Note large part of the article is also about illegal construction in difficult mountainous terrain with insufficient safety measures where the construction prevents water retention, creating additional feedback loop to increase the risk of landslides and flooding. The construction is obviously stimulated by demand for tourist accommodation and corruption lowers the scrutiny in safety and environmental protection oversight. As I have seen exactly the same thing in Poland and Russia, where people were paying bribes to build houses in flood basins - and then got flooded - I’m not sure there’s any words that can describe in a sensible way an obvious human tragedy, which was nonetheless caused as result of own casualties’ actions.
Corruption can be, of course, devastatingly corrosive, but we can see some of these problems even in cases where it isn't an obvious cause. In the flood catastrophes in Germany in 2021 one of the multipliers of damage and deaths turned out to be building on what previously were considered flood plains - along with a whole host of other reasons: laxity in regulation and enforcement, dismantling of warning infrastructure, misjudgement of possible outcomes, etc., all played a role.
Can’t say about spatial planning in Germany, but in Poland it’s quite common to issue building permits for areas that are clearly described as river’s flood basin in the local plan. The problem here is entirely risk-based, because floods are probabilistic events:
If you have 1/100 years flood probability in given area and all construction is banned there, then you’re wasting its 100 years economic potential.
When 1/100 flood happens, it causes damages. Are these damages higher than profit accumulated for that 100 years of economic use? Most people seem to value that profit much higher than the damages.
Now we come to the core issue with such calculations: 1/100 probability does neither guarantee the flood will happen every 100 years, nor that it will not happen shortly after one “100 years flood”. We saw exactly that in Poland in 1997 and then in 2010, both were “100 years” flood events.
What is kind of obvious, is that allowing residential construction on areas that are known to be flooded 1/10 years is utterly stupid, because during average lifetime of such housing (~50-100 years) it will be almost certainly damaged. But how about permanent housing on areas with 1/50, 1/100 or 1/200 flood probability? How about short-time construction (festivals, temporary housing) on 1/10 areas?
And looking at history of Poland I would postulate that the lower country’s GDP per capita, the more people are ready to accept higher risks, because the more they are desperate to earn money or save it, getting affordable housing.
The challenge here is that we’re not talking about certain, periodic events like day and night cycle on Earth, but about largely random events, and people are very bad at correctly assessing these. If you’re a local council and you don’t allow housing on 1/50 area, you will be bashed by media for “not allowing people to get affordable housing” (and media usually don’t mention why parcels on flood land are “affordable”). If you allow, and then they are flooded, you will be bashed by the same media for “allowing them to build on flood risk land”. So as a regulator you’re screwed either way 🤷
@kravietz
I'm aware that this might not be your area of expertise but do you know how these building permits are issued? As an exemption of regulation or just in contravention of it?
With regards to Germany, or England, it can be said that the increasing probability of what once were termed 100 year events has certainly sharpened regulatory minds. And also that we now have deaths which generally tilts the balance in favour of greater risk aversion and away from purely economic analysis.
In Poland it’s complex topic: in theory, all land should be subject to “local land-zoning plans” (PZP) which should very clearly set intended purpose of each piece of land, construction parameters if intended for construction, whether it’s residential, industrial, commercial, density, biodiversity parameters etc.
That’s theory. In practice, many (in some regions most) areas do not have PZP. By law it’s being worked on everywhere, but it could be for example “in progress” for the last 20 years and when they publish a draft, there’s endless court appeals from local residents and developers, and they never effectively enter into force.
But there’s another type of permit, called “conditions of development” (WZ) which was intended as an exception for situations when temporarily there’s no PZP in given area.
I’m sure you can see the pattern here clearly - they’re blocking PZP by all means for decades, which allows them to apply based on WZ.
And WZ has very few of the limitations of PZP: it’s mostly based on the neighbourhood criteria, for example if there’s a 2 floors house on neighbour’s parcel, you can also build a 2 or 3 floors house, and this of course works for the next parcel, and the next etc.
I know areas of Kraków where in this way empty grassland among small one-family houses suddenly was turned into 4-5 floors high multi-apartment closed districts. Of course, with no suitable roads, electricity, sewage etc, because WZ doesn’t require any of these.
And once again I don’t know about Germany, but UK is a very weird country as it comes to risk aversion. In a rather bipolar way they switch between regulation that is totally restrictive and completely lax, and in quite random order.
For example, British regulators are generally obsessive about safety as it comes to some activities - you can’t swim in a lake without tons of protective equipment and half hour safety briefing.
At the same time it’s legal to have a 1942 fuse box in your house with aluminium cabling. You need to have “hot contents” warnings on coffee cups, but in most toilets you’ll have separate taps - one with cold water, another with water so hot that you can burn your hands, and it’s not clear how you are expected to use them safely. You are required to have a CO and smoke detector, but you are not required to have any actual ventilation, or energy efficient windows, even if people are actually dying as result of this backwardness:
@kravietz
That made me laugh: trying to go for a swim in Britain was also one of the weirdest experiences I ever had in my life. (I also had one of those fuse boxes).
RE ventilation, you actually are required to have ventilation and in new buildings energy efficient windows are now mandatory. But yes, lots of hangovers from the past. The separate taps are supposed to work by filling the basin with water to the desired temperature and then using that ... but most basins lack a stopper...
But the problem is that majority of the houses in the UK are refurbished and they are rented, which composes both worst features of housing market. Overall, vast majority of houses in the UK are EPC class D or worse.
The requirements for new construction are also rather lax, for example kitchen or bathroom is legally required to have ventilation, but this legal requirement can be satisfied by… presence of a window 😂 If you rent, which 60% people do, the rental agencies will provide you will a 30 page booklet on “how to avoid condensation”, where the primary advice is to “open windows”. Using their logic, when having a shower or cooking in winter you’d probably be much better doing that outdoors 🤦
Double glazed windows highlighted in adverts like some kind of ultra-modern luxury, which also looks rather miserable for anyone who came from EU.
UK is unfortunately 100% supplier driven market, with stores selling any old shit that can barely pass already low legislative threshold, as it gives them higher profit margins. Most of the windows you can buy in UK are generation old technologies, old fittings etc. If you talk to window fitters they will tell you all kinds of fables about how extremely modern they are, and I don’t know if it’s just their greed or ignorance. As result, I’ve imported my windows from Poland - I got triple-glazed argon-filled windows at 60% of the price I’d pay in the UK for older generation ones.
Same applies to kitchen appliances, washing machines etc.
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