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Guavanaut posted:Well really how much could a banana zone cost? Depends on how much money's in the banana zone.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:18
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Phlegmish posted:I'll admit it I don't really get the joke here, but I've seen the unedited map posted before, and that supposed Great Lakes megaregion always seemed very dodgy to me. There are hundreds of kilometers of mostly empty space between some of those cities. Even the Blue Banana is more morphologically and sociologically coherent.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:26
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Eiba posted:I don't think the Great Lakes Megaregion is all that coherent myself, but when you say the issue is a lack of contiguousness/cities broken up by low density areas, you do realize your Blue Banana has a big chunk of the North Sea bisecting it, right? I believe the North Sea has a rather low population density itself. You have the north sea, a bunch of impassible mountains in the south. Something called a luxembourg? There's a lot of holes in the theory to be sure.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:29
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It's just the ancestral memory of Doggerland living on.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:33
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I said 'even' the Blue Banana, which is to say that I agree with similar criticisms leveled at it. That said, I would bet that even with the chunk of North Sea included, it probably still has a higher population density than that gigantic Great Lakes megaregion
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Feb 21, 2024 21:42
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Benelux should either be one country or be abolished England should just be abolished.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:49
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Ditocoaf posted:I'm glad that euros, british pounds, and dollars are all finally equivalent. Let's get some others in the club
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Feb 21, 2024 21:49
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I think the way modern infrastructure works has a pretty big impact on what a region means. Basically, a hundred years ago, before the car was commonplace, most people had a commuting range of not that far, meaning most people lived their lives either on the road or in a smallish area. But with cars, driving 100km every day becomes feasible, so now you have a gigantic area where everyone goes to the same city or cities to work, especially with suburban sprawl and general urbanisation. In that sense, maybe these megaregions make sense? But also, they're too big for that. I guess people on Funen could go to either Hamburg or Copenhagen, but it's gonna be Copenhagen. Or Hamburg for Southern Jutland. But it's kinda hard to set hard borders between the centres, and I think these megaregions are just adding them all up?
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Feb 21, 2024 21:51
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Phlegmish posted:I said 'even' the Blue Banana, which is to say that I agree with similar criticisms leveled at it. And yeah, that chunk of Europe has crazy population density. In the whole world I'd bet only China and India have bigger regions as densely populated. It's all split between different countries so it doesn't get as much recognition, but Europe's population density is pretty crazy high compared to most of the world.
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Feb 21, 2024 21:53
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FreudianSlippers posted:Benelux should either be one country or be abolished Eiba posted:Fair. A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 21:56
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Feb 21, 2024 22:41
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A Buttery Pastry posted:A united Benelux would surely be seen in a favorable light. A disunited Benelux isn't even seen in a favourable light.
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Feb 21, 2024 22:50
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just return all three of them to the hapsburgs
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Feb 21, 2024 22:52
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I for one, feel like existence of Belgium is better than taking Habsburg rule on the chin.
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Feb 21, 2024 23:00
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BELGICA DELENDA EST
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Feb 21, 2024 23:04
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Iceland would be in the mid tier, but that one crazy strongman skews the average.
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Feb 21, 2024 23:16
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A Buttery Pastry posted:A united Benelux would surely be seen in a favorable light. Might be OK if you take Benelux, but chop off all of Walloonia except for Namur and sink it into the sea*. I don’t think anyone wants to be saddled with the Walloons, but Namur is actually pretty nice. I’ve never been to Mons, but Liege and Charleroi are probably tied with Genoa for being the ugliest and most depressing European cities I’ve seen, and at least Genoa is at the sea and has a better climate. Maybe Liege will be nice after the downtown area no longer looks like 2001-era Grozny due to their current reconstruction plan that started with "let’s nuke the city center and start from scratch". I’m not sure there is any hope for Charleroi, but maybe Phlegmish knows more. *i am aware that Wallonie doesn’t border the sea and that a lot of it is quite far above sea level. Just take all of that dirt, give it to northern Benelux, and make a huge lake where Charleroi and Liege once were. I guess the Ardennes can stay, they’re not amazing but they’re reasonably nice. Saladman fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Feb 21, 2024 |
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Feb 21, 2024 23:17
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A united Benelux would simply be too powerful for the rest of the world to allow. Top dog being of course Luxembourg, which had to be nerfed Trianon style.
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Feb 21, 2024 23:18
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(Ethnic Russians)
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Feb 21, 2024 23:59
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Technically there's a pretty long history of human settlement spreading to both sides of any relatively small body of water, because even though it may be a major blockage to like an invading army (so conquering states will settle on them for borders), it's pretty easy for individual humans to cross if there's not going to be an opposed landing or something. It's often more logisitically convenient for shipping than roads, which is why a lot of cities and towns sometimes build up highest right next to the water. In the modern era, cars have kinda screwed with that by being more convenient than taking ferries, so most individuals don't regularly travel by water, although it's still usually logistically cheaper to transport goods by water. There are a couple tunnels in the channel to keep London linked into historic Lotharingia, but the mountains sure do screw with things a lot more. It's kinda weird I haven't seen more non-banana-based maps talking about potential transnational megalopolises in Europe, but I guess while US state borders are kinda bullshit, Europeans put a lot more importance on their borders and national distinctions, so it's more controversial to assert that areas are more connected across borders than they are with their more distant fellow nationals. I guess with language barriers it's even more possible to maintain some kind of pseudo-separation with people that you're directly next to and surrounded by.
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Feb 22, 2024 00:02
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Kennel posted:Iceland would be in the mid tier, but that one crazy strongman skews the average. Hormones Georg is an outlier adn should not have been counted
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Feb 22, 2024 00:53
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Eiba posted:Fair. Turn on interactive stats for country and city breakdowns.
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Feb 22, 2024 01:25
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Saladman posted:Might be OK if you take Benelux, but chop off all of Walloonia except for Namur and sink it into the sea*. I don’t think anyone wants to be saddled with the Walloons, but Namur is actually pretty nice. I’ve never been to Mons, but Liege and Charleroi are probably tied with Genoa for being the ugliest and most depressing European cities I’ve seen, and at least Genoa is at the sea and has a better climate. Mons and Namur: I've only been to each city a few times in my life, but I do agree that they're nice places to visit, especially Mons in a relative sense, since it's in (or immediately adjacent to, depending on your definition) the Borinage, one of the most economically depressed areas of Western Europe. I tend to prefer smaller, more provincial cities over the bigger, crowded ones, and it doesn't get much more provincial than those two. Liège isn't that bad. They have a really nice public aquarium, I admittedly don't remember much else. In any case, at least it is an actual city with a rich medieval past and a properly defined (concentric) urban structure. Charleroi really is pretty much as dire as people say it is, though. Its main problem is that it has grown almost tenfold since the early 19th century, it basically owes its existence as a city to the Industrial Revolution, and with the slow decline of Wallonia's industry it just does not have anything to fall back on. It lacks coherence since it is essentially no more than a collection of mining/working-class towns and neighborhoods, and there are no beautiful sights or historical architecture to admire, other than decaying terrils (spoil tips) and factories, which does have its own melancholic charm. To a less extreme extent, this is the problem of Wallonia in general. It was the first area in the world (outside of the UK) to industrialize, and if you somewhat anachronistically consider it to be a nation, probably no nation on Earth was more profoundly and deeply affected by the Industrial Revolution. It's a source of pride to them, which I completely understand. So when industry, particularly mining and the steel industry, started declining from the mid-20th century on, they were hit especially hard. To bring it back to the population density discussion, here is a map of Belgium (there's no date in the legend but the relative distribution hasn't really changed over time):  Virtually all of the dark red areas in Wallonia are in the so-called sillon industriel, the coal-rich, heavily industrialized area that bisects it from west to east, as you can see on the map. That's where the population is essentially concentrated. Almost no one lives in the Ardennes region. Walloon Brabant, just to the north of the sillon, does have some people and is doing quite well, but it's essentially Brussels suburbia and has little to do with the rest of Wallonia. What all of this means is that the decline of (heavy) industry simultaneously meant the decline of Wallonia in an almost 1:1 relationship. As you can imagine, all of this is quite charged in the context of Belgian politics. Wallonia is struggling, and slower to recover, to an even greater degree than other post-industrial regions in Europe, such as parts of Northern England or the Ruhr area in Germany. A common talking point in Flanders, particularly among right-wing nationalists, is that there is no incentive for them to change since they happen to be paired with one of the most economically performant regions of Europe (in a historic reversal of fortune), guaranteeing that they will have the necessary funds to spend on infrastructure, subsidies, and social security payments, regardless of how inefficient their administration is, and how much their economy is underperforming. I know this line of reasoning smacks of shock therapy, but I do think there is some truth to it, the problem is that the people who say this usually don't actually care about what happens to Wallonia, they just want to justify their own support of confederalism or separatism. There's no easy solution. I wouldn't say I'm a big believer in what's left of the Belgian project, and I don't have much regard for the politicians currently in charge of Wallonia, but I do think the region deserves more respect than to basically be treated as a laughing stock. They pioneered the Industrial Revolution in mainland Europe, and for quite a long time, they punched above their weight to an extreme degree. They're currently struggling in a way that is almost proportional to this early success, and you could justifiedly say that 'they' made a mistake clinging to their industry for so long, even to this day, but it's too easy and glib to say 'lol just reorient your entire economy'.
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Feb 22, 2024 01:39
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A Buttery Pastry posted:A united Benelux would surely be seen in a favorable light. Don't worry I understood this joke
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Feb 22, 2024 02:44
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Mr. Belpit posted:Don't worry I understood this joke
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Feb 22, 2024 06:17
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SlothfulCobra posted:And here's a take by just an Austinite map nerd who for a lot of supposed megaregions, he reduced them just to the greater metropolitan areas, but he still wants to believe in the Great Lakes of Kentucky. - Select all census tracts with >20 people/km^2 - Paint bucket fill ones that touch each other - Add up the total population for each one of those fills - If that total is >20m, give it a color and a name So the Great Lakes blob has medium density paths connecting all the cities that never dip down into sub twenty people/km^2 like the parts of the Texas Triangle do
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Feb 22, 2024 07:34
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Meine Europa Banane
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Feb 22, 2024 08:13
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Charleroi is probably pretty unique in that they've built a couple of metro lines that were "fully completed, but never opened" as seen in this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeMJBqU_eYc
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Feb 22, 2024 08:39
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A Buttery Pastry posted:We are simply too smart and refined for this thread. Enlightened, if you will.
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Feb 22, 2024 09:43
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Offler posted:Charleroi is probably pretty unique in that they've built a couple of metro lines that were "fully completed, but never opened" as seen in this video. Yeah, "forgotten metro lines" and not a remnant of a project to sequester all the Dutch speakers into parallel underground cities
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Feb 22, 2024 09:48
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They tried to do a Morlock to Dutch speakers??
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Feb 22, 2024 12:14
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:They tried to do a Morlock to Dutch speakers?? idiots, they'll never go for that. they should have built artificial fens.
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Feb 22, 2024 12:24
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steinrokkan posted:Yeah, "forgotten metro lines" and not a remnant of a project to sequester all the Dutch speakers into parallel underground cities I thought that was under Disneyland Paris? https://zapatopi.net/belgium/
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Feb 22, 2024 12:40
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:They tried to do a Morlock to Dutch speakers?? I was thinking more along the lines of the hit movie Us. The Dutch already act and speak the part.
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Feb 22, 2024 12:44
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I should probably have written a TL:DR for people who didn't watch the video. It seems that Belgium's old policy demanded that any large spending on infrastructure had to be divided evenly between Wallonia and Flanders. During this policy, Wallonia and/or Charleroi specifically got thrown a lot of use-it-or-lose-it money for building a metro. So they started building a massively oversized metro for the city's size just to spend the money. Then national politics changed, and now the two halves are responsible for their own infrastructure spending. Suddenly an oversized metro wasn't as appealing, leading to the situations where you have "fully completed, never opened" metro lines.
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Feb 22, 2024 12:47
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Right. I was a bit apprehensive when I saw 'southern Belgium' in the description, which is more or less like referring to Scotland as 'northern Great Britain', but I understand that most international viewers have no idea what the hell Wallonia is, and the actual video is accurate enough. This policy of evenly matched spending was indeed known as 'waffle-iron politics' and led to massive increases in the national debt, which was a major impetus for the introduction of federalism. Belgium didn't officially become a federal country until 1993, which is insanely recent when you think about it. I was already born then.
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Feb 22, 2024 13:15
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I wonder if that decision had anything to do with the Yugoslav Wars that were happening at the time.Offler posted:Charleroi is probably pretty unique in that they've built a couple of metro lines that were "fully completed, but never opened" as seen in this video. Also they had a whole wacky thing where separate metro companies were running trains on the wrong side. But maybe the train line will be reopened one day.
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Feb 22, 2024 15:13
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This is why the Portuguese word for lawyer is borrowed from the Nahuatl word for testicle.
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Feb 22, 2024 15:26
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SlothfulCobra posted:I wonder if that decision had anything to do with the Yugoslav Wars that were happening at the time. I doubt it, since it was just the consecration of what was already de facto the case after successive major state reforms starting in 1970. Still, in a strict constitutional sense, Belgium only became a federalized country 31 years ago.
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Feb 22, 2024 16:01
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Foxfire_ posted:If this one is actually doing what it says it's doing, Great Lakes of Kentucky is kind of a thing. I read that description as: it doesn't seem too controversial that northern kentucky is strongly tied to cincinnatti, which is strongly tied to the rest of ohio. I guess you could split that region into two contiguous regions: lake and river but then it would break their methodology.
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Feb 22, 2024 16:58
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