Dutch city testing the future of urban life (2023)

A little over a century ago, anyone looking out over the water on the east bank of Amsterdam on a clear day would have seen Dutch fishermen hauling their nets out to sea. Today things are very different - over 200,000 people now live in a place that was once covered by the waters of the IJsselmeer, an inland sea that formed at the mouth of the North Seacut by a long dyke in the 1930s.

The settlement that arose where there was once water is Almere – the newest city in the Netherlands,coming out of non-existence in the 1970sin what is now the eighth largest city in the country. If Atlantis was the ancient city that, according to myth, disappeared beneath the waves, Almere is the modern answer that rose from the sea. And this as perhaps the most experimental city in the world, realizing different forms of expression of the “Design for Living” concept.

Many of Almere's growing array of distinctive neighborhoods provide a forum for both urban innovation and individual self-expression. Over the past 15 years, for example, thehomeruskwartier districtprovided some 1,500 home builders with a canvas to let their imaginations run wild, creating a cornucopia of individual homes amidst tree-lined avenues, parks and waterways, accompanied by local schools, markets and community amenities.

The district leader behind the first decade of this man-led architectural self-expression was Dutch experimental architect Jacqueline Tellinga. "The designers agreed on one thing: Almere shouldn't be high-rise, anonymous, drab," she says. For them, the huge variety of homes in Almere simply would not have been possible if traditional developers were in charge.

Within this general freedom of development, certain areas of Almere channel specific intriguing themes. At therainbow neighborhood(Rainbow Quarter) Kaleidoscopic colors predominate – tall, curved yellow houses meet navy blue row houses and bright red apartment towers (the Rode Donders) reminiscent of the grain silos that were once typical of the Dutch agricultural landscape.

Almere's two-story architecture uses flat roofs to create green spaces for housing (Credit: Visit Almere)

patterned(The Fantasy), on the other hand, is an enclave of flashy buildings that won a design competition in 1982 that set radical rules for its competitors. These included banning any use of foundations in their construction and rewarding projects that played ingeniously with materials and interior spaces. The Csplendor of remarkable housesThe result is now attracting architecture fans from all over the world to admire the contrasting results – from the Paneelhuis duo of geometric, fairytale-like thatched houses designed in startling triangular plans, to the Psyche house, which uses materials as diverse as mahogany, glass and aluminum combine in a structure with a wing-shaped living space supported by curved pillars.

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But cities are not only inhabited by those who have the resources to build such bizarre structures. In the Almere Poort area, there are budget houses designed to provide families with annual household incomes of less than €20,000 (£16,800 / $22,000) with quality housing designed by local architects. But instead of the gray skyscrapers and dilapidated neighborhoods that accompany cheaper housing in most cities around the world, Almere Poort combines this accessibility with an uplifting quality of life, thanks to a natural setting with forests and a beautiful beach in the background. district.

"It's the interplay between experimentation and proven techniques that makes Almere such an intriguing role model for others," says Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV, a Rotterdam-based global architecture and urbanism practice, from hisAlmere 2030The Masterplan provides a loose model to inspire city development over the next decade and work in partnership with the people who live here.

“We don't believe that a city should be the result of the vision of just one person or one organization”, says Maas.

The birth of a new city

The creation of the world's largest man-made island - dubbed Flevoland and covering just under 1,000 square kilometers (386 sq mi) - in the late 1960s gave the land on which Almere sits theThe first residents arrived in the late 1970s. It formed the core of the community officially established in 1984. The innovative new city takes its name from the medieval Dutch word for inland sea, from which its land arose.

The main practical reason for founding Almere was to relieve housing pressure in one of the most densely populated parts of the Netherlands and to create a blank canvas in an unspoiled natural setting to make it easier for more people to move to the two main cities nearby, Stuff Amsterdam and Utrecht. .

The Regenboogbuurt in Almere features colorful residential buildings, including Rode Donders, reminiscent of the Dutch grain silos that once dominated the landscape (Credit: Alamy)

Almere's city planners were inspired in part by a movement that took shape in England in the early 20th century - exemplified by the proposed new towns such as Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City north of London. The blueprints for this came from a visionary British urban planner with a name like a Dickensian character.

"Almere was a variation of thatgarden city principlesby Ebenezer Howard,” explains Jaap Jan Berg, an urban planning researcher affiliated with the influential International New Town Institute. He described Almere in his 2007 Dutch language bookyoung almereas a place of "ideals, ambitions, courage and experiences".

Garden Cities ideals include plenty of living spaces, contemporary living concepts, schools and health centers integrated into neighborhoods, good local public transport, and short distances between residential areas and green areas.

It was an approach ridiculed at the time by some Dutch city planners, who were used to ideas of modern high-rise living that dominated much of post-war planning. One of the leading architects of the 1970s, Carel Weeber, described the first parts of Almere to be built as examples of this.new stupidity("New Stupidity").

The original blueprint for Almere was laid out by world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas through his award-winning Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas set out to create a distinctive three-story downtown. This concentrated underground car park is complemented by commercial and leisure facilities at ground level, which are now free of traffic. The three-story project was completed with an upper layer of vegetation planted on the roofs of the ground-floor buildings, where the houses and small apartment blocks are located.

Nature has also been integrated into a city from the start, in the form of more than 40 km (25 miles) of coastline and 400 km (249 miles) of dedicated bike lanes. "Most residents live within five minutes of parks, cycle paths and public transport," says Liesbeth Hollander, spokeswoman for Almere's tourist board. "People often cite this as an important reason why they enjoy living in Almere so much."

The freedom granted to Almere residents to play a key role in the development and appearance of their city has also raised eyebrows. When MVRDV first presented its vision of Almere at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale as a kind of "open source" collection of dispersed neighborhoods designed by local residents, architects and urban planners, Winy Maas says some European colleagues saw the idea as so radical that it seemed almost insane. Meanwhile, some Latin American colleagues warned against itnegative parallelsbetween the freedom residents are given and what they see as the chaos of places like Kunterbuntfavelasfrom Brazil.

a living experiment

Ask Maas if Almere is essentially an experimental city and he will give you a subtle answer. "Almere is not exactly an experimental city, but a city where experiments can happen," he says. “The difference is subtle but important. The city has always embodied proven urbanism traits - multiple cores, strong transport links and so on. But we found ways to experiment within those frameworks. Or, more importantly, we find ways to let others experience it."

Part of this process was based on a revolutionary approach to city planning using games - the brainchild of Ekim Tan, the founder of a game-based initiative calledplay the city, which was created in 2009 as a result of his doctoral thesis at the Technical University of Delft. The game can be created in different versions, adapted to explore the practical aspects of locations with different characters and needs.

Almere is built on land reclaimed from the IJsselmeer inland sea and there are floating villas in some neighborhoods (Credit: Frans Lemmens/Alamy)

Play the City brings groups of local people together to make decisions about various aspects of land use and infrastructure design in an interactive game environment, requiring trade-offs at various stages to progress the game. This approach aims to discover what city dwellers really want in their living environment, encouraging collaborative decision-making and conflict resolution through maps, charts and interactive videos.

Almere residents have regularly played Tan's "game" to contribute to the development of different neighborhoods over the past decade - a process that also provides insights for city planners like Tan, who see "which rules people come from which Reason is most commonly used - or what rules they avoided or broke".

Use Play the City to guide the development of the Almere de Oosterwold district, a unique area developed to encourage local food production. Around 60% of their land is set aside to support “urban agriculture”, which not only gives residents the physical and emotional benefits of harvesting their own food, but also reduces the impact of climate change through miles of food.

Around 1,000 people flocked to Play the City: Oosterwold in 2011, mixing local residents with farmers, Almere city planners, legal experts and the National Water Board of the Netherlands - insights from the latter matter in a nation that stays largely below sea level.(Read more about the 1000 year history of the Dutch Water Boards.)

Among the outcomes of the game was a clear desire by people to build their homes as close to the water as possible - prompting the municipal government to change a previous planning criterion to require a 2 m (6.6 ft) long access lane. . Players were also attracted to community offsets such as road layouts during gameplay after realizing that anyone who scattered their plans haphazardly would not work well.

These citizen games also flowed into the MVRDV masterplan. "We didn't actually plan anything specific, but let residents build their own living quarters," says Maas. “In return, they have more responsibility – planning roads with their neighbours, organizing their own energy supply and so on. That sounds radical to some people – but this is how cities have been built for centuries.”

Among the new neighborhoods expected to take shape over the next decade is Almere Pampus - a neighborhood whose experimental opportunities include proposals for 500 houseboats on a vast lake.

Almere will also take advantage of hosting Floriade 2022 - the world's largest international horticultural exhibition - later this year (April to October) to create a new permanent green district in the heart of the city, once exhibitors leave it.

A role model for others

Almere's development is also inspiring other cities, providing examples of innovative urban planning in action. "Professionals - politicians, architects, urban planners - come from all over the world to see and learn from Almere," says JaapJan Berg, referring to China's special interest. “They worked in new cities and towns on a very different scale – places like Shenzhen. In the UK I would mention Milton Keynes and in France Marne-la-Vallée.”

The MVRDV, in turn, was based on the principles of AlmereRehabilitation of the center of the Dutch city of Eindhoven, which aims to allow this city to expand significantly while maintaining an air of "comfort". Almere's buzzwords include creating green spaces in the city center and using colorful buildings in distinctive ways to liven up the cityscape.

Principles learned in Almere are also applied on a smaller scale in the small Dutch village ofarmoredWho saw italmost 80% of homes badly damagedas a result of earthquakes triggered by fracking in the area.

Hot water, which heats up to 25,000 homes, is piped from Diemen to Almere in an 11 km (6.8 mile) pipe (Credit: Ashley Cooper/Alamy)

Key ideas tested in Almere, presented here, include the ability for residents to design their own new homes and shared decision-making about infrastructure and facilities. “Residents were asked what their aspirations are and what they want the village to look like in 10 years – [so] we gave residents a toolbox to give them the help and inspiration they needed to face the future in a handshake,” says Winy Maas.

While Almere offers a bold testing ground for urban experimentation and open-minded approaches to urban planning, Jacqueline Tellinga, project manager for Almerehomeruskwartier district, warns not to lose sight of some practical aspects, such as B. the risk of spreading in cities. “The distances are long, the roads are good and wide – all the more reason to drive than walking, cycling or using public transport,” she says.

But unlike many cities around the world where residents are being pushed out of city centers leading to suburban sprawl, Almere is showing signs of becoming less suburban rather than more suburban. This has led some researchers to describe Almere as an example ofnew kind of hybrid suburban city.

JaapJan Berg offers a more positive twist on Almere's lack of the typical continuous urban sprawl that some see as inherent in the idea of ​​a city. "Almere is the weakest if you look at it as a normal city," he says. “But his immaturity gives Almere room to choose several options and keep them open. Maintaining this spatial and mental notion of incompleteness gives the city a continuous dynamism.”

Winy Maas agrees. "Successful cities always come from the contribution of many people over years, decades, sometimes millennia," he says. "This belief has led to Almere's reputation for experimentation - how we allow individuals to add their own vision."

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