(not even sure whether this topic belongs here, but at least I wanted it to start the discussion somewhere)
Last week I travelled to Andalusia (because I love Spain and the Spanish way of living!) and was horrified by the dimensions of the economic crisis that you can see here everywhere: dozens of villages of new houses were not completed during the economic crisis and are still empty. New streets with foot-walks and street lights on both sides are not used so that foot-walks are overgrown by bushes and trees are growing out of the canalization! Many places seemed to be ghost towns.
But this is not showing up in the map. One reason might be that from the Bing satellite images it is hard to decide whether a building or a village is still under construction or completed. So I started mapping at the place where we stayed and I could personally visit using the tags:
Highway = construction
Landuse = construction
(see map here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=36.41432&lon=-5.19053&zoom=15&layers=M)
Just to be clear: purpose of my post is not finger-pointing (I guess there was enough German money involved in this crash), but I want to suggest a way to show the very large dimensions of this economic problem by capturing the construction areas in the map! Only if we understand these dimensions and that it is too large that implications can be limited to Spain, and I hope this can be a starting point to jointly find ways out!
What do you think?
Keep on mapping!
Tilo