Show HN: I created this land use visualisation for the Netherlands | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I created this land use visualisation for the Netherlands

koenvangilst.nl

78 pointsvnglst27 comments

Last weekend, I tried creating an original visualization of something on many minds in my home country the Netherlands: land use.

Much of our discussion revolves around land use—housing crisis, sustainable farming, solar energy—it's all about the land. To illustrate this, I created a map where each hexagon represents 0.06% (26,647 hectares) of land in the Netherlands. The color indicates the type of land use.

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The agricultural land use in the Netherlands always triggers me.

More than 50% of the Netherlands is used for agriculture, yet it only makes up about 1.5% of our GDP. At the same time we are the world’s second biggest exporter of agricultural goods in the world. Mainly meat to Germany, Italy and China.

All that environmental sacrifice for a few farmers and food for other countries. Instead we could have better air, nicer and bigger pieces of nature, etc.

Another fun fact is that one tile is solar panels which are more than all of the solar panels in the whole of Africa.

Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332329/leading-countrie...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/276713/distribution-of-g...

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/25/the-netherlands-is-the...

https://decorrespondent.nl/14856/goed-nieuws-de-groene-trans....

You're not counting in the tulip industry, which googling returns a whooping 10% of the GDP.

Flowers + greenhouses is still barely 1.5%

Still, why is one of the most densely populated countries in the EU designating so much of its land to agriculture?

Maybe they don't want to fully give up that part of their industries.

Also cheesemaking is big in the Netherlands, so I wouldn't be surprised that lots of it is for feeding cattle.

Pretty much all of the food for our cattle is imported, I.e soy from Brasil etc. Capitalism combined with a lack of environmental taxes results in some crazy wasteful situations like this. It also results in the related cattle food etc industries subsidizing political parties and thus manipulating our government to let it keep on going and duck any responsibilities, like we have to the EU, that would risk stopping it.

That's crazy but makes sense too.

When I biked from Amsterdam to Antwerp in ~2014, it was difficult to not run into a village every few km.

I guess there's no cheap enough real estate left to grow the massive amounts of soy, cow corn, and hay to feed the animals.

Since it's such a huge source of climate change GHGs, pandemics, antibiotic resistance, and air, water, and soil pollution, perhaps globally we need to scale back dairy and meat agriculture.

A better question is why is any government anywhere designating any of its land for anything? Leave land use as broadly defined as possible (ie you want some regulation to stop a steel smelter or high density pork barn operation in high density residential, but not much regulation beyond that type of thing) and get out of the way. Stop subsidizing everybody while you are at it too (defined as a tax code with almost no carve outs that broadly applies to all business equally) and if farming is a bad idea it will go away on its own.

Zeg ken jij de mosselman? (Dit hoor ik nu de hele dag op Spotify, mijn peuter is er dol op).)

I wasn't aware of the numbers you mentioned, that really puts things in perspective (and makes that upside down flag even more annoying to me).

Nee, maar ik ken de muffinman.

(Mijn hele Nederlandse taal heb ik via Google geleerd.)

I guess you should save up your eurosand buy some farm land to convert to nature.

Very nice visualization! Tiny feature request: would be nice if I could hover over the items in the legend at the top left to highlight them on the map as well.

I'm surprised at the small amount of 'urban area' for such a 'volgebouwd' country.

Advice: add a button that morphs the visualization to the situation where every hexagon is at/near the geographical location where it belongs.

Nice!

Kinda confused, using a map to represent land area, then the colored hex locations are not corresponding to the land use they indicate.

I get it, some of the hexes are 'all over', like solar. Can't put that one hex any one place. Just remarking that it gave me pause - mixing land-use-geography with ... geography. Without being correlated in any way.

It is really strange and ends up obscuring the relationships between quantities.

It is a pretty visualization that unfortunately fails its primary purpose.

I would recommend to the author the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte.

> ends up obscuring the relationships between quantities

It can end up obscuring relationships between quantities internal to the visualization, but at the same time having this kind of visualization can help tie the internal quantities to external quantities known to the reader. E.g. "4% of land mass of Netherlands" may not mean much to someone, but if they can see it visualized on a map like this can help them recognize that it's equivalent to e.g. "this county I'm living in".

A treemap would probably be the better choice. The Swiss government uses one to visualize their land use: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/territory-en...

Nice. I had definitely not expected agriculture in total to be over 50%.

Love it! Reallt shows how much land is used by agriculture

Love the visualization

Kinda confused with the meaning, there is more infrastructure than buildings?

And there seems to be a massive amount of urban grass!

Thanks Joris!

According the the Wageningen University report there is! It's small road, highways but also rail road tracks. The actual report can be found here: https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/landelijk-grondgebru...

This also contains the definitions of land use categories. I've grouped all of the above (roads, rail, highways) under infrastructure.

From reading the description, perhaps "urban greenery" would be a better term than "urban grass".

It makes sense if you think about it. I live in a relatively dense neighbourhood, and if you consider the infrastructure my building and the building across from me share, two sidewalks and a street, it's already almost as much area as the footprint of our buildings. Add to that large buildings that often have huge paved areas around them, and highways which are extremely wide and stretch for hundreds of kilometers, it's easy to see that there will be more infrastructure than buildings.

With regards to the grass, even though I live in the city I already have as much garden ("urban grass") as I have building footprint. I wonder if they include other garden vegetation as "urban grass" as well, but maybe it's not significant in comparison?

More corn % than America even.

Pasture: Is all of that for grazing livestock or does that represent land without trees?

Damn, I wonder how it would have been to be born and raised in Netherlands...

Almost 1% flowers!

Beautiful work

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