Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
France is interesting bc it's north of the Alps, but the built form is often closer to the denser, more apartment-oriented Club Med countries.
You always notice the differences traveling between Germany and France. Germany is much closer to the UK-Netherlands-Nordics typology. Of course directly on the border is blurry, bc the border changed so many times in history.
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I find German urbanism much closer to France's urbanism than to UK-Benelux. German cities have a dense core surrounded by low density sprawl. It's the same in France.
France is very different from the Med in the sense that its dense cores are surrounded by low density sprawl, which is the case neither in Italy nor in Spain. In France the detached house is very prevalent, as in Germany. It's nowhere to be seen in Spain, and rather not frequent in Italy.
France and Germany are also very different from Benelux and UK in the sense that their urban cores are denser, made up of taller apartment buildings. In Germany this has become a bit blurred of course since WW2, because all their city centers were destroyed, and never rebuilt to the same level of density they had before the war, but still, they are denser than their Beneluxian and British counterparts, and closer to the French model.
French and German cities also sprawl much more than Dutch and British cities (Belgium is closer to France and Germany here, with unruly sprawl).