Meanwhile The Netherlands is bright green due to its suburbanization policies of the 1970s. Let’s spread people out instead of building out our cities…

I don't think what works in a small and flat country with a famously productive agricultural sector can work equally well in the mountains of Spain and Italy.

If you look economically how that works (ie. tax haven + oil + "buying the population", ie. the extremely rich pay for that for not great reasons) you will see that, first, it's not sustainable and, second, it can't be replicated elsewhere (for one thing, it requires the country to be small). I mean there are places it can be replicated, say Norway, but for the vast majority of countries this is not possible.