I was playing a city-building game, and I was wondering how your homes have changed in the time you’ve been there.

34 comments

  1. In the past 20 years, the suburb of London I grew up in has gone from well-off but kind of Bohemian and a haunt for actors and artists and stuff (what French people call ‘bobo’ and ironically what English people very occasionally call ‘Hampstead socialist’) to super-rich bankers who are the only people who can now afford to live there. And tbh this is basically the case for much of the rest of London too.

  3. I was born and grew up in [Porvoo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porvoo).

    It’s one of the few medieval towns in Finland and it has an Old Town and that area has became way more touristy. I remember when there was for instance a fishing store inside the Old Town – nowadays most of the shops there are catered for tourists.

    A new bridge over Porvoonjoki river has been built during my life. It has reduced traffic jams in the city centre.

    New shopping areas have been built, mostly outside the city centre. There used to be hardware and electronics stores inside the city centre, nowadays they are located outside of it and it practically requires a car to effectively reach them.

  4. Ashford (Kent, SE England) has evidence of settlement dating back as far as prehistoric times. The present town originates from an original settlement established in 893 AD by inhabitants escaping a Danish Viking raid, who were granted land by a Saxon Lord for their resistance. In the Domesday Book of 1086 it was described as having a church, two mills and 21 ‘households’, which was large by medieval standards.

    Ashford’s importance as an agricultural and market town grew in the 13th century, and in 1243, King Henry III granted the town a charter to hold a market for livestock.

    Ashford station was established when the South Eastern Railway’s London to Dover line opened between 1842 and 1845, and the company established its locomotive works in the town. The railway community had its own village containing shops, schools, pubs and bathhouse.By 1864, there were 3000 people living around the railway line. The railway works declined in use from the 1960 onwards, finally closing in 1982.

    During the early and mid-20th century, print and media became a noted industry in Ashford. The Headley Brothers, a printing services company, was founded in 1881 and by the mid-1950s printed and exported over 2 million books. The business closed in 2017 and the factory was demolished two years later. The Letraset company set up an arts material factory in Ashford in the 1960s. It closed in 2013, following the decline of Letraset and the company’s decision to relocate works abroad.

    The soup manufacturer Batchelors became a significant employer in Ashford when they opened a £2.5m factory in Willesborough, east of the town centre, in 1957. The wholesale frozen food firm Brake Brothers was established in 1957. Initially based at nearby Lenham, it later moved to Ashford and expanded. The current European headquarters are in Eureka Park to the north of the town.

    The Ashford International station opened by British Rail with the Channel Tunnel in 1994. It now serves Eurostar trains on High Speed 1, with trains to London, Lille, Brussels and Paris and connections to the rest of Europe. (Although currently not stopping in Ashford due to COVID)

    Little is left of the old Ashford town centre, apart from a cluster of medieval half-timbered buildings in Middle Row and around the churchyard in the town centre. A number of old buildings were removed to make way for the controversial ring road around the centre, including four public houses.

    The Ashford Designer Centre was built near the station in 2000, and nearly doubled in size when a new extension opened in November 2019.

    The 2011 census revealed that the borough of Ashford saw the largest population growth in Kent, with records showing a 14.6% rise to 118,000 inhabitants. The original town of Ashford, like many other settlements, has outgrown its original size and has combined with smaller villages in a conurbation.

    Source — mostly Wikipedia.

  5. a lot,

    underground number of stations went from 9 to 61,

    tunnels from car changed from something like 800meters to 14km.

    every empty space at downtown or close has now some office building or something else.

  6. I haven’t lived in the town where I grew up in over twenty years but it’s the place where I know the changes best. When I was five we moved to a newly developed area that mostly used to be forest. The biggest change in my childhood was getting stores and other services nearby and eventually a middle school. The town has a lake in the middle of it and our neighborhood was on the opposite side of it from the town center and getting there meant driving around the lake. When I was 9 they finally built a long bridge over the lake and cut the distance to town center by about 7 km. I grew up playing in the forests near our home but by the time I was a teenager most of it was gone. They’ve been building in the area for close to forty years now and there isn’t much nature left. There have been some benefits to that as well, for example there’s now public transport. I went to high school in the town center about 3 km away. The nearest bus stop was 2 km in the opposite direction so mostly I just walked or rode my bike to school. These days there’s a bus stop right next to our former home. A few years ago the area finally got their own branch library after about thirty years of planning.

    The town has grown a lot, both in population and area since I moved away. When I lived there it was very compact, with much larger population density than was common for Finland. The population was about 75000 when I was growing up. Since then it has merged with neighboring (and one strangely far away one) and its area is now 11 times larger with a population of about 140 000.

  7. I live in a fairly major city,Palermo in Sicily.

    In the recent past it hasn’t changed a great deal physically.It has a very large historic centre and then rings of ‘suburbs’…but it has been built out pretty much as far as possible,up to the mountains that are around the city.

    On the other side there is the sea,so it can’t really expand anymore.

    It has a very long history,with many different civilisations…there are prehistoric caves,there was a Phoenician Colony (very little remains),a Greek city,a Roman city,Byzantine rule,then Arab rule.

    Under the Arabs Palermo became the primary city in Sicily.(previously it had been Siracusa).

    Then we had Norman rule,Spanish rule,the Bourbons and then unification with the rest of Italy.

    So it has changed a huge amount over the years.All those things are on top of each other!

  8. The funniest thing is a store that sells porcelain figures that’s had a going out of business sale for the past 25 years…

  9. Not that much. Two junctions were replaced by roundabouts, a foot bridge was built over the river, an ugly building and the border crossing were demolished and now recently a school and football “stadium” were upgraded.

  10. Throughout my lifetime not much has changed. It’s become a city, but all that really meant is a bit of re-branding for the council. There was never a huge amount of industry here to begin with but most of what there was shut down before I was born.

  11. My district in Vienna is one of the poorest, so there are lots of immigrants. Vienna in general has grown much in the past 25 years and here you get the more international ones and less people from Germany or other parts of Austria. Additionally, I know of lots of young people who end up here after moving out because it’s cheapest and moderately central.

    What’s interesting architecturally is that the long unused train tracks and yards are being developed into a new neighbourhood, a similar development is almost finished in the district to the south, also on former tracks. There are Apartment buildings with the normal amount of shops, restaurants and schools and kindergartens. The area has several pedestrian zones and little traffic.

    Here an area was also mostly left untouched to create a park with some wooden paths and informational signs. The tracks and plants that grew between them are left as they were and the habitat houses some rare toads and birds (the reason they needed to do something like that to preseeve the populations). It’s not very parklike but was left as the Gstettn it was.

  13. A lot of new small neighborhoods were added on the outskirts and the city center went from very active to rather abandoned(by comparison, it’s not actually abandoned). Social housing arrived in the neighborhood when I was a high schooler meaning that in basically every spot you could go and party(something we Belgians do easily beginning from age 15) there was always a change the foreigners(culturally, this isn’t a race thing) would arrive and result in the police being called because they used the pole cue to hit somebody in the face or something because somebody “looked at them funny”. It became rather predictable.

  14. There was a [viral video](https://youtu.be/i06QsJfueBk) a couple of years ago of a car ride in Bucharest in 1993.

    In 2019 an [update](https://youtu.be/ChoYSzBpIl0) was made.

    The difference is quite striking. The guys in the original video make a joke at one point that the traffic is “very very VERY intense” while only having a couple of old cars on the road. Well nowadays traffic is a huge problem in Bucharest.

    A lot of construction projects were unfinished in 1993, and it looked like a ruined city in parts.

    Aside from that, the city is growing, a lot of gaps have been filled by residential or office buildings and cranes are a common sight, a couple of underpasses and overpasses have been built, a couple of metro lines got finished. But at the same time it seems this building phase is too chaotic.

  15. Well I’ve lived in Helsinki all my life, so I’d have to say the amount of refugees and immigrants have increased. Nowadays there are a lot of them in the Eastern part of the city where I live. I’ve lived here for about a decade, and during that time the amount has increased by over double.

  16. coal mine closed down, industry closed down, power plant closed down, a spa openend.

    Population is stable, it’s quite nice there, but many people now commute to the state capital then working in town or even county

  17. It’s still ignored by a lot of people due to being inland rather than on the coast like the more popular cities of the region, but a lot of cool restaurants have opened up. The high school I went to was renovated shortly after I graduated and is now quite nice compared to when I was there. The festivals organized there have become bigger, and there’s more concerts and other types of events. The best mall in terms of shops and other facilities opened up in the outskirts a few years ago, and that’s always busy (tbf it has an Ikea and Primark).

    As for the village I grew up in, more and more big houses are being constructed there. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up becoming gentrified by foreign property developers. My grandparents and people they know have been receiving letters from French people wanting to purchase their land.

  18. Major infrastructure changes include:

    * Replacement of a dangerous 5-way crossing with a roundabout.
    * The tearing down of multiple derelict buildings to build a new square and new spaces for shops, with assisted living homes above them. The shops remain empty though. There’s been an exodus of mom-and-pop type stores over the years because of online shopping.
    * Old officers’ quarters is being converted into a war museum (to be opened next year).
    * A new prison is being built on former military grounds (to be opened 2025).
    * The railroad is finally getting electrified (to be completed next year). Additionally, several unused sidetracks were removed and there’s now extra space for development (yet to be decided what it’s going to be).

  19. Small town in Czech Republic… I’d say it was for the better. Since 7 years ago when we moved in, they built a roundabout in place of a dangerous 4-way intersection, fixed a lot of pothole-ridden roads, overhauled the fire station and now there’s an abandoned railway being restored.

  20. Went from one of the centers of Czech industry with state of the art amenities into a glorified suburb with basically no high paying jobs which cannot support a cultural or gastronomical scene anywhere approriate for its size. My dad always says that a third of the people do all their business in Prague and just go home to sleep, a third are too poor to eat out or afford most leisure activities, and the remaining third just can’t support enough stuff to not make the city a fairly dull place. It’s been improving lately, albeit slowly. We even got a real Mexican place now, wowee! Still no Italian though.

    It’s not all bad though, the industry shutting down means that the air is clean and pollution minimal, which is a definitive improvement. And a lot of areas went through a massive regeneration, especially the city center. However, there were also some neighborhoods that were almost completely left behind by these changes and the differences can be quite jarring.

    So, in conclusion, it’s a land of contrasts

  21. Biggest change in my hometown has probably been that the American soldiers left. The areas where they had been stationed have been redeveloped.

  22. The part of Edinburgh I grew up in has not really changed all that much in terms of the basic built substance because most of the houses are either from the 19th or early 20th centuries. The last major additions were the council houses of the 60s.

    What I definitely observed over the years was the shift from local shops. Edinburgh has often been described, like other cities, as a collection of villages, and each “village”/city district has its “High Street” of local shops.

    When I was born in the early 70s, the shops were a bank, a post office, a plumber, a carpenter/DIY store, a grocer, a greengrocer, a newsagents, a butcher, a fishmonger.

    Now there is much more in the way of services and far less retail: the bank has gone, there are far fewer branches these days. The post office is still there, but is now part of a general store. The food shops have all gone. Quite soon after my arrival, a large supermarket opened nearby. There is still one specialist butcher in the next set of shops, but, apart from the basic offering of the post office/general store, for fresh food you now have to go to a supermarket. Instead, there are two takeaways (chip shop, Chinese) and a tea room. There’s also a phone shop and a hairdresser.

    The other change that comes to mind is that several factories/manufacturing business have been turned over the years into housing. When I was growing up, there was a sweet manufacturer (mints mostly) and a steelworks on the way to school, and we used to drive past a lumber yard/joiners that had been owned by my great-grandfather. Now all three are flats.

  23. I live in Székesfehérvár, Fehérvár for short. Its population falls a bit short of 100 thousand people, but it’s still one of the biggest cities in Hungary and a major economic centre.

    A lot has changed. Revonation, restoration and expansion. These three words really sum up well how the city changed in the last decade. Old buildings were renovated, roads repaired, and many new homes were built. Meanwhile, restoring the cultural vibrancy of the city is one of the main goals of the current city government. Compared to the previous administration, they are fairly successful at it tbh. The most striking change was probably the renovation of the Main Street a few years ago.

  24. There used to be a railway that kinda cut the city in half and they’ve very succesfully but that under ground and build a new station that also houses city offices as well, they’ve also completely reworked the traffic situation around there and there’s a whole area with new development and even dug new canals because they’re seen as important to the character of the city.

  25. In the city I grew up in:

    * a whole-ass new bridge built over the river
    * trolleybus infrastructure
    * hypermarkets sprouting all over the place (this goes for the whole country)
    * main square overhauled
    * main train station redesigned
    * main bus station (for long-distance buses) disassembled
    * and quite a few areas declining – a cultural centre with theatre and cinema closed down, brewery got bought by Heineken and closed down, …

  26. I grew up in more of a village than a town. But the population has risen exponentially the past few decades. 20 years ago the population in my village was 2.000 people, now it’s 3.500. Reason to this growth is a pretty strategic location, only about an hour from the capital and biggest city Oslo. With the rising real estate prices in Oslo lots of families decide to move out here where they can buy a big house for the same cost as a 2 bedroom apartment in the city. It still definitely has a countryside feel to it but you’re not that far from the largest urban area which is a bonus. The biggest change to the village is just tons more housing. You have big fields that didnt have a single house 10 years ago where now hundreds of people live. They’ve also upgraded infrastructure somewhat because of the growth. With the local school having being expanded, so has the local mall. Restaurants also come and go, many of which didnt survive much longer than 4-5 years but now there’s a couple established ones. Other than that not many revolutionary changes. Our neighbouring village thats about the same size as us gets most of the cool new stuff since they’re the centre for the municipality.

  27. There’s a new boring suburb-esque neighbourhood with expensive houses, a new train station that nobody uses, they’ve cut down a bunch of trees and they’ve replaced an old decrepit shopping center with an Aldi.

    I like the Aldi, but that’s about it.

  28. Sadly, is has grown bigger. I once knew the names of everyone I saw but nowadays I don’t.

  29. To the worse definitely. I’m from Novi Sad, the second biggest city in Serbia, which has somewhat of a central European vibe and the layout was quite similar to a lot of central European cities of that size. Meaning, we have a nice city center surrounded with areas made up of small old houses such as [this](https://www.google.rs/maps/@45.2603339,19.8401399,3a,75y,184.51h,81.88t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sWguppAv_3haebi9S1Z3vvg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656) street for example. On the outskirts there are commie blocks just as everywhere in eastern Europe, but they are quite functional and not a too bad place to live. A lot of parks and green areas in between.

    However, in the last 15 years those nice houses near the city center are being destroyed one by one and in their place shitty 5-7 story buildings are being constructed. Not only are those generic buildings an eyesore, but they are making the city much more overcrowded by cars a they are placed in places where they shouldn’t have been, something like [this](https://www.google.rs/maps/@45.2454224,19.8323609,3a,75y,124.52h,102.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sETp5ROEm8ohMHS5BrKPjfA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656). Way too much traffic and people the area can handle. Instead of making new suburbs in a small flat city, they are making the population density near the center much bigger just for profit, destroying the architecturally beautiful center. The quality of life has gone done a lot.

  30. Not much? A few renovations, one library, 2 schools, a new store, a new restaurant and minor patches.

    The city is a 19th century wooden town so it’s been the same for a while

  31. I’d say quite a bit. We’ve got dozens if roundabiuts that replacet nearly every classical road junction, tons of new shopping centers, some really big, a new footbal stadium, extension of the highway and a long highway tunnel, a new park, two new big schools, some more exotic restaurants moved in (Chinese)…and of course new apartment buildings being built

  33. I grew up in two places, respectivly Russia & Norway. In Norway my «hometown « has gotten very quiet, far fewer people and not much left. In Russia its the same old Sovijet appartment buildings. Both are nice enough, but I am not going to visit my Norwegian hometown much.

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