zlacker

Here in Europe building denser housing is extremely frowned upon by cultural conservatives, who unfortunately are in charge everywhere. That's why there's hardly any high-rises in Europe.

Extreme height restrictions combined with extreme regulatory costs is what has lead to this issue.

Show a European politician, especially a local one in charge of urban development, an image from Tokyo and they will recoil in horror.

Here in Europe everything must be flat and look cultural.

>>pelora+(OP)
Spain is the one the de densest countries if not the densest country in Europe. Most people live in flats in dense cities.

>>christ+31
No, it’s not, it’s number 27. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europ...

>>ck45+b2
This is really a different notion of "density" than the gp is talking about---it averages over the whole country, including a lot of very empty areas.

>>blahed+M2
Wrong again. Why are France and Germany 2x as dense as Spain and the UK 3x as dense as Spain then?

>>FactKn+m4
It is most representative to look at the list of densest European cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...

As you see, Spain has 12 cities among the top 38 cities in Europe. L'Hospitalet (an urban centre close to Barcelona) is densest than Paris.

>>ck45+b2
That's the wrong metric.

Spain seems to have planning laws that force density. Small agricultural towns in the middle of nowhere have people living cheek by jowl in apartments and townhouses, with an abrupt cutoff once you hit the town boundary.

>>jvican+S6
The first of those 12 is Emperador, a city of 692 people, so you have 692 people living very densely. Meanwhile, Paris, two ranks down, has more than 2 million people living at basically the same density. You'd need to account for that. The arbitrary nature of municipal and regional boundaries has always been the bane of comparisons of population density.

You could weigh the density by population (effectively giving you population²/area?! I'm not saying this is a good idea), and you'd get a top10 of Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Bucharest, Berlin, Athens, Milan, Brussels, Vienna, Naples, which despite the slightly bizarre metric seems a more sensible ranking (Emperador is at the bottom rank), and which, to be fair, also features two Spanish cities.

But again, it's kind of a pointless endeavor, because of the arbitrary nature of the boundaries chosen -- why Paris and not Paris metro? etc. I guess ideally you'd have a function density(person) giving you the population density of any given person and you'd want to look at the distribution of that function, specifically the average per country of that function.

>>FactKn+m4
It's plain as day once you actually visit Spainish towns and cities (try a motorcycle tour, you can hit a dozen or more a day, I've toured Spain several times) and compare it with the UK (I lived in the UK for 15 years).

German towns and cities feel a bit denser than the UK (I live in Switzerland and visit Germany every month).

>>morsch+ec
The question being raised in this thread is if Spain has dense housing. And it does. It's clearly very dense.

>>barrke+Ec
No. The assertion was that Spain as a whole is one of the most densly, if not the most densly populated countries in Europe.

>>pelora+(OP)
As an Spanish guy living in Japan, let me tell you that Japanese urban planning and development is an utter disaster that we should not copy. Please find a better example.