Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago
correctiv.org
correctiv.org
The commoditisation, clustering and gentrification of landscape and living is world-wide phenomenon.
At Corsica FLNC fought with bombing against hijacking of landscape by vacationers. But xenophobia solves nothing.
Revolution? Slow collapse? Some way out of the cities and back to the countryside? Idk. Time will tell.
People have been moving to cities for decades now. Many of humanities recent developments make much more sense at scale so people are going to places with that scale. Some prefer a quieter environment and don't move but most people rather have opportunities, jobs, services, etc and all that is made much easier when lots of people are concentrated in a smaller area.
Sure, bringing in tons of tourists where there were initially none is going to change a place. But isn't it a way to keep it alive, even if different?
I think the situation is different from places where people actually want to live but are pushed out "by the rich" (tourists or second-home owners).
- Before airbnb there was some balance in these places: people had regular professions (plumbers, builders, bakers, farmers, agriculture, fishing, hoteliers, etc)
- After airbnb: local people saw that opportunity for extra income on the side, also thriving side businesses around tourirm. There is also the existing generation of people still doing these regular professions
- Now: local people might have sold their properties to companies managing these airbnbs or foreigners visiting once per couple years. Local people have also enough money to live comfortably somewhere else, number of regular professions is declining or replaced by non-local people, e.g. from India or Pakistan (this is the case for all balkan countries). For reference, a couple years ago, this was done by people from Albania or Romania.
- In 20 years: these islands are not inhabited by greek people, only companies maintain these airbnbs or whole villages are left empty. No bakeries are left, no local markets, only large supermarket chains bringing non local food and groceries, noone likes to work as a plumber or baker since they can make money from other stuff.
This is how i see the future in these places. I am not talking about the popular ones like Mykonos or Santorini, these are high-income generators and won't have an issue finding "workers". However this is the current state in other non popular islands.
In France, many small villages are dying. They're not cute enough or whatever to attract tourists, so as people leave for the cities, local bakeries and other businesses close, lacking clients. They become almost ghost-towns with abandoned homes everywhere.
As a foreigner, I very much enjoy holidaying in your beautiful islands but do not wish to destroy their charm with my attendance. You have some beautiful waters.
If anything else, for me the main issue in France is the dearth of doctors in rural areas. So even the romantic idea of retiring in quaint village is predicated on not getting sick.
With that and climate change our plans might be changing
Well until this year it seemed like the coolest and most stable part of France - also the least French part and reminds me of Scotland.
(We have friends who just sold up and moved to near Bordeaux - not sure it they are regretting it yet)
I visited outside Bordeaux at Saint Émilion and found the area very beautiful, so hopefully they don't regret it. The price of wine in the country was so amazingly reasonable that even if they did regret moving, they could live in a constant wine fugue and be oblivious to their worries, partly...?
Grew up in a village. What you do is... drive to another village / town. There are always doctors to be found - and less queues than in big cities.
Driving to another part also often implies having someone to drive you.
If you live further out in the countryside, it can be a real PITA to find someone.
I kinda have to disagree with this. Sure, there's not a lot of software engineers grabbing a hoe and moving to a quiet rural farming village. But oh boy is there a lot of money being a software engineer working on farming.
I'd have to say more software engineers are working in agriculture today than ever before - it's one of the reasons why the rural areas can shrink. State programs for mechanization and increasingly advanced and hyper-specific machines are allowing crops that were labour intensive just a decade ago to be done by a team of 2-4. We went apple picking last year and the field next to us was having its apples harvested by flying drones (which was a real "we're living in the future" moment for us) while a worker sat in a lawn chair nearby reading a book.
Then there's the pushes to remove transport costs and grow closer to the cities. All of our family's lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber come year round from greenhouses on the roof Walmarts, warehouses and other big block stores, just a few blocks away - https://montreal.lufa.com/en/farms. 100% "touch-free" automated greenhouses are being built and have entered full productivity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITRts-KOkuM&t=44s. Cheap electricity and thousands of overbuilt (snow load) flat roofs are a good combination for city greenhouses. These "farms" employee directly and indirectly plenty of engineers of all kinds.
I have several burnt out friends who went “farming” and I assure you, programming combines and drones is not the thing they meant by going away.
Here in Berlin where I currently live the population grows by a out 50K people a year. There are housing shortages and people are struggling to find a place to live.
However the surrounding Brandenburg area has been depopulating since the wall fell. Lots of little ghost towns there. And it's not even that far. There's plenty of housing available if you can tolerate the inconvenience of a shitty commute.
IMHO the coming revolution of autonomous driving is going to lower the cost and inconvenience of living a bit further away. It enables working or relaxing while you commute. A two hour commute is much less of a problem if you can be a bit productive. And of course you don't have to do that everyday. Lots of people work remotely some or all of the time.
Autonomous driving could also lower the cost of public transport by eliminating the cost of drivers and fossil fuels. Most of the reason of remote villages being underserved by public transport is cost. On demand pickups/dropoffs and more flexible scheduling could further address that. And it's a lot cheaper than commuter rail extensions.
I would rather pay for the better location than pay for the larger house. The physical size of my home isn't a large factor in my quality of life. The length of my commute is. Now I was going to write "It's really weird to me this isn't a more mainstream view", but given the data we're looking at, seems this view is absolutely the mainstream.
In my specific area the housing price reduction of moving out of the city balances out quickly by the need for a car and/or a second car (our cheap tiny EV works fine for short commutes), particularly if you compare the relative interest rates. I imagine market forces make it so, the financial tradeoffs are reflected in the pricing.
Further: as the only available housing at a low price point collects in smaller towns the impact of borderline purchasers becomes more pronounced. As neighbours I don’t care, but as a parent who has seen kids get an unfortunate personality remodel from a near-peer bad influences and listened to the experiences of my parent friends who live out of town… the contemporary local culture needs to be considered. It’s not necessarily the cozy small town upbringing we expected in olden days, there has been generational turnover.
Scary stuff, I would love to hear more. May I ask what country is this?
It was never that cosy idealistic and the more you read history of those places the more you see it. The vision of pure sainty village is ideological rather then historical.
People who live in small towns are people. Some get aggressive, some are alcoholic or gamblers. Some are assholes in other ways. Or just lead long passive aggressive wars about stupid stuff. There are fights, enablement and abuse for similar reasons as in the cities.
There is less anonymity which changes things, but the vision of sainty small town was never accurate.
If everyone is on the road, be it "autonomous" or not, then the net result will be traffic jams. It sounds so idyllic if it's only me but it won't be.
Make public transport more attractive and it could be doable. After all, Europe has spent the last X years trying to get people to use bikes and public transport instead of clogging up roads.
> eliminating the cost of drivers and fossil fuels
By that time, we'll be on fission fuel ... it's just around the corner!
I actually called out public transport as part of the solution. Autonomous driving makes small buses for uneconomical, remote destinations more feasible. Even just a shuttle to a commuter rail way station would be helpful. The challenge is that these remote areas are depopulating because you can't easily get there. Public transport is amazing but not when it means waiting for a bus for 2 hours that may be delayed by another hour or be cancelled entirely. One plus side of the countryside: not a whole lot of traffic jams there.
A two hour commute sounds absolutely unbearable to my ears. I guess it makes sense if you are able work for 4 hours daily inside a train or something, but that's already half of the workday, i.e. you might as well just work from home.
This is all predicated on true autonomous vehicles though, not the half-baked non-solutions that exist today.
...is going to take another 20-30 years, if it arrives at all.
It's become very clear in the years since the promise of "self-driving cars in six months!" failed to materialise that the level of computer vision and processing required to operate self-driving cars on arbitrary roads (as in, not in very specific areas in the American Southwest, where the weather is very consistent) is much, much higher than we thought.
Until we can be pretty damn well guaranteed that a self-driving tractor trailer is not going to see a road under construction and either continue going straight through—killing lots of construction workers, and possibly causing a massive explosion if it's carrying fossil fuels—or swerve off the road into someone's house, no matter how poorly the correct lane to drive in is marked...
And that self-driving vehicles will be able to keep in lane at least as well as humans can when there's 8cm of snow on the roads...
We're going to need to accept that the answer to "shitty commute" has to be public transport, or remote work.
The consequence of all this is that water flows less freely and that when there is a lot of rainfall it comes not just with water but also large amounts of trees and stones.
I imagine this happening in many places.
Sadly, this is going to have to be at least a generational change, as the current people in power are deeply entrenched in the mindset that "managing people" means "ensuring butts are in seats", and that they are neofeudal lords overseeing their techno-serfs, which they can only feel good about if they can go aggravate them in person.
Honestly that was really primarily mechanisation and industrialisation. The number of people required to farm a given area of land has _plummeted_; in Europe it is still artificially inflated with subsidies.
https://cdn.correctiv.org/deployed-apps/CE_2026_population_m...
I checked the area around Munich, Germany (where I live).
- one is an actual lake (correct shape) that went down to 0 from a bogus 1
- three are actual forests/parks which may have had some sorts, but 11/16/48 to 0 is a rounding error, but there is no filter for absolute, it technically is -100%...
- bit further out is another lake with 14 to 0
Then the Government did little to nothing to encourage that, and at some point the trend essentially died.
Needless to say, a lot of couples could have moved to their areas of origin, have the support of the extended family (grandparents) and that would have likely helped with children (particularly with couples yearning to have more children.
It was another lost occasion to revitalise some of the smaller towns.
Part of my family hails from a small Mountain Village which used to be quite alive thirty years ago, but now the majority of the population is above 60, and there's only a handful of children. Small towns have many positive sides, but network effects are too important for people.
I am really torn about where to raise my kid as it really seems one has to choose between opportunities and social/family life.
Places like Australia have plenty of land but, nah, everyone wants to live urban where housing prices are insane or inherited.
Food costs often go down in developed countries, cheaper than developing ones. Maybe they're so low that they can't afford to become farmers anymore? Not enough people buy corn and corn price is so cheap that it gets made into HFCS. But if you can't mass produce cheap corn, you're screwed and get a desk job.
So we have the service economy. Everyone sells services to one another, works from home, makes tons of money. Madrid has top-tier designers, chefs, doctors, moneylenders, nearly every kind of service. All the piles of money in a concentrated place like Madrid makes the whole place overpriced. If you happen to be the best tuna butcher in Western Europe, there's a limited number of places you can work, but many of these specialist jobs are also wfh.
Is there a hack to this though? Can our top tier Spanish pixel artist sell her services to someone in suburban Canada?
Governments do this in all sorts of ways, including the big one: making this the only real risk-free but effective way to save up and have a bigger pension at retirement (so any change to this system will take a LOT of money out of the pockets of old people, who often can't replace it anymore)
But if you made mortgages either have real risk for banks or stopped funding them through central bank loans ... house prices will crash down. And having inflation is simply a choice. We could choose otherwise.
The problem with changing this is that it will require a permanent reduction in government spending or a permanent (big) raise in tax. Both are non-starters.
What this does over time is it makes labor that has low productivity, such as farming, less and less realistic if you want a decent life. It is a ratchet that forces the population to make more and more money over time ... or face destitution. It's been an extremely powerful way for countries to get rich.
Every country, with only a few exceptions, has been doing this since WW2, US and Europe longer. So the benefits have been going strong for 75 years and counting now. 200 to 1000 years and counting in various parts of Europe.
> The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance)
Indeed. Unfortunately that means about the opposite of what you think it does. Even you agree that there's a new class. Before this system started inheritance was absolutely the only way to wealth.
If this system goes wrong the outcome will be that inheritance is the only way to wealth.
Right now that isn't the case (well, it is in Europe, but in the US most of the uber-wealthy come from ... well half of them were refugees as kids. There is generational wealth in America but nothing like there is in most of the world. Even in Europe there's like 10% who only found wealth after WW2. And 90% who had wealth before WW2 and managed to keep it with the Nazis in power and, frankly, there's only one way that happened (and most of the European commission members come from that 90%, as do most country governments, so good luck changing that). Still, you want to argue that this is better than what came before? That's easy)
So great success!
Then you will have to have regional duplicates of each.
Stuff will cost more though.
Would also not recommend.
If you think anything in the first world constitutes indentured servitude, I have some really bad news about how you decide what your job is in the USSR. Hint: you don't.
Also, bit of news for you, the USSR no longer exists, while the people who still see communism everywhere carry the highest debt load ever while their wages haven’t kept with with real inflation in generations. So yeah, it’s indentured service, only instead of scrip and the company store it’s an endless buffet of perpetually-more-enshittified subscriptions services in a home you’re only renting while driving a car you’ll never own.
2. Surely "municipality" does not mean the same thing in different countries.
More and more people want to live in the city, as you can see in the skyrocketing rents, but they do not want to
- build higher
- build more dense (in particular, keep the green areas)
In picturesque locations, there's upward price pressure because well-off urbanites sometimes buy vacation properties, but that's hardly a new thing.
Since 1900, major U.S. military interventions in Europe have included full-scale combat operations during World War I (1917–1918) and World War II (1941–1945), as well as targeted Allied troop deployments in Archangel and Siberia during the Russian Civil War (1918–1920). Throughout the Cold War, U.S. forces executed non-combat and advisory operations, such as supplying West Berlin during the Berlin Airlift (1948–1949) and providing direct military aid during the Greek Civil War (1947–1949). In the post-Cold War era, the U.S. engaged in several NATO-led Balkan campaigns, including airstrikes and peacekeeping missions in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995), a 78-day air campaign and ground deployment in Yugoslavia and Kosovo (1999), and a brief disarmament operation in North Macedonia (2001).
Would Europe have been better off under Nazi Germany?
Is that what you’re saying?
The history of Europe is one of unending conflict all the way back to Roman times. So what if Hitler controls all of Europe?
From an American perspective very little changes. Had Hitler not been beligerent toward the British and allowed trade with the US to continue there was basically no reason for the US to be involved.
Everyone would likely have been better off: 30 million civilian deaths could have been avoided, the iron curtain moves much farther east and millions more avoid the purges and starvation under the rule of the USSR after Europe us divided at the end of the war.
An alternate universe exists where Operation Barbarossa is successful because Hitler is not fighting a war on two fronts, and the USSR is either fragmented or controlled by Germany and the Cold War never even commences.
Additionally, Europe doesn’t become defacto occupied by the US for decades and atrophy to the point where half their cities are smaller than they were a few generations ago.
I personally don’t think such an outcome would have been better, but a strong argument can be made, and making it doesn’t mean you’re a nazi.
One could hold that position, but I think the vast majority of people would agree that it was the best choice for the US to get involved in WWII in the way it did.
Europe was better off with postwar peace. Germany was occupied ... as it should.
Go eff yourself with these pro-nazi crap.
> The history of Europe is one of unending conflict all the way back to Roman times. So what if Hitler controls all of Europe?
What a load of nonsense.
Go read up on the Final Solution. The nazis tried to expel the Jews before killing them. The industrialized genocide they’re infamous for didn’t start in earnest until 1942, right when significant US combat involvement began. The pace of killing increased as they saw the writing on the wall and realized they would likely lose the war.
In 1940 there were plans to send the Jews to Madagascar but the allied blockade made such plans untenable. The general state of combat in Europe toward the end of the war also made leaving on foot impossible.
Additionally the US did next to nothing to stop the genocide throughout the course of the war, save accept some Jewish refugees. US involvement accelerated Hitler’s desire to kill the Jews quickly but did nothing to prevent Hitler’s death camps from operating. Railways to the camps were generally not considered strategic objectives and weren’t bombed, despite ample knowledge of what was happening.
None of this is to excuse any of the actions taken by the Nazis, but again, history is path dependent, and absent US involvement things turn out very differently. Jews might have been mostly deported en masse instead of killed on an industrial scale in concentration camps. Many of them are more able to escape on foot because Europe isn’t blown to bits and swarming with allied troops fighting the Nazis.
Many East Germans, Hungarians, and Ukrainians would vehemently disagree with your claim they were better off with the postwar “peace.” The concentration camps the Nazis invented were perfected by the Soviets, and given perfect hindsight, it’s not clear to me most would choose a to be “liberated” by the Soviets in a war to destroy the occupying Nazis knowing how everything would turn out.
Were the Nazis evil? 100%. Did the US have to fight them when and how they did? Or even at all? To reiterate my original point, the answer to that question is much less clear and a good argument can be made that US involvement was counterproductive.