledged, these "densifying laws" seem to really push the housing prices upward a lot. In many cities there are simply not enough apartments to cover the demand. Switzerland for example has an annual deficit of around 40k apartments per year, that is 0.5% of the population! (They don't end up on the street but are forced to live longer with the parents, shared apartments etc.)
I do think, however, that it would be wrong to allow sprawl again, and get a lot of shitty housing. Rather, densified, good urban housing should be simplyfied. At the moment it is often hell to densify, because all the neighbors show opposition. And there are some rules the developers have to manage, that are just very.... stupid.
One rule is: An apartment cannot have noise imissions above a certain threshold. (sounds sensible) This makes building in densified areas much more costly, and is often solved by sound protection windows which cannot be opened. Windows that can be opened are not allowed, because, the noise imission wouhld be too high when opened. (Despite being the owners choice.) Additionally, as we all know in this challenge, the noise comes from cars that drive from sprawling areas. The cost however, is beared by the city (street builders) and the developer/owner of the apartment next to the street.
A typical external cost of sprawling, offloaded to the denser city centers.
Would have been nice to show some examples!
At 2:40 you say that the population density of the continent is 486 people per km^2. That seemed incredibly high, so I checked, and according to Eurostat the population density of the EU is only 106 per km^2. Including non-EU countries would make this number even lower. Maybe you meant the population density of urban areas in Europe, since you were talking about the fraction of urban population before that? Anyway, great video, learned a lot about my continent, even some unexpected things!
I've never heard someone name-drop Cornell more than Andy Bernard. Impressive 😂
8:19 Previously it was said Stockholm was having a sprawl expansion but here the WUP decreases for the city... (also Madrid is in a massive process of expansion!)
Can you put the location on the places you show?
7:33 shows a location just south of Düsseldorf
OMG LOLZ right random sprawl tiwn in green hills hinterlenadersss ... Ai?
I'm deeply confused by the population of distance chart. It shows NYC at the city center only has 100 people hectare or 10,000 per km^2, but the Financial district's wiki article has the financial district at 49,000 people per km^2 = 490 people per Hectare and Mid Town Manhattan is 46000 people per km^2 or 460 people per hectare. What did they do start in Queens where the geographical center is or central park being used to drag the average down?
Asian Tiger Cities have virtually no sprawl. High rise apartments extend to the edge of Singapore's metro area.
It’s because Singapore is a city state+ is an island so there’s literally no room to sprawl
@@thomasgrabkowski8283 Seoul also has similar development patterns
Regarding the Prague, the reason is that they finally managed to start building projects that were envisioned 10-15 years ago and were halted due to combination of byzantine bureaucracy and NIMBYism, which had led to extreme property price increase which had outpriced most of the young Czechs from chance to ever own flat there. Price to income ratio for housing in Prague is almost same as in London and other major cities in Czechia has this ratio higher than many cities in Western Europe. For example properties in Brno are relatively twice as expensive as those in Antwerp, Stuttgart and Madrid and Prague is more expensive now than London, Paris, Vienna, Bratislava and Rome. And this is increasingly becoming problem as it creates division between younger people who have it hard to buy a place to live and older people that were able to get flats quite cheaply during privatization. And this problem is slowly spreading to to other towns and cities.
But back to Prague, most of those areas that are being redeveloped were originally old industrial areas in Smíchov, Holešovice and Žižkov. But the Prague will soon run out of those and then the sprawl will either begin again or the city will start to lose it's inner green spaces. So once those projects are done, the sprawl will most likely begin again as most likely the price problem will not be addressed. Other option would be to upwards, but any such project faces extreme pushback by various groups that want to keep Prague as some sort of time capsule stuck in previous century. So any project that would involve higher buildings has it extremely hard. Prague currently lacks some 86k units if I remember it correctly and the yearly demand is around 10k a year and only around 5k are being build annually. So in my opinion the sprawl will only continue in long run.
I suspect that the reason why the leapfrog development is not happening is because there are other towns and villages that are not yet restricted by the green belts and the new project simply move to those.
It differs considerably from country to country. Certainly Scandinavia, Poland, and even Portugal have surprising amounts of sprawl.
In France there is a legally mandated "zero net artificialisation " policy. Any development, residential or other, can only be by densification of built up areas, by reclaiming brownfieds, or "rewilding" of previouly of previously urbanised areas.
Yes.
I'm not surprised to hear Stockholm high on the list. As I've only lived here I cannot compare to other places. But we have very long subway lines stretching out into the land all around the city to places that were once towns as well as completely new living areas. I'm not a fan.
However, in recent years another trend has taken hold to densify the outer edge of the city. This is not sprawl, but a continuation of the house-street-house type of environment we have in the rest of the city. This is of course because we to a high degree don't want to tear down our inner city more than we have (too bad the 60's happened), but people still want to develop high density living spaces. There is also a trend to, in these edge regions, experiment more with high rises. Most of Stockholm has about the same roof height. This is intentional. The skyline is broken off by the occational tower such as church towers, or hills. But I guess the rules are looser around the edge.
Before the Americans arrive... I live in, arguably, one of the most sprawled areas of Sweden after Stockholm (in the west coast of Skåne), within a 6km radius from home there are busses going in-out of town every 30mins and 3 train stations served by said busses (one regional while the other ones has intercity trains too). There are also several bike-only paths that span the whole coast side. The same applies for Stockholm, from personal experience, you don't need a car to live a good life even if that town is a sprawling mess...
Just saying, the houses might be atrociously expensive, but we aren't car dependent by any stretch of imagination.
Before the Americans arrive…I think the American with a PhD who made the video did a fairly good job explaining the differences between European and North American sprawl but thank you for feeling the need to add your own explanation for we Americans are too feeble minded to understand.
@@Noah-yq6wy European smugness is unbearable. I don't known how a whole continent adopted such an unpleasant and ubiquitous behavior pattern.
I was just explaining how, even if sprawling happens here too, it's not car dependent... The "before the Americans arrive" was meant as a joke but I can see it being taken as passive aggressive, my bad I guess...
@@andy_liga Sweden in it's entirety is ~450,000 km sq. The US (minus Alaska, our largest state) is ~8,080,464km sq. Of course you are not as car dependent, your country is no where near the same size.
@ISeeOldPeople very few people regularly drive over the entire country in either location.
Can you make a video about Japan’s urbanism? I think they have zero sprawl
You should checkout Prishtina in Kosovo. They have lots of stroads there, granted the city center is dense.