Directly speaking, Germany is not sparsely populated, but there is no particularly crowded megalopolis, and the fundamental reason is that Germany is a manufacturing country, and factories do not need to be in metropolitan centers, so most of the population of Germany lives in small and medium-sized cities and does not look crowded.
In Germany, the tertiary sector is 69% and the secondary sector is 29%.
In the United States, the tertiary industry is 82%, and the secondary industry is 16%.
The tertiary sector in the UK is 80% and the secondary sector is 18%.
In France, the tertiary sector is 78% and the secondary sector is 19%.
Germany's tertiary sector accounts for a lower proportion than that of major developed countries, while the secondary sector, especially manufacturing, has always accounted for a high proportion in Germany.
This is also the result of the sharp increase in the proportion of the tertiary industry in the world in recent years, Germany has long been a country dominated by the secondary industry, so the entire layout of Germany is around manufacturing.
A basic common sense, the development of the tertiary industry requires a metropolis, the degree of concentration is very high, a few hundred meters of Wall Street has hundreds of the world's top financial institutions, a Hollywood and gambling city have millions of people.
New York has a large number of international organization headquarters, Wall Street, Broadway; Los Angeles has Hollywood; San Francisco has Silicon Valley. Whether it's finance, technology, film and television, or entertainment, it is necessary to build a top global center to attract talent from all over the world and form a huge metropolis.
London in the United Kingdom and Paris in France are the core cities of the country, France is simply divided into Parisians and provinces, London can't wait to account for half of England's population. Britain and France are colonial powers, attracting talents from all over the world as the United States, but they are very attractive to former colonies.
And Germany's manufacturing industry is to put it bluntly, it is playing with factories, we can look at the country, as long as it is a factory, let alone in a large city, it is also distributed in the suburbs in the county.
Compared with the high density of the tertiary industry, the factory needs a larger site, convenient transportation, as well as supporting facilities such as water and electricity. Compared with the sudden change in the tertiary industry, the stability of the manufacturing industry is also better.
Megacities have the benefits of agglomeration, but there are also disadvantages of expensive land, traffic congestion, and harsh environment, which are not suitable for manufacturing development.
Therefore, convenient transportation, complete supporting facilities and beautiful environment are the necessary hardware for the German manufacturing industry. And the entire layout of Germany also revolves around these conditions:
Germany has a convenient inland waterway network and seamless access to sea freight. In Germany, the Kiel Canal connects the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, from the Rhine in the Ruhr region to the east there is the northern canal connecting the Weser and Elbes, and in the southeast there is the canal connecting the Rhine and the Danube. The Rhine, Weser and Elbe all have unimpeded access to the sea.
Germany's railway mileage is 40,000 kilometers, China's railway mileage is 140,000 kilometers, you must know that Germany's area is 27/1 of China, that is to say, Germany's railway density is eight times that of China.
Germany's highway mileage is 12,800 kilometers, the density is comparable to eastern China, Jiangsu's population is only 5,000 kilometers with Germany's high-speed, Sichuan's population and area are 9,000 kilometers of Germany's highway, 12,800 kilometers of expressway is enough for Germany.
In terms of infrastructure, Germany leads the way in inland rivers and railways, and the fact that Germany's weakest motorway is comparable to China's is itself a testament to how good Germany's infrastructure is.
This means that there are too many river ports, train stations and highways in Germany. Even a small town with a port, train station and highway at the same time is normal.
This means that German factories can be set up at will, without having to rush to places with convenient infrastructure, as in other countries.
Therefore, German companies, such as Siemens, BMW, Volkswagen, Krupp, Pasts, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, Bayer and other large factories are also located in many small and medium-sized cities, and the 3 million enterprises supporting them are naturally scattered in small towns.
Live in a small town with port, train station and motorway, beautiful location and detached house. And in the small town, you can work in large factories such as Siemens, Volkswagen, Krupp or factories that provide them with accessories. For example, if you can work in these companies in your hometown town, are you still willing to drift to the big city?
So whether we have a province with a population of more than 50 million or a country with a population of more than 50 million in the world, there are metropolises with a population of more than 10 million.
There are only four cities in Germany with a population of more than 83 million and a population of more than 1 million: Berlin with 3.6 million people, Hamburg with 1.8 million people, Munich with 1.5 million people and Cologne with 1.08 million people.
It should be known that Foshan's Nanhai district is comparable to Berlin's population, Zhejiang's Yiwu or Cixi is comparable to the famous Hamburg population, and the districts and counties that exceed the population of Munich are in every populous province.
Frankfurt, Germany's fifth-largest city, has only 760,000 people, and even a county is only medium-sized.
With 83 million people, 357,000 square kilometers, Germany has a population density of nearly 240 people per square kilometer, three times the European average and far exceeding China's level of 146 people per square kilometer.
But because Germany has a developed manufacturing industry, distributed in small and medium-sized cities, and does not have densely populated metropolises, the data looks high, but in fact it is not too dense. It can only be said that the population is very reasonably distributed and very happy, far from being widely sparsely populated.