Show HN: I created this land use visualisation for the Netherlands (koenvangilst.nl)
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.
29 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 73.1 ms ] threadKinda confused with the meaning, there is more infrastructure than buildings?
And there seems to be a massive amount of urban grass!
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.
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?
I'm surprised at the small amount of 'urban area' for such a 'volgebouwd' country.
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 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.
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".
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....
Also cheesemaking is big in the Netherlands, so I wouldn't be surprised that lots of it is for feeding cattle.
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.
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).
(Mijn hele Nederlandse taal heb ik via Google geleerd.)
Pasture: Is all of that for grazing livestock or does that represent land without trees?