What a fantastic site! Wish more titea were build this way. It was an awesome experience!
I’m an outsider living in Spain for the last 22 years, I think that while the content portrays a reality of the high rise movement in Spain, there is an angle that was missed. It is important to say that the at time draconian land laws pay an important role in the urban landscape. Not to mention that Spain relative young democracy ( we won’t talk about that the today ) also plays am important role into shaping the urban seen. Lots of change in the government parties have also lead to constrains and or retains during several periods. Ok his has mean that different areas would grow artificially dependent on the “favoritism” at play at the moment through favorable zoning changes or subsidized public housing. Albeit and thankfully at the moment, Spain has not discovers property taxes like the US, it contains growth with little planning and driven by massive speculation which has been an economic driver for major cities even with relative low occupation rates. There is also the fundamental culture of buy vs rent that drives for more flats been built to keep up with the demand. On the plus side, one the the biggest differences I have seen in Spain is a relative wide spread economic demographic in the cities, where you don’t see the major changes like most other major city across the world, it happens but it’s neither common or as drastic as the rest.
Unpopular opinion but I hate the design of the site. The transitions are too slow and the entire site is inaccessible to anyone with vertigo, visual processing or balance disorders. Needless to say it also doesn't respect the browser's `prefers-reduced-motion` preference.
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.
One thing that annoyed me is that I constantly had to pause and Google all the locations. They really could have put some images about the different places and buildings so that it's easier to imagine what they were talking about.
... and I think I'm about to throw up, but that's a smaller issue, I take one for the team to encourage creative web development.
What's interesting is that the Netherlands is pretty low on the list of countries with the highest percentage of people in collective dwellings (at 21% vs Spain's 65%, only the UK is lower), even though it's one of the most densely populated countries in Europe. I suppose that's the result of the mentioned "mushroom neighbourhoods"?
From what I’ve seen while cycling between cities in the Netherlands, the “rural” areas still have houses frequently (and even more in “urban” areas - for example between The Hague and Rotterdam you probably won’t be able to go 500m without finding a house/building).
However, the density of most cities isn’t that high (most/median residential buildings are probably 4-5 floors or less, except Rotterdam).
For comparison Mumbai has way more taller buildings than almost any city in the Netherlands except for Rotterdam, and Mumbai hasn’t had a lot of high rises due to FSI limitations.
Yeah, I think often the Netherlands makes more sense if you just think of the Randstad -or even the entirety of the Netherlands- as a big city. Population-wise, that's not a crazy idea either. Then obviously it will be denser than an entire country like Spain, while it can still be less dense than actual cities within Spain.
In the Netherlands an exceptional high percentage of houses are social - so they should not be expensive. But most of them are single family houses connected 'rijtjeshuis'. Think of them as flat buildings flipped over. I can imagine with the countries muddy soil it was the cheaper solution to build this way.
About weight, you can see the strength of the soil in the historic buildings. Like Delft: 3 stories high. Zaandam: 2 stories where one is build from wood. Amsterdam is build on wooden piles allowing for 5 stories.
And you can also see wealth in the height of the building. The Hague is most famous for that (as they say you come from clay or from sand), poor areas were build on clay -> low buildings. Rich areas were build on sand, high ceiling heavy buildings. Living on sand was/is healthier also, another reason why the rich flocked there.
Smaller plots of land, also. UK family homes (at least until the 70s or so) tend to have large gardens, Dutch seem to have less private outdoor space but put more effort into making the street-scene nice in residential areas, which UK is terrible at.
On the flip-side, the Dutch attitude to their countryside (or let's say, non urban land) is pretty brutal outside of the national parks. There's not the fetishization of "country" living that you get in the UK.
That's what surprised me too. I think it might be because for every big, dense Dutch city there are n farmhouses in Friesland, Groningen, etc. Also I'm not sure whether they categorise semidetached houses as houses or flats, given how common they are in the Netherlands the 21% would be no surprise if they're considered houses.
That whole graph is surprising. The differences between European countries are astonishing and would warrant a story article. Is it cultural? Or climate-related? Or some statistical quirk? So weird.
Americans have a very skweed view of what apartment living is actually like, in part because the construction of such buildings in America (outside of the ultra-luxury market) is generally terrible.
Lumber is abundant in North America and cheap so everything is timber-framed, which is awful for noise. I actually do not understand how people can live in two-story houses in the US. Such people complaining about noise seems crazy to me. Only drywall separating rooms. Only a plank between floors pretty much. Awful.
Anyway, a lot of apartments in the US are what's called 5-over-1 construction. That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Live in a decently built apartment and it's a completely different world. Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls). Any pre-war apartments in NYC are generally amazing.
It's also worth pointing out that complaining about noise and wanting things to be quiet isn't universal. Whenever you hear such complaints, make a mental note of their demographics and see what patterns you notice.
Spaniard living in the US here. I grew up in apartment complexes and don’t ever remember worrying about noise. I think there’s definitely a component of just being used to it. Agree with your point on construction materials in the US, in relation to noise levels: the only time in my life that I was bothered by my loud neighbors was when I lived in a multi-family home unit in San Mateo, CA. It was a 4-unit home and I could literally hear all my neighbors whereabouts 24/7.
You have a very incorrect build of what modern American construction is like. Yes it is mostly timer-framed, but we have fire codes which means walls are not as thin as you seem to think. Sure if you look at an apartment built in 1950 your summary is valid, but that isn't done anymore.
5 over 1 refers to section 1 and section 5 of the building code and not the number of floors built for each. It is coincidence that with section 5, five floors is about the max you can have - but that is an about (sometimes 4 is all, sometimes you can get 6 - see a proper civil engineer for details). Section 1 is a lot more expensive to build, but it is also higher strength (and other features that make is useful for a parking garage)
5-over-1, 5-over-2, 4-over-1, and 3-over-1 are all often used terminology and they're referring to the number of floors in a podium-constructed building, not different sections of IBC. All of these podium construction styles are a product of section 510.2 of the IBC which allows for these to be treated as two separate buildings for fire purposes.
>Lumber is abundant in North America and cheap so everything is timber-framed, which is awful for noise. I actually do not understand how people can live in two-story houses in the US. Such people complaining about noise seems crazy to me. Only drywall separating rooms. Only a plank between floors pretty much. Awful.
I like dumping on American housing standards, but this is completely wrong. Modern US timber framing has fairly thick walls filled with insulation. Some crappy apartments of course skimp on the insulation and you can hear the neighbors, but properly-constructed apartments are quite quiet, because of the insulation between units. In a single-family house, properly-made ones have low-grade noise insulation ("low grade" meaning it has a lower R-value than exterior insulation, because you don't need it between rooms) in the walls between rooms, so kids don't have to hear their parents screwing. "Only a plank between floors"? Please.
>That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Yeah, try actually spending some time in any decently-constructed modern apartment like this. They're not noisy at all.
Say what you want about the earthquake or fire resistance of buildings like this, but noise is not the problem you think it is.
>Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls).
If they have cheap walls, they're going to have the noise problems you're complaining about. Cheap walls = drywall (on lightweight steel studs) with little or no insulation.
Noise is almost entirely a function of how well insulated the walls in a building are between units, except in places where the units are completely separated by solid concrete. It doesn't matter if it's wood-framed or steel-framed.
Disagree. Sounds in a concrete building can travel a very long way. Someone drilling into a wall or dropping something on the floor can be heard from several floors away. Timber construction usually limits sounds from neighboring units. And when it's well constructed with noise insulation, you don't even hear neighbors.
I wonder if Barcelona's "ventilation-oriented" architecture from the cholera period had a measurable effect on the spread of covid. Of course the article itself notes that a lot of the architecture was "speculative", and that modern-day Barcelona is very densely populated, but still.
IIRC Spain was also one of the first countries during the pandemic to publish research on the importance of keeping rooms well-ventilated, so now I'm wondering if there is a connection to history there (meaning: more likely to look at the importance of ventilation due to cultural history).
Keep in mind Barcelona and Madrid are some of the densest cities in the whole Europe. It's one of the reasons why COVID took such a big hit at the beginning of the pandemic.
Barcelona is pretty aerial though. I’ve been there twice in my life and I’m very impressed by its original urbanism. At first sight by looking at a map it looks really American inspired but once you dig a little, it’s in fact a unique "modular" urbanism (of course I’m not talking about the historical city center, that’s another interesting topic).
What amazed me is how that city manages to be so densely populated but is designed so you never feel packed. My only "complaint" would be that there could be more trees but there were still more than in most French cities (which I’m from) so …
Excellent storytelling, fluidly integrating geospatial data and other visual elements and statistics in a smooth flow.
Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.
The New York Times regularly have this flowing style of stories. It is often quite impressive. Once they did a simple flowless scroll type of story called 78 long minutes, about a scared police force during a school shooting. Very impressive, you keep thinking do something! while reading and scrolling.
I wonder how many of these building types would be legal in the US just due to fire codes that were created for a different area. In most of the US apartment buildings units must have access to two stairwells which in essence limits everything to a double-loaded hallway layout. That makes it harder to build units for families and makes it impossible to have more windows and a cross-breeze. More complete discussion: https://www.niskanencenter.org/how-to-build-more-family-size...
I'm not against safe building, but some friends of ours were actually denied the ability to be eligible to foster a child because their home didn't have 2 points of egress in every room. The US seems particularly stringent about anything fire-related.
I don't have a large enough sample to make a statement, but my impression is apartments in Spain are larger than in the US. Even if you want to live in an apartment, if you want more space you are forced to buy a house. You can't get a 4 bedroom apartment (3 kids? separate office? hobby room?...) You can't get an apartment with two "living rooms" (music room, tv room, rec room...). You don't need any of that, but if you are not poor you may want those things and be willing to pay if it was available.
One of the major problems with apartment living here in Sydney (or Melbourne) is the lack of 3 bedroom apartments - there just isn’t any. So once you have a family you either stay in a 2 bedroom (most of which are pretty small) or move miles out to the outer suburbs which have zero amenities and commute for over an hour each way.
Not sure about Spain, but in Italy, you definitely find a lot of 'family size' flats. We had a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom flat in a 6-plex, and that is a pretty common sort of living arrangement.
What's the area of those flats? Where I live there are plenty of 3 bedroom flats, but they are usually under 100 m^2 (often smaller) and almost always under 150 m^2.
Yeah, in Spain "apartamentos" refers to smaller flats; since most of the population lives in flats there's a much wider array of sizes to choose from. The typical middle class family-sized flat is about 80-120 m2, 900-1300 sqft.
Readit News
I wonder what you mean by this, since homeowners in Spain do pay a property tax with similar rates to the US's (around 1% of assessed value).
A massive case of style over substance for me.
The charts and graphs are also not very good. You can't search, sort, or filter in any way.
Also no light mode which is also terrible UX. People with astigmatism can have a hard time with dark mode.
https://medium.com/@h_locke/why-dark-mode-causes-more-access...
Another downside is that it consumes huge amounts of memory.
... and I think I'm about to throw up, but that's a smaller issue, I take one for the team to encourage creative web development.
https://www.quora.com/What-does-estadounidense-mean-in-Spani...
Great visuals btw.
However, the density of most cities isn’t that high (most/median residential buildings are probably 4-5 floors or less, except Rotterdam). For comparison Mumbai has way more taller buildings than almost any city in the Netherlands except for Rotterdam, and Mumbai hasn’t had a lot of high rises due to FSI limitations.
About weight, you can see the strength of the soil in the historic buildings. Like Delft: 3 stories high. Zaandam: 2 stories where one is build from wood. Amsterdam is build on wooden piles allowing for 5 stories.
And you can also see wealth in the height of the building. The Hague is most famous for that (as they say you come from clay or from sand), poor areas were build on clay -> low buildings. Rich areas were build on sand, high ceiling heavy buildings. Living on sand was/is healthier also, another reason why the rich flocked there.
Usually known as terraced houses, townhouses or row houses in English.
On the flip-side, the Dutch attitude to their countryside (or let's say, non urban land) is pretty brutal outside of the national parks. There's not the fetishization of "country" living that you get in the UK.
Lumber is abundant in North America and cheap so everything is timber-framed, which is awful for noise. I actually do not understand how people can live in two-story houses in the US. Such people complaining about noise seems crazy to me. Only drywall separating rooms. Only a plank between floors pretty much. Awful.
Anyway, a lot of apartments in the US are what's called 5-over-1 construction. That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Live in a decently built apartment and it's a completely different world. Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls). Any pre-war apartments in NYC are generally amazing.
It's also worth pointing out that complaining about noise and wanting things to be quiet isn't universal. Whenever you hear such complaints, make a mental note of their demographics and see what patterns you notice.
5 over 1 refers to section 1 and section 5 of the building code and not the number of floors built for each. It is coincidence that with section 5, five floors is about the max you can have - but that is an about (sometimes 4 is all, sometimes you can get 6 - see a proper civil engineer for details). Section 1 is a lot more expensive to build, but it is also higher strength (and other features that make is useful for a parking garage)
https://www.woodworks.org/resources/code-path-and-requiremen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
thick concrete walls might as well be hypothetical, theoretical building material given how much not expensive it is, and thus how much rarer it is.
I like dumping on American housing standards, but this is completely wrong. Modern US timber framing has fairly thick walls filled with insulation. Some crappy apartments of course skimp on the insulation and you can hear the neighbors, but properly-constructed apartments are quite quiet, because of the insulation between units. In a single-family house, properly-made ones have low-grade noise insulation ("low grade" meaning it has a lower R-value than exterior insulation, because you don't need it between rooms) in the walls between rooms, so kids don't have to hear their parents screwing. "Only a plank between floors"? Please.
>That's 1 concrete framed floor, often commercial and then 5 floors of timber-framed apartments above that. Terrible.
Yeah, try actually spending some time in any decently-constructed modern apartment like this. They're not noisy at all.
Say what you want about the earthquake or fire resistance of buildings like this, but noise is not the problem you think it is.
>Actual high-rises tend to be decent because they have to be concrete and steel framed (although they may have cheap walls).
If they have cheap walls, they're going to have the noise problems you're complaining about. Cheap walls = drywall (on lightweight steel studs) with little or no insulation.
Noise is almost entirely a function of how well insulated the walls in a building are between units, except in places where the units are completely separated by solid concrete. It doesn't matter if it's wood-framed or steel-framed.
IIRC Spain was also one of the first countries during the pandemic to publish research on the importance of keeping rooms well-ventilated, so now I'm wondering if there is a connection to history there (meaning: more likely to look at the importance of ventilation due to cultural history).
What amazed me is how that city manages to be so densely populated but is designed so you never feel packed. My only "complaint" would be that there could be more trees but there were still more than in most French cities (which I’m from) so …
Who knows, maybe one day such a "visual space" inside a browser would be interactive, a Google Earth type of thing as far as navigation goes, but with data queries that allow on the fly to populate various widgets. An expert could livestream a story or "save" it for later publication.
Today I assume a web browser and/or the device it is on could kill me and eat my lunch given the proper input.
I just want to read an article with illustrations, a format that will never cease to be effective.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/05/28/us/school-sho...
Dead Comment
I'm not against safe building, but some friends of ours were actually denied the ability to be eligible to foster a child because their home didn't have 2 points of egress in every room. The US seems particularly stringent about anything fire-related.
3 bedrooms in 100 m^2 is pretty cramped.