Quote Originally Posted by Philippus Flavius Homovallumus View Post
We are the 50-most populous in the world, and many of the most populous above us are either horribly overcrowded and suffer socially as a result (Japan, Hong Kong), Micro-Stare or Enclaves (Monaco, Gibraltar, the Vatican), or tiny Island nations (Bermuda, Malta).

At the same time there are ~30 fewer people per square kilometre in Germany and ~120 fewer in France.

Let me give you a concrete example. I live in the City of Exeter, I have friends living in the village of Pinhoe, it's about an hour's walk between the two but over the last four years that walk has gone from about 50% fields to 25% fields and dropping. In another five years Exeter will effectively swallow Pinhoe whole.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.74.../data=!3m1!1e3

Google Earth actually shows you the bit under development, you can actually see the boundaries between village and city being blurred.
Things like that happen in Germany just as well, the entire Ruhrgebiet is slowly growing together. A lot of that is probably due to urbanization and less so due to immigration. When you zoom out from your google maps view, you see fields everywhere. Pinhoe and Exeter probably started to grow together somewhere around the middle ages. What's funny is that the Brexit also causes Britain to compete against its neighbors, and a larger population is a competitive advantage. So we'll see about that.

I would actually agree in general that the planet has far too much population given the goals of consumption everyone has. But Britain being overcrowded sounds a bit off given that Israel, Japan and so on are even more densely populated and seem to make it work. To just claim that they have problems from overpopulation does not convince me really, you'd have to show a bit more than that. I mean surely they have problems, but I'm not sure they're caused by overpopulation in a significant way. Tokyo's crowded subway system can be attributed to urbanization, centralization and the height of buildings just the same. If they spread the population more evenly around the country, that problem could be gone.