The great myth of urban Britain

[Zmapper]

I thought this was an interesting read: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18623096

"The 80% of us who live in towns and cities spend an inordinate amount of time staring at tarmac and brick. On most urban roads, one can be tricked into thinking that the ribbon of grey we see reflects the land use for miles around.

But when you look out of a plane window as you buckle-up ahead of landing at a UK airport, the revelation is how green the country appears."

[Road Hog]

It's true. I've driven between Leeds and Manchester over the Moors and it's as empty as anyplace in Texas I've ever driven.

[mgk920]

Ditto NYC and Chicago.  Outside of the downtown area, Chicago, especially, looks like a forest from low altitude.

Also, many foreigners, especially Europeans, are amazed at how truly vast and empty a nation of 320M can be when they start driving around the USA outside of the major metro areas.

Mike

[kphoger]

Ditto NYC and Chicago.  Outside of the downtown area, Chicago, especially, looks like a forest from low altitude.

Also, many foreigners, especially Europeans, are amazed at how truly vast and empty a nation of 320M can be when they start driving around the USA outside of the major metro areas.

Mike

Chicago has a decent amount of park land compared to many other cities.

[mgk920]

Ditto NYC and Chicago.  Outside of the downtown area, Chicago, especially, looks like a forest from low altitude.

Also, many foreigners, especially Europeans, are amazed at how truly vast and empty a nation of 320M can be when they start driving around the USA outside of the major metro areas.

Mike

Chicago has a decent amount of park land compared to many other cities.

Not just in the parks, but the regular neighborhoods, too.

Mike

[3467]

Actually the the Chicago area delibratly preserved native praries and forests before its expansion and even now as in the case of Illinois 53 expansion. If you fly over the rest of Northern and Central Illinosi you will see how intense the farming is . Its the land we use for farming that takes up most of the human landscape. If we switched to something like cultured meat we would need now other land or envirnomental regulation
I would add due to lack of fire most of the praries turned into forests in metro Chicago

[3467]

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMZ16L26DF_index_0.html

Nice zoomable map of the worlds land cover/use

[english si]

Chicago has a decent amount of park land compared to many other cities.

London is rather green as well - Greater London is about 10% less dense than Cook County.

England is, despite areas like the Pennines, etc, 50 million people with a population density of Rhode Island, or Puerto Rico. New Jersey is the only state more packed in than England. Given that we rarely do high rises, we have small houses, smallish gardens and little room between towns.

I'm on the edge of the London Met area, surrounded by large amounts of rural area and with extremely tight development controls (Green Belt that is also a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) between towns, but even so, there's no large expanse of rural area - outside the towns, there's villages at least every mile.

The M62 over the moors might be as desolate as Texas, but it's a 5 mile gap in what is basically a single conglomeration (like 'BosWash', only smaller and more continuous) from coast to coast. A couple of miles to the north and the gaps between towns are around a mile. A better analogy might be driving out of LA on US101, or the Septulva Pass on I-405 - both are mountain gaps of 2-3 miles (OK, we're looking at 5 miles of windswept moor instead or 3 miles of steep mountains, but it's similar). OK, it's a long thin empty area, so you can go north from Alton Towers Theme Park to Scotland without really passing a through anywhere of notable size.

[Chris]

The Netherlands also has very tight land development regulations, and even if major cities are 20 miles apart, there are low-density rural areas between them.

The Netherlands does not have many suburbs like in the United States. Most suburban areas are part of the main city. For example Utrecht annexed a small town west of it, and then constructed houses for 90,000 people around it. In most countries it would've been a separately administered suburb, but in the Netherlands it's part of the core city.

The Netherlands and the United Kingdom have the highest rate of rowhouses (terraced housing) in Europe and probably the world. Housing is also generally unaffordable, also in typical residential areas housing prices tend to be very high. $ 300,000 is about the starting price for a single-family home in our country, but if you want a more decent house with a larger garden $ 450,000 - 500,000 is about where it starts. Detached housing is mostly found in rural areas, detached housing in suburban areas is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.

[Brandon]

Actually the the Chicago area delibratly preserved native praries and forests before its expansion and even now as in the case of Illinois 53 expansion. If you fly over the rest of Northern and Central Illinosi you will see how intense the farming is . Its the land we use for farming that takes up most of the human landscape. If we switched to something like cultured meat we would need now other land or envirnomental regulation
I would add due to lack of fire most of the praries turned into forests in metro Chicago

Everywhere people have settled here in subdivisions, they plant trees.  If you look at the older subdivisions, they seem like forests with houses from the air.  It's only the newer ones that lack trees for now.

[english si]

Detached housing is mostly found in rural areas, detached housing in suburban areas is unaffordable for the vast majority of the population.

Here, many new houses are done as detached as they make more money - they aren't unaffordable for the vast majority, but certainly are expensive. They are also small - the rooms are small, the plot itself is small, there's not many rooms (2 bedrooms, a box room and a bathroom upstairs, a kitchen, dining room and a toilet downstairs).

Our houses are, on average, smaller than even the Japanese average like-for-like. Semi-detached and terraced houses built between WW1 and the 70s are bigger than modern detached houses, despite taking up roughly the same amount of room. Victorian terraces are typically small '2 up, 2 down' (2 bedrooms upstairs, a kitchen and a dining/living room down, plus a bathroom and probably a toilet under the stairs), especially in the north.

[NE2]

How does the myth of shagging sheep jibe with this myth of urban Britain?

[english si]

That's only the Welsh - they have lots of mountains (and sheep). They are outskirts.

[NE2]

That's only the Welsh - they have lots of mountains (and sheep). They are outskirts.

Don't you mean outkilts?

[BigMattFromTexas]

Even though San Angelo is really small.. (2011 est.94,500) there are parts of town that won't ever really be able to be built up. As it's part of a flood zone, so nothing can be built there. Although down here we do build more spaciously than other parts of the country. A lot different than the UK..
BigMatt