Almere: Last Exit to Utopia by John Weich

Anyone familiar with urban planning in the Netherlands knows the wry Dutch saying – God created the world but the Dutch created Holland. One need only inspect the country’s topography to verify some truth in this; there’s no questioning Holland’s land reclamation ingenuity. Driven largely by necessity – Holland ranks amongst the most populous nations in the world – the Dutch take a certain amount of pride in their ability to conjure real estate by non-violent means. Nowhere is this more evident than in Flevoland, a province located 20 kilometres east of Amsterdam and which consists entirely of land reclaimed from the murky waters and sludge of the former Zuiderzee. Even before the sod had completely dried planners were premeditating the rise of an organic suburb city to Amsterdam’s urb, a low-rise paradise for city dwellers looking to trade in their cramped urban quarters for the anti-urban bourgeois idyll: a modest-sized house with a modest-sized garden. That city became Almere.



Almere was erected on a bed not of ideology but of need. There were no edicts to ring in a new national identity, no fell swoops to upgrade the amenities of the teeming destitute, no sweeping boulevards to accommodate totalitarian military parades. Almere promised lebensraum without the Nazi sub context; its pretty plots of land drew middle-class Dutch pioneers in a way not entirely dissimilar to the pull the Texan plains had on 19th century Americans who abandon their perfectly sound but invariably small Appalachian farms for something bigger and cheaper. But whereas the Texans braved the danger of a Comanche Indian scalping, the Dutch risked only suburban boredom. The Dutch government envisioned a polder city of between 150,000 and 250,000 residents within 25 years’ time and set a quota of 3,000 new homes per annum to achieve this. Little time was allotted for architects to pontificate Corbusierian urban grandeur; Almere’s role as an architecture testing ground like Casablanca was for France or Wiessenhofsiedlung for Stuttgart would come later. The agenda was to build and to build quickly – the land was drained in the summer of 1968, a master plan submitted in 1972, initial construction in 1974 and the first residents arrived in 1975 – circumstances more in tune with Soviet satellite cities than with Holland’s randstad conurbation.



To accommodate this rapid-fire building spree Almere’s founding fathers created a flexible, polynuclear scheme comprising five homogenous cores spread across 132 square kilometres of pristine land. The decision to shun the modish compact city model (compact = prosperous) is indicative of the cum laude swagger with which the young architects of the responsible Projektburo strolled into the Zuiderzee wastelands and planned the new town. It also assured that full-blooded urbanites would revile Almere for its suburban façade right from the very beginning. The Projektburo’s open-ended approach was tinged with pragmatism and the euphoric dogma of the early 1970s. The flexible model that designated a high street, city hall, business district, public facilities and communal space for each self-sufficient core, would enable future planners to mould and shape the city over time as the demographics became more specific. Moreover, they would avoid typical new town snags that saddled pioneer residents with sterile and amenity-less environments. One-third of the city would be dedicated to industry, one-third to housing and one-third to parks and open space. Eighty percent of the dwellings would be devoted to single families, and 70% to low to middle income residents. Sidewalks wide enough for children to play on. One job for every three residents. One company for every 100 homes. Industrial areas would be situated close to the home to accommodate a female workforce. Bus stops erected every 400 meters, train stations every 800 meters, every home within a five minute’s walk a large park or forest. It was a heyday in methodical planning, and today many of those distances can still be pinpointed to the meter.



Up till a few months ago most Dutch associated Almere with the type of freakish Anglo-Saxon new towns that often creep into the songs of singer-songwriter Nick Cave; the suburb with zero crime and no fear and a police force whose primary purpose is to rescue kittens out of trees. Like almost everyone else, the Dutch have adopted tract-home denigration as party punch lines and consider the complacent cadence of their own hi-density VINEX neighbourhoods as indistinguishable plankton. Which is why many were forced to double take when the city’s mayor announced in January that crime in Almere was up 20%. Almere’s population, apparently, was outpacing its police force and its infrastructure – it is currently on pace for 400,000 residents by 2030, far exceeding original estimates. Moreover, the first generation of teenagers, the children of the pioneers, are bored. Twenty-seven years after the sod was first turned Almere still has only one nightclub and only a handful of bars and cafes. The dearth of entertainment is so disheartening that many don’t consider Almere is a city at all, just a expansive stretch of homes surrounding by a whole lot of agricultural areas and ecological zones.



Almere’s many designations and marketing jingles indeed reveal a city still trying, in accordance with New Age precepts, to find itself. Boomtown. Dutch Town. Transit City. Edge City. Leisure City. Nebulous City. City of the Future. City on the Water. Dormitory Town. Boringville. Some of the early planners pictured a Spiritual City full of cloisters and meditation activities, but things didn’t pan out. Similarly, early attempts to create a University City by opening a branch of the University of Amsterdam fell through, as did ambitions to become a Media City by luring television and radio studios from nearby Hilversum, Holland’s Hollywood. More recently, Almere added its name to the long list of faceless towns that can boast a World Trade Centre, and what to make medieval castle replica, complete with romantic moat, being built along the A6 freeway which, when finished, will house a swank hotel and conference facilities? The castle is the type of uncouth statement Amsterdammers loath but Almereians love and further underscores the alien-ness of a city whose vast tracts of empty land and the large distances between cores are much more akin to American towns than to Dutch ones. Almere is neither here nor there, neither urb nor suburb, as much ersatz mini-city as it is a low-density agglomeration of middle-class homes.



Almere is only now acquiring the girth to warrant major investment in cultural institutions (hence its dullness heretofore). And who better to assign the task to than Rem Koolhaas, an architect who has earned a reputation for metamorphosing urban environments into entertaining fun zones. In 1994 Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Art (OMA) landed the commission to redeveloped Almere City into a compact city with urban verisimilitude. Just like Almere’s forefathers who looked to architectural idioms elsewhere when modelling their city – to H.P. Berlage’s Amsterdam South, to piazza San Marco, to Montreux, to Barcelona’s Ramblas – Koolhaas’s centre is derived from the functional suburban mega malls that are increasingly characterizing the peripheral boundaries of American and Asia cities. OMA’s master plan, a self-titled ‘shock treatment’, aims to rejuvenate Almere City in one ‘quantum leap’ by way of a hi-density mega structure that neatly compartmentalises the city’s parking, traffic, commercial, cultural and living needs into folded layers piled atop one other. In ‘Dutchtown: OMA’s Almere Master plan’ (NAI Publishers, 1999), the agency explains: ‘The plan is to a certain degree an attack on everything Almere is: Almere is low, the plan is high; Almere is a grid, the plan is full of diagonals; Almere is low density, the plan is hi-density. More than anything else, it [the plan] wants to be different than Almere.’ The new city centre contrasts ‘the routine of suburbia’ with ‘urban block patterns...to achieve a place of maximum public interaction.’



‘Koolhaas was more a political choice than a popular one,’ says Barbara Nieuwkoop, director of Almere’s Centre for Architecture and Urban Planning CASLa. ‘In Almere architects have a lot of power, and Koolhaas’s international allure has enabled him to bring an all-star cast of architects to a city with architecture ambitions.’ Similar to the University of Utrecht campus De Uithof, under Koolhaas Almere City has become a prestige project for architects both local and foreign: in addition to OMA’s master plan and Koolhaas’s multiplex cinema, there are theatres by Wiel Arets, Studio Liebeskind, Neutelings Riedijk, MVRDV, Kazyuo Sejima and William Alsop, apartment complexes by Frits van Dongen, Rene van Zuuk, Claus & Kaan and commercial venues by Christian de Potzamparc, Gigon & Guyer and Benthen & Crouwel. They will all be channelled into a dense urban corridor between the main train station and the lake on which the city is contingent, the Weerwater. While OMA’s plan does not necessarily focus on the waterfront, idealistic oppidans have noted a similarity to Chicago, albeit a diminutive one (Holland often looks Westwards for its municipal mimicry, i.e. Rotterdam is ‘Manhattan on the Maas’). Architecture aside, when finished the City will also be kitted out with a 10 million euro offal transportation system that can displace waste at 70 km/h via underground vacuum tubes and make both trash collectors and traditional trash containers obsolete. While Stockholm has had such a system for thirty years, it lends a bit of hypermodern credence to the residents of Almere, and more importantly the pride that goes with it. When finished in 2005, the new Big City will centralise Almere’s current polder anarchy and provide a viable entertainment alternative to the increasing legion of bored teenagers who currently get their kicks by vandalising mailboxes and terrorising bus stops.



Within a decade of being founded, Almere’s insatiable thirst for more homes and profusion of space turned it into an architectural playground for expressive, and experimental, catalogue structures. In addition to the plethora of individual villas and civic structures built by Holland’s Who’s Who in architecture – Job Coenen’s pizzeria (now a bank), Cees Dam’s City Hall, Rene van Zuuk’s Villa van Diepen, Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem’s De Paviljoens, Herman Hertzberger’s four ‘Woonwerkhuis’ blocks – avant-garde competitions like De Fantasie (theme: unusual living) and De Realiteit (theme: temporary living) encouraged architects to apply to suburban living Carl Weeber’s principle of spontaneous housing. Benthem Crouwel’s Hard Glass aquarium, a cubic villa wrapped in 12mm of glass on three sides; Teun Koolhaas’s industrial metal and glass Polderblik; Jos Abbo’s splinter-thin Golfhuis; Dan Holvast and Flip van Woerden’s transparent amphibian home. Today, Almere’s only tourists are archi-tourists, bussed in for the afternoon to visit neighbourhoods devoted to quirky themes like film, music, pastels, flowers and fauna that where the outspoken translations of Weeber’s spontaneous housing principle relieve the somnambulant ennui. The most expressive experiment to date can be found in the Eilandbuurt, or Island neighbourhood, in Almere Buiten where the amalgamation of volumes and materials interjected with canals, green space and medium-rise apartment complexes are at once anti-suburban and visually chaotic. Many critics have denigrated this neighbourhood for its lack of unifying identity, which may be true but is also beside the point. Few other cities would have offered itself up as a guinea pig to theory. It is a wonder such a large-scale experimental venture was built in the first place.



‘The pace of development in Almere is so rapid that each neighbourhood has become a map of time-specific visions, ideologies and styles,’ says architect Rene van Zuuk, who moved to Almere a decade ago and whose curvaceous Block 16 apartment complex will soon rise in Almere City. The ‘human’ tints of brown and postmodern provincialism of Haven, for example, exude 1970s urban planning, just as Teun Koolhaas’s City neighbourhoods exemplifies 1980s building culture and his brother Koolhaas’s new centre bares all the markings of contemporary architecture dogma. The panoply of autonomous bicycle paths and bus lanes that slice through the city with the ease and arrogance of a presidential motorcade still express the anti-automobile sentiments of the post-1968 generation and today force Almere’s residents, more than 80% of which commute by car, to juke myriad roundabouts and tolerate leafy cul-de-sacs and sudden dead-ends. Even the unattractive power lines that criss-cross the cityscape serve the greater purpose of keeping the ground on which they were built green and edifice free. These palpable anachronisms are not without charm; in fact, they make living in Almere much more attractive than the majority of Holland’s VINEX neighbourhoods where there is either too little green and not enough urbanity. The atmosphere is undeniably Nick Cave ballad, and the happy glances of dog walkers, the ecstatic screams of children playing on front yard jungle gyms, the old men with poles caste into verdant ponds and all those bus stops every 400 meters reveal a city that is content with itself. Measured in complacency, Almere is a success.



Koolhaas’s panache has so far proven great PR and, when the new centre is completed in 2005, will undoubtedly contribute to city’s identity (though not necessarily make the residents happier). But one wonders if this is the timeless city Almere set out to be or could have become. In the end Koolhaas’s new centre marginalizes Almere, turns it into a city just like any other, a predictable ville with its animated core and sedate outskirts. Almere as Generic City. With so much carte blanche to work with, couldn’t Holland’s cerebral theoreticians have contrived an entirely new entity that happily oscillates between metropolis and provincial village? A true City of the Future? ‘Almere was a rare opportunity to create something new, something unique,’ says architect Liesbeth van der Pol. ‘No one seems to have asked the question of whether Almere should become a city at all. We could have approached it from an entirely different angle.’ Van der Pol expresses a similar sentiment in her three fire-engine red ‘Rooie Donders’ apartment complexes that tower above Buiten’s low-rise sprawl like Saraman’s castle over trees in Lord of the Rings. In fact, Van der Pol’s buildings are as close to monuments as this monument-less city has, with the exception perhaps of the four large elephant sculptures along the A6 freeway. There is an intrinsic polder-ness to the barn-like Rooie Donders that underscores Almere’s most valuable asset, its landscape. Few structures express the area’s correspondence between the built and unbuilt as well, and you can’t help but question the logic in opting for a low-rise, low-density idyll rather than for a series of vertical polder villages with their elevated panoramas of seemingly endless fields of green and grain.



Of all Almere’s epithets and appellations, Leisure City is the most picturesque and oft-used. It is also the most appropriate. Sailboats parked in driveways, joggers along the Weerwater, cyclists disappearing into autonomous forest paths, canoes tied up to backyard docks and quite possibly the highest per capita dog population in Europe which, coupled with the ubiquity of garden gnomes and plastic patio furniture, is also a symbol of middle-class gratification. The pretty little terraced home surfeit and cultural paucity may reek of suburbia, but Almereians are an active lot with their bikes and boats and have plenty of space to manoeuvre through town. Many homes are in position to enjoy the same vistas as from atop Van der Pol’s Rooie Donders, such as the cubic villas in Norderplassen where enormous yachts are docked off backyard stages and kitchen windows look out over unadulterated liquid landscapes. Or in Hout, where substantial villas are camouflaged by foliage and exist symbiotically with their surroundings. Or the recreational paradise that the fifth and final core, Port, promises to become. Even the cultural czars in Amsterdam who gladly propagate Almere’s obloquy - Almere as Culture-less City, as City Without History - cannot discount the city’s serenity. ‘People from Almere are no longer ashamed to say this is their home,’ says Van Zuuk. While a quantum leap forward of the Koolhaasian sort, it is hardly the polder pride the founding fathers had in mind. ‘Give us ten years,’ Van Zuuk adds. ‘In ten years Almere will be a completely different city. An exciting city.’