In large cities, sure, but mostly out of necessity. Historically, the communist regimes there sort of forced industrialization on people. Workforce was needed so they moved people from the countryside into flats, close to the workplace. As the change was mostly sudden, it was a bit of a culture shock due to people suddenly moving from their own house with a yard into a wee matchbox and not really adjusting behaviour to the new circumstances. So the apartment building culture in such places is quite different from the western one (in terms, for instance, of being respectful of your neighbour - like not drilling on Sunday at 8 am because that's when the quiet time - according to the law - ends).
So the drive there is to get your own house away from hundreds of neighbours as soon as you have the means, even if it implies commuting in hellish traffic.
Coincidentally, also why you might see some pushback from those places when people suggest walkable cities with apartment blocks. Because when suggesting that, everyone thinks Sweden or Denmark, not Eastern Europe.
Absolutely not surprised about Spain being top in flats after learning its interior, excluding Madrid, is basically the most sparsely populated region in Europe.
Hey, thanks for this! While watching the Tour de France my friend and I were wondering if most people in France lived in apartments or detached homes. You have neatly answered our question!
France has endless suburbs. The contrast with Spain is quite stark. Suddenly most people live in town and village centres and they usually stop at the old historical borders.
I'm genuinely shocked that people drink more wine than beer in Denmark. Considering Tuborg and Carlsberg both come from there, and the amount of beer I see people drink publicly, it seems genuinely doubtful to me.
The title of the graphics is a bit misleading, as it's not the amount of wine, beer or spirits which is most in each country, it is the the amount of (pure) alcohol from wine, beer or spirits. And one often can see people drinking wine in the Nordics.
Marking for Slovenia is wrong. I do have statistical data from our statistical agency and it is not even close: 8.5l/person/year of vine and 26.5/person/year of beer (including non-alcohol).
Arguably, vine has higher alcohol content (~11.5%) compared to beer (~4.9%), but even even if we look at "alcohol consumed from wine/beer per person per year", we get 0,9775L from vine and 1,2985 from beer.
These findings are in agreement with my intuition based on me seeing what people drink.
As the numbers for beer from stat.si do not differentiate between alcohol free and usual beer, its bold to assume the weighted (by share of consumption) average beer contains 4.9 vol.% alcohol unless you know that it may be totally uncommon to drink non-alcoholic beer.
True. It is uncommon, I'd guess every 10th beer is non-alcoholic. But then there is also radler, with lower alcohol content, which would probably represent 3 out of every 10 beers.
I was a bit surprised by the wine in Sweden. I sometimes feel like an outcast with my wine on AWs and other outings. It seems that most people around me prefer beer.
Maybe it's a matter of selection bias since I tend to be around the same group of people.
The diagram is the amount of pure alcohol. Beer typilally contains 3.5 % - 5 % alcohol and wine 12 %, thus the consumption of beer in litres is larger than wine.
However, I was also surprised how much wine (with or without alcohol) is consumed in Sweden considering its price.
No, the calculation is like 0.5 litre beer with 5 vol.% alcohol contain 25 ml pure (100 %) alcohol and these 25 ml go into the statistics as alcohol from the consumption of beer.
Yes, beer with up to 3.5 % you can buy in a supermarket. Beer above 3.5 % is called strong beer (starköl) which you can only buy at Systembolaget, the governmental alcohol store. Considering a large part of the beer is light beer (lättöl) or folks beer (folköl) below 3.5 %, the amount of beer to cover the 36 % pure alcohol is even higher.
I would have thought that 10 years ago, but wine has become a lot more popular since then. I know it's partly my age and the age of people I mingle with but I've noticed it for younger people too when I'm out and about, common to see groups of ~20 year olds with those 1l or 3l tetra pak wines during weekends.
I used to live in the Midwest of USA. It was very flat and trees were not absent but sparse. The sunrise and sunset were the best feature. This is beautiful.
I think memes are cool and this one is accurate lol. I’m just hoping this won’t become some right wing community like 2westerneurope4u. Some memes were funny but all the racism and other right wing bullshit made it pretty much unbearable.
Interesting, from what I've seen on the market, the B2B formula can be nice if you are able to work as a freelancer, I even see a few people coming from other countries to Poland for that.
B2B is being cut down from working better than a regular work agreement. The golden days of it are gone. Also, being able to be fired in 5 mins without any notice other than a "fuck you get out" sucks.
Fuck yes for IT but people working their asses of at lidl deserve a home too. The housing market is out of control here, and a take away pizza is now a luxury.
I would say with confidence that while QOL was increasing rapidly in Poland in the last two decades this one is sadly different. Late stage capitalism sucks.
I've been to Tokyo (and it's awesome!) but I don't live there.
I've only glanced at the headlines of the article you posted and most of the factors appear to be in the article. There are a few things that are missing though, afaiu, and it really is a bag of mixed blessings:
fairly relaxed building codes which means building gets cheaper
average houses, especially if they're on the smaller side, are only a couple of decades old -- the Japanese demolish and replace their relatively cheap housing fairly often
less space for motorized traffic
not a lot of greenery
Cursorily related to the final point: I was also really shocked at Japanese parks. On the plus side, they're extremely neat. However, most of them have super-wide ways, so half the park is just paved over. And of course there are opening hours, usually they're open until 6pm but they have all kinds of alarms and announcements going off in the 30 minutes prior.
YUROP
Heiß