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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

We underestimate the pressure the world has been under in the last century. In 1950, we had about 2.5 billion people. Today, we have 8 billion. We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people who all expected to have a greater standard of living with electricity and living space; something had to give.

We had to be more parsimonious with the materials at our disposal.

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"We had to find accommodations for 5.5 billion people" is irrelevant to a discussion of one city in Spain that did not grow quickly: Spain has its own architects that haven't been influenced much by architects in countries like Nigeria and India where the population grew very fast.

Population of Barcelona grew from 500K to more than 1.7M in 70 years.

OK (that is much faster growth than Spain as a whole) but the 5.5 billion new people is still irrelevant.

It’s not irrelevant as a ratio. 2.5 billion to 8 billion is very comparable to 500k to 1.7 million. The population tripled in 70 years and, in the current times, you also have to deal with all the existing architecture and infrastructure in the city that wasn’t built for anywhere near that population level.

People really don't understand how big the 'boomers' generation really was. Populations exploded in the post war era and with the rapid rise in technology people were disinterested in doing things in the way of the past. In the US at least there was a mass migration over the country and a massive need for housing that could be quickly built. Later this rapid expansion of 'sameness' would be captured in popular media in songs like "Little Boxes".

There was also an enormous urban population boom in the heyday of capitalism, late 1800s early 1900s, and architecture was absolutely glorious. It's really not the post war population boom. It was the post war mindset, modernism, a spiteful iconoclasm married to an infatuation with high technology (ie. All human experience must be mediated with the latest technology, a priori). Without that, our cities would have grown just as beautifully as before.

Eh, it was an urban population migration after mechanization of farming. Population growth then still was not great nor anywhere near what happened later. This time was laying the roots of a future time where people didn't stay still and the world was moving at a fast pace, but it wasn't that world yet.

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