Apart from weather, a big issue outside the USA is also car infrastructure. The US is extremely car centric with large, straight, easy-to-maneuver roads everywhere. Here in Germany, it's different. We have rather narrow, chaotic roads, unclear signage, "right car has right of way" traffic rules which sometimes get resolved via hand signs, no jaywalking laws, etc.
I am still hoping for fewer cars on the road overall. The car itself is inefficient and hopefully on its way out.
The first few are single family villas, the last four are multi family housing complexes.
For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transport, integrate commercial and residential zones and are fairly nice to live in. Most, however, are simply unhealthy for both the planet and the residents.
It's great to live in dense places; but its benefits are countered by huge, empty plazas that take 15 minutes to cross if I just want to walk to the next corner store.
> For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
I saw a documentary about one of these projects. It was contemporary footage with interviews of regular people, asking what they thought about them. A woman gave an answer which I felt was very profound: "Who wants to live where you can't see your kids when they're playing outside?"
It just seems so jarringly obvious, how disconnected it is to sit up in a tower block, coming from someone who is probably used to be able to open the front door and be outside. Also it struck me how these areas are always associated in my mind with delinquency (having grown up around them). Perhaps it's just because the parents can't see their kids, duh.
I grew up in a courtyard style (but much larger, super-block style) area for much of my childhood. The outer box is one section of the compound. The inner boxes are tall apartment blocks. If you look out your front balcony you'll see your kids play with other kids and the older kids will watch out for the younger ones. The box with the 'x's in it is a massive courtyard (think a couple of your football fields) with trees and playgrounds and space for sports. It is encircled by a road that leaves at that top right area.
> For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
To be fair, there were pressing issues with large slums all across Europe at that time, and they needed to build lots of homes very quickly. I am not sure there were many alternative to blocks of flats back in the day. The problem is also not really high densities, because it also means that there is a local market for shops, restaurants, etc, which can make the neighbourhoods very walkable and nice. Most large projects had plans for things like cinemas, swimming pools, gyms, shops, and stuff. Often these were not built and instead there were these rows after rows of blocks of concrete.
Transport is a real problem, because these places became less and less attractive as they aged and became more and more isolated.
But smaller population densities would not have helped one bit with that. It would just have encouraged urban sprawl which is even worse in terms of public transport and walkability.
What you said is underappreciated in options on architecture. I'm as much of a critic of some themes as anyone, but it's fundamentally about designing within constraints.
One can dislike the result, but proposing alternatives that ignore the design constraints is disingenuous.
If countries need massive amount of housing but don't have time or money to build it... you're going to get a certain type of solution.
And it can be the best solution given those constraints and still an objectively bad solution.
I consider my neighbourhood in Western Europe a great modernist success:
Blocks are mostly around 7 floors high, with access organized vertically - each floor landing has typically 3 apartments around the lift/stairwell, so no 'streets in the sky'.
Plenty of shops (and entrances!) at ground level of each block.
Lots of parks, schools, trams, etc interspersed amongst the blocks.
You're missing how some of those places were built with, or without, the necessary secondary support architecture that was specified in the original ideas.
For example, Communist-era housing blocks in Poland had standardised requirements for availability of grocery shops, healthcare, transportation, sport and recreation areas, etc. for each community built this way, and generally you never had to walk far to get to a grocery store in my experience. What was problematic is that due to worse processes at the time, it took years for green areas to get, well, green.
Corbusier and many places inspired by him seemed to have put the requirements, but often for various reasons those were stripped out - either due to subpar followers, or costs, or even outright malfeasance (one place I lived in had the design changed by builders while architects were on vacation, resulting in much maligned building)
That’s questionable. Germany is social state. It has great protections for ordinary people. It’s really hard to lose everything because of bad work. Sounds more like US where you could be fired any minute without warnings.
Not entirely true. Outside of government workers who are set for life, getting fired in Germany is definitely possible for various reasons, I know many cases. There are legal processes the employer must follow in order to fire employees but nearly all companies have lawyers that take care of that process to let employees go without getting sued.
And you can fall on financial hardship if for example, you took massive loan for a house and you lost your job which happens to be in a low demand filed, making it hard to find another job quickly. You usually have your 1-3 months notice period as a buffer, but the unemployment you get after that might not cover your full expenses as that's usually around the 60% mark of your pay.
Sure, like in most of Europe, it's more difficult to become poor and homeless than in the US, but Germany doesn't give you some magic immunity talisman to never loosing your job.
Yes, you can loose your job in Germany. But definitely not as easy as for example in the US. Companies need valid reasons for letting people go. And then it doesn't work like: You are fired - this is your last paycheck (only in really, really extreme cases like you stealing from your employer or punching him in the face kind of reasons).
Then there is the fact that for a time after being let go you receive a relevant share of your average salary for the last 12 months from the state while you keep looking for work.
Does it suck to be let go? Sure. Is it the end of the world in Germany? In more cases than not - it isn't.
I work in a company with even stronger employee protection as we have a so called works council. A body representing the workers towards upper management and standing in for their rights. Additionally there are strong unions in some industries in Germany that also help a lot.
Ar there areas where companies sometimes already on the side of illegalities abuse the system and workers - for sure. Esp. in the low wage sector.
What many outsiders don't know is that those protections you talk about don't apply much to your average Berlin startup where expats come exiting to kick back and relax and get shocked when they get ground up to a pulp in overtime.
The great employee protection are for those unionized German megacorps in the IG Metall brach, basically the traditional 100 year old German companies, like Mercedes, Siemens, Bosch, VW, Audi, etc. Those have the best employee protections and working conditions, albeit at the cost of usually archaic and crusty management, compensation schemes, heavy, slow and bureaucratic processes, etc.
Your average modern "move fast and break things" SW company or mobile focused startup doesn't enjoy any of those benefits and usually come with overtime expectations and pressure to ship, ship, ship.
Germans tend to rent, and overstretched mortgages aren't a thing over there. If you are fired you still have access to healthcare and unless your professional qualifications are in terribly low demand you will find work for adequate salary (unions in Germany sit on the boards). If everything else fails, you will get social security subsidies, albeit much to keep you out of poverty.
Often, these thoughts are about worst cases, and imagined outcomes so much more than realistic ones. Germans do have a word for that: "Kopfkino" (literally translated to "cinema in the head"), a state of worrying about things that becomes more darkly fantastical with every second spent on it, playing through all the imaginable adverse outcomes.
You're right. It's a societal, imagined instability.
In the US, if you lose your job, you're "between jobs". In Germany, you're "arbeitslos" (jobless), which some people use as an insult. There are entire TV channels that make fun of jobless people - think TLC type shows, but strictly about poverty and joblessness.
It has protection, but that doesn't mean the company will respect them and you will be compensated 18 months later after a trial. And during that time, you won't have a lot a money coming to help you.
Just because many privately owned apps are bad, does not mean the concept of apps is bad. If the government in theory can offer a "secure" open source channel for me to do my business with them without having to go there or pay for postage, why not use it?
And why do we still believe that paper docs are secure? Someone needs to look at them and can just as easily "lose" them, too.
The problem here is the smartphone ecosystem. If there were merely an "app standard" which I could run even if I did not have a Google or Apple device, that would be fine. But, requiring that I give at least some information to Apple, or even more information to Google in order to use a government service is what I take issue with.
The bigger problem is that this issue is almost entirely artificial. Most apps are merely glorified web pages. Functionally, they could (in most cases) just be websites and function exactly as well.
There are ‘laser’ powerups and bullet powerups. You can use the laser to blast through big columns of blocks, and or at least weaken them until your shots kill them with bounces. It introduces an interesting tension between wanting nice horizontal bounces versus wanting to hit as many blocks as possible with the laser. Fun stuff.
I think you have to accept that some starts are better than others. If you get no powerups on the first screen you're going to struggle. I think you're right that the middle game is quite easy (i.e. you can just bounce off a wall and clear the screen pretty easily). At higher levels you have to plan a bit more, and get really good at hitting corners to achieve horizontal bounces, which is hard to do reliably. It was certainly worth a weekend of my life, anyway. :)
>At the extreme, if it is bad enough, they can start their own.
That is not a realistic proposition, either. People are as forced to use private services as they are forced to use government ones. There might be a competitor, but even that does not necessarily provide cheaper or better service or products.
>No problem, the locations are just metadata! Your files are still there, sitting in π - they're never going away, are they?