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A Dutch city testing the future of urban life

175 points by lelf 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lbriner 4y ago
I think it looks really nice but alluded to in the article is the spectre of people who thought they were doing something equally innovative in the 1950s and we now have large brutalist city centres that are much lamented. There are plenty of buildings that look amazing when they are first built (or even worse when they are simply drawn) but give it 5 years, some water staining, a few unruly residents etc.... I don't want to be negative because I often wonder about much better living environments/thinking but I think that the social side of things is often overlooked (at least in the UK) so that affordable housing in my friends new estate meant drug dealers and large white vans parked up and down her small road next to her nice house. You don't want to be a snob but when you work hard to afford a nice place to live, you also don't want to be imposed upon by those who aren't so bothered about their community.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  What are some examples of these regretted 1950s brutalist city centers?
  - gernb 4y ago
    I think maybe the most famous is Brasilia https://archive.curbed.com/2019/6/7/18657121/brasilia-brazil-urban-planning-architecture-design https://archive.curbed.com/2019/6/7/18657121/brasilia-brazil...
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Birmingham comes to mind. Lots of concrete, big ring roads cutting through everything. It's unfortunate because there's still a few historic buildings from before that era suggesting what might have been.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      No love for the roads, but many of those brutalist buildings in Birmingham are considered masterpieces of architecture. That's why they are listed. And I can't think of one from before 1960, either.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Some would say they had to be listed to be prevented from being torn down.
    - lmm 4y ago
      Neighbouring Coventry is a more complete example, being smaller. Croydon also has a similar reputation.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Lots of those in former SovBloc countries.
  - eecc 4y ago
    Well, Bijlmer itself has become a mess at some point
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      > Well, Bijlmer itself was a mess… Still is, but massively improved compared to the 80's.
  - mpol 4y ago
    Not 1950s, but 1970s; Lelystad. They did not mention this at all in the article, which is quite a miss. Lelystad was the earlier experiment, a bit more up north in Flevoland. It is not growing anymore because some parts have failed and not many people move there anymore. Housing is still quite cheap, even now. Some neighbourhoods are quite good neighbourhoods, some are just awful with many residents living on wellfare, many people into drugs, etcetera. They didn't plan for mixing different cultures and classes in society, they planned for somewhat segregated neighbourhoods, which was a wrong choice. If there is a city in the Netherlands where you can guess income and status from the postal code, Lelystad is the place. We still have to see what will happen to Almere, Almere Haven is just 30 years old. Not all parts there are good :) It is often 30 or 40 years, that a neighbourhood can go from good to bad, at least that is usual in the Netherlands.
- outside1234 4y ago
  In particular, the floating houses they show. Not sure how that scales (or if we want it to scale) and for sure that is going to be an expensive maintenance option.
- twelvechairs 4y ago
  Its not made clear in the article but Almere is exactly one of these Brutalist cities. Its only since the late 90s or early 2000s they built the new 'city centre' which is an architects wonderland to start overcoming its monotony. There's still huge expanses of fairly simple, cheap, robust and boring 70s housing. This is close to the train station [0] and a typical suburban street [1]. Regardless of the buildings the Netherlands is the world leader in street design which makes this slightly less bleak than others of a similar era. [0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/eKF4jGYzEjSPVb3g7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/eKF4jGYzEjSPVb3g7 [1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/mFdK333GFYKdQwD97 https://maps.app.goo.gl/mFdK333GFYKdQwD97
giantg2 4y ago
Ugh, those red buildings. There are wonderfully colored houses/buildings in many of the picturesque neighborhoods you see in certain towns. It seems like they tried to do the same with those. In my opinion, it doesn't work. There's no color variation, no trim/contrast to make the colors pop and look good. It just looks like an ugly red building that would hurt my eyes to see that much red every day (imagine being in the center building with red on both sides). It would have likely been better and cheaper to go with a neutral color for the majority of the structure and used color on various subpieces or trim. Even just doing something like the blue floating houses is so much better. They have variation. I think it probably also works better due to the smaller size (red sports car vs solid red semi truck - one can look nice and the other looks obnoxious)
- Luc 4y ago
  If it makes you feel better: the colors in that image are oversaturated.
  - warp 4y ago
    Oh wow, indeed. In case you want to see them on streetview, the address is Pastelstraat 1, Almere. Here is a link: https://goo.gl/maps/mpXgFFd4kGLBinge9 https://goo.gl/maps/mpXgFFd4kGLBinge9
  - giantg2 4y ago
    That is a huge difference. Much better that way.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    People would probably get in trouble if they painted buildings in the colour as in the BBC article (people actually have gotten in problems with the city council, and at the very least it would be a Rijdende Rechter episode). Dutch people are allergic to bright colours or something.
wila 4y ago
and there I was thinking this would be about floriade [0], which happens to be in Almere as well. [0] https://floriade.com/en/ https://floriade.com/en/
- jacquesm 4y ago
  It wasn't always so though, there still is the Floriade park (these days called Amstelpark) next to the RAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstelpark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstelpark It's a gorgeous park and one of the lesser trafficked ones in Amsterdam, well worth a visit.
jacquesm 4y ago
To give a Dutch perspective: Lots of Dutch people would not be found dead in Almere (founded in '76), for a long time it was basically a satellite city of Amsterdam where people went to sleep. Then in the mid 90's it started to change: companies realized that the daily traffic jam to Amsterdam in the morning and to Almere in the evening was a major obstacle, so why not relocate the company to Almere? And this caused the first wave of businesses to settle there in what was for the time ridiculously cheap real estate. This then led to some commuting the other way because some of the employees lived in Amsterdam and then ended up working in Almere. But that has always been a small fraction of the traffic in the other direction. Even today Almere houses and commercial space are a very small fraction of what those go for just the other side of the bridges of A27 and A6, which is prime real estate (Laren, Blaricum, Hilversum, Amsterdam and some cheaper areas as well but not much cheaper). Almere obviously doesn't have a whole lot of history compared to other Dutch towns, it is quite literally built on 'new land', areas that were turned from water into land in living memory (1950's and 1960's). Almere 'haven' is the oldest part, subsequently Almere has grown in jumps to become the fastest growing and now the 7th largest municipality of the Netherlands. So this why Almere is the place in NL where there is room for such experimentation. In other Dutch cities it is usually super crowded already and the only places where you can still expand is at the edges, and municipalities tend to be very conservative to help the new areas blend in with the older ones. I have some family living in Almere, they work on the other side of the bridge so over the years (they have lived there now for 35 years) that took up a lot of commute time, but where they live is child friendly and it is a much nicer house than they would have ever had anywhere else in NL on a much larger lot. But there isn't - even today - a whole lot of life in Almere compared to other Dutch cities and likely this will remain until it is so old that it no longer stands out as the 'newest city'. Second generation citizens of Almere already are much more at home there than those that moved out from Amsterdam (and especially from Bijlmermeer), and with every passing generation that will improve. But it will be a long time before people will go to Almere to see the city center. What would really help Almere is a second bridge into Amsterdam but there are many reasons why that likely will not happen in the next 20 years or so. (see: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJmeerverbinding https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJmeerverbinding (Dutch)).
- Scarblac 4y ago
PortiaBerries 4y ago
Some of those buildings remind me of The Objective Room in "That Hideous Strength." "They suggested some kind of pattern. Their peculiar ugliness consisted in the very fact that they kept on suggesting it and then frustrating the expectation thus aroused."
dncornholio 4y ago
Almere broke my child imagination of what a city was. I was very young when Almere got build and I was so confused on how people could build a city in one go. I always thought it would take hundreds of years to develop a city. I always thought cities were the product of generations and generations.. and there I was standing in NL's newest city. It's not something worth to visit. It's still too sterile. Nobody visits Almere for the city.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  For the longest time it was called the bedroom of Amsterdam.
- bombcar 4y ago
  You weren’t wrong as a child - a city has a story and takes time to grow. Attempting to do it all at once gets a suburb or hotel at best - or maybe a Disneyland.
FooBarWidget 4y ago
Unfortunately it is now uncertain whether any of this matters 100 years from now. It is expected that sea levels will rise by more than 2 meters, and that dykes will no longer work beyond an extra 2 meter extension, not because they can't be extended but because Dutch soil is too soft and seawater will just go under the dyke. Almere will probably be amongst the first to go. It seems nobody has proposed a solution, but in the mean time life goes on as if it won't happen. You don't see this being factored into plans or housing prices.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  The US has somewhat similar problem: flood insurance is heavily subsidized by the federal government so the market doesn't remotely factor in future flooding risks into housing prices. There have recently been plans to raise prices but since Florida is such an important state to Federal elections there's a massive political hurdle
  - MomoXenosaga 4y ago
    Imagine every American east coast city flooding at the same time. That's what would happen in the Netherlands if the levies break. At least Florida can be abandoned in a worst case scenario and the US would continue to function.
    - mellavora 4y ago
      Florida doesn't really have many evacuation routes. In a worst case scenario it isn't just the land which gets abandoned.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      No, that's not what would happen. There are a great many secondary and tertiary systems in place, a breach in one place would not automatically flood the whole country, though of course if you lived in the area just behind the breach it would be a major problem. NL has lived with water long enough that the risks are reasonably well understood. Of course nature can still surprise you, the intensity increase of especially rain has caused some pretty serious problems in recent memory. But even though we occasionally have a dike that fails something at the level of 1953 isn't going to happen 'just like that', though you can never entirely rule out the possibility. Much more money has gone into water management since then, it is our 'Los Alamos', special water management taxes have been used for massive investments into infrastructure including pumps, dikes, flood barriers and all kinds of less visible work. It isn't perfect, but it is really quite good and I would much rather live here than a few hundred kilometers upstream during a heavy rain season. At least we are no longer in denial that water management is something that you postpone until after the flood.
imilk 4y ago
It's interesting - but it's hard for me to see this being the future of urban life when most of the city looks entirely suburban (not very walkable), separated from the main commercial area without bars/restaurants/shops in their own sub-neighborhoods. I would expect a key part of future urban life would include one of the most important parts of current urban life; walkability and a harmonious melding of commercial, residential, and public spaces.
- Mo3 4y ago
  I lived there for a year. I think you forget that everyone owns a bicycle, everyone rides their bicycle everywhere, and almost every single street has a separated bicycle lane. There are more bicycle lanes than in any other country on earth (22,000 miles in a country ten times smaller than California) [1], there's even bicycle highways and intersections. Public transport is exceptionally good as well. Everything is highly walkable and accessible, everything you want to do is doable and everywhere you want to go is reachable. You should check it out sometime, these pictures don't really show it. (jacquesm in this thread is spot on too though. There's not that much life going on in Almere itself.) [1] https://www.opencyclemap.org/?zoom=7&lat=51.48412&lon=8.08713&layers=B0000 https://www.opencyclemap.org/?zoom=7&lat=51.48412&lon=8.0871...
  - sandworm101 4y ago
    But every parking spot in the picture seems to have a car parked in it.
    - Mo3 4y ago
      Of course there's still cars. They are just not used exclusively or frequently. If I remember the statistics correctly, in cities trips are made 30-45% by bicycle, 25-40% by public transport and the rest is cars.
  - imilk 4y ago
    I've never been there and was just making a quick assessment by Google Maps. It is nice that you can bike anywhere, but I'm mostly seeing residential neighborhoods (~10 blocks wide of identical row homes) pretty spaced out around a town center without amenities in their area. So in terms of meeting someone for a coffee/meal/beer/event it looks like you'll have to hop on a bicycle unless you want to go on a 20-30 minute walk past monotonous homes. Which is not that different than suburbs anywhere else.
sandworm101 4y ago
>> Around 60% of Oosterwold is set aside to support "urban agriculture", cutting the climate-change impact of food miles I don't see how this helps. An urban farm is not nearly as efficient as a true industrial farm. They don't have the economies of scale. They are limited as to chemical use (both pesticides and fertilizer) and have to deal with noise complaints. Urban farms are also, nearly universally, fed by potable water sources which can never scale to appreciable food production (acre-feet rather than liters). If we actually want to produce food near consumers, urban farms are not the way. It only works using enclosed buildings, ugly industrial greenhouses, not pretty little fields between condos.
- martincmartin 4y ago
  It's not cutting the climate-change impact of food. It's cutting the climate-change impact of food miles. As you say, overall it's making things worse, e.g. increasing the climate-change impact of every other delivery but food.
  - nostrebored 4y ago
    But this is fundamentally flaws analysis. Lack of economies of scale mean you have to analyze the production of food bottoms-up. What's the cost of getting the resources needed to each of these individual farms and to support the life of people there? The thing people don't realize is that industrial farming is actually extremely carbon-emission efficient. Even your food coming from a container ship from halfway around the world, transported via freight, and driven last mile in a semi is less carbon intensive than getting a delivery from a local (XX miles away) farm. This seems to be trivially true as well for an entire city of inefficient farms with any expectation of modern amenities.
    - beembeem 4y ago
      Composting and rain water harvesting give you much of what you need. Not much is needed from far away.
      - 4y ago
kkfx 4y ago
Sorry but no. Images shown are not a future of anything, just yet another erotic dream of some archistar. The future means an age of cheapness and scarcity, at least in the short term, witch can only means a Sarajevo-style semi-abandoned cities. An a bit more far future will be like modern China: poor concentrated in open-sky prisons named smart-cities, capsule-hotel style, far more dense that the fictional dutch scenario, and some more wealthy living in small areas of individual homes, villas-alike. Sparse tall buildings and hallway spaces are not likely at all and have no purpose at all. Floating constructions is a tempted and failed way, too much humidity, cracks and fissures, problems of sewage and networks in general (water intakes, TLCs etc) so again might sound nice on paper but a failure otherwise so very unlikely as well. To architects: when you design something imaging it's usage BEFORE start drawing. We built for some reasons, beauty is one of them, but secondary, an added thing to something with more practical reasons; anything designed first than adapted to some purpose end up in expensive failures. To my fellow Citizens: please when you dream your future dream it really: where and how do you really want to live? In a Goshiwong/capsule-hotel room in a dense area with some hallway and common areas in general to loitering aimlessly, maybe with a stupid smile drawn on face for the "happy-o-meter" part of the new social score? Or you dream a low density area where you can work and live in homes, with a bit of nature ALL AROUND, leaving tall buildings to specific purposes like hospitals, schools etc? Perhaps considering that single family homes can evolve, being recycled and rebuilt perhaps at generational change, while no tall building can evolve so even if it's well designed now will be a disaster in 40+ years and no one know what to do then?
fleddr 4y ago
Almere is painful. The lack of history makes everything so sterile. Everything is hypermodern, clean and new. You won't have that cute old bar, infrastructural imperfection, clash of cultures, hybrid of old and new, it's entirely without soul. It feels like a VR game. Maybe I just hate modern architecture.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Can't invoke history where there is none. Can't create history when most of the city is running off to other places for those "rustic, authentic" experiences. Can't build with a bit of chaos when prices have to be kept low, density high and requirements must be met which naturally prefers prefabs and cheap, stale-looking materials. The criticisms are valid, but people haven't exactly given Almere a chance to be anything other than hypermodern, either.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    If they had taken a more organic approach from day #1 I think that could have been avoided, but then the growth would have been much slower. It quite literally feels like a city designed behind a drafting table instead of something that matured over time. And that's not something that you can buff out a few decades later.
    - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
      Yeah, you see almost the exact same in new streets and new sections of existing cities. They aren't made with the idea of being organic or adding a little chaos to simulate it. They are made with the intent of putting down prefabs in the cheapest way possible while still hitting requirements and budgets. Every new project around say, Utrecht, has the same "hypermodern" feel to it. Little contrast, straight lines, visible patterns, flat and rectangular. They try to add a little more chaos to it (probably to avoid being compared to Almere) and some more greenery, but it's a far cry from the old European city look.
      - 4y ago
theYipster 4y ago
Ah, Almere... The Irvine, CA of The Netherlands! :) (NB: I have a good friend in Almere and I live in Irvine.)
ramesh31 4y ago
For the dutch, sure. But architecture begins with the local culture, landscape, environment, ecology, and climate as foundational axioms. The European model has never worked in North America because of vast differences in those conditions.

175 points by lelf 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

I think it looks really nice but alluded to in the article is the spectre of people who thought they were doing something equally innovative in the 1950s and we now have large brutalist city centres that are much lamented. There are plenty of buildings that look amazing when they are first built (or even worse when they are simply drawn) but give it 5 years, some water staining, a few unruly residents etc.... I don't want to be negative because I often wonder about much better living environments/thinking but I think that the social side of things is often overlooked (at least in the UK) so that affordable housing in my friends new estate meant drug dealers and large white vans parked up and down her small road next to her nice house. You don't want to be a snob but when you work hard to afford a nice place to live, you also don't want to be imposed upon by those who aren't so bothered about their community.

jeffbee 4y ago
What are some examples of these regretted 1950s brutalist city centers?
- gernb 4y ago
  I think maybe the most famous is Brasilia https://archive.curbed.com/2019/6/7/18657121/brasilia-brazil-urban-planning-architecture-design https://archive.curbed.com/2019/6/7/18657121/brasilia-brazil...
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Birmingham comes to mind. Lots of concrete, big ring roads cutting through everything. It's unfortunate because there's still a few historic buildings from before that era suggesting what might have been.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    No love for the roads, but many of those brutalist buildings in Birmingham are considered masterpieces of architecture. That's why they are listed. And I can't think of one from before 1960, either.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Some would say they had to be listed to be prevented from being torn down.
  - lmm 4y ago
    Neighbouring Coventry is a more complete example, being smaller. Croydon also has a similar reputation.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Lots of those in former SovBloc countries.
- eecc 4y ago
  Well, Bijlmer itself has become a mess at some point
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > Well, Bijlmer itself was a mess… Still is, but massively improved compared to the 80's.
- mpol 4y ago
  Not 1950s, but 1970s; Lelystad. They did not mention this at all in the article, which is quite a miss. Lelystad was the earlier experiment, a bit more up north in Flevoland. It is not growing anymore because some parts have failed and not many people move there anymore. Housing is still quite cheap, even now. Some neighbourhoods are quite good neighbourhoods, some are just awful with many residents living on wellfare, many people into drugs, etcetera. They didn't plan for mixing different cultures and classes in society, they planned for somewhat segregated neighbourhoods, which was a wrong choice. If there is a city in the Netherlands where you can guess income and status from the postal code, Lelystad is the place. We still have to see what will happen to Almere, Almere Haven is just 30 years old. Not all parts there are good :) It is often 30 or 40 years, that a neighbourhood can go from good to bad, at least that is usual in the Netherlands.
outside1234 4y ago
In particular, the floating houses they show. Not sure how that scales (or if we want it to scale) and for sure that is going to be an expensive maintenance option.
twelvechairs 4y ago
Its not made clear in the article but Almere is exactly one of these Brutalist cities. Its only since the late 90s or early 2000s they built the new 'city centre' which is an architects wonderland to start overcoming its monotony. There's still huge expanses of fairly simple, cheap, robust and boring 70s housing. This is close to the train station [0] and a typical suburban street [1]. Regardless of the buildings the Netherlands is the world leader in street design which makes this slightly less bleak than others of a similar era. [0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/eKF4jGYzEjSPVb3g7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/eKF4jGYzEjSPVb3g7 [1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/mFdK333GFYKdQwD97 https://maps.app.goo.gl/mFdK333GFYKdQwD97

giantg2 4y ago

Ugh, those red buildings. There are wonderfully colored houses/buildings in many of the picturesque neighborhoods you see in certain towns. It seems like they tried to do the same with those. In my opinion, it doesn't work. There's no color variation, no trim/contrast to make the colors pop and look good. It just looks like an ugly red building that would hurt my eyes to see that much red every day (imagine being in the center building with red on both sides). It would have likely been better and cheaper to go with a neutral color for the majority of the structure and used color on various subpieces or trim. Even just doing something like the blue floating houses is so much better. They have variation. I think it probably also works better due to the smaller size (red sports car vs solid red semi truck - one can look nice and the other looks obnoxious)

Luc 4y ago
If it makes you feel better: the colors in that image are oversaturated.
- warp 4y ago
  Oh wow, indeed. In case you want to see them on streetview, the address is Pastelstraat 1, Almere. Here is a link: https://goo.gl/maps/mpXgFFd4kGLBinge9 https://goo.gl/maps/mpXgFFd4kGLBinge9
- giantg2 4y ago
  That is a huge difference. Much better that way.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  People would probably get in trouble if they painted buildings in the colour as in the BBC article (people actually have gotten in problems with the city council, and at the very least it would be a Rijdende Rechter episode). Dutch people are allergic to bright colours or something.

wila 4y ago

and there I was thinking this would be about floriade [0], which happens to be in Almere as well. [0] https://floriade.com/en/ https://floriade.com/en/

jacquesm 4y ago
It wasn't always so though, there still is the Floriade park (these days called Amstelpark) next to the RAI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstelpark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstelpark It's a gorgeous park and one of the lesser trafficked ones in Amsterdam, well worth a visit.

jacquesm 4y ago

To give a Dutch perspective: Lots of Dutch people would not be found dead in Almere (founded in '76), for a long time it was basically a satellite city of Amsterdam where people went to sleep. Then in the mid 90's it started to change: companies realized that the daily traffic jam to Amsterdam in the morning and to Almere in the evening was a major obstacle, so why not relocate the company to Almere? And this caused the first wave of businesses to settle there in what was for the time ridiculously cheap real estate. This then led to some commuting the other way because some of the employees lived in Amsterdam and then ended up working in Almere. But that has always been a small fraction of the traffic in the other direction. Even today Almere houses and commercial space are a very small fraction of what those go for just the other side of the bridges of A27 and A6, which is prime real estate (Laren, Blaricum, Hilversum, Amsterdam and some cheaper areas as well but not much cheaper). Almere obviously doesn't have a whole lot of history compared to other Dutch towns, it is quite literally built on 'new land', areas that were turned from water into land in living memory (1950's and 1960's). Almere 'haven' is the oldest part, subsequently Almere has grown in jumps to become the fastest growing and now the 7th largest municipality of the Netherlands. So this why Almere is the place in NL where there is room for such experimentation. In other Dutch cities it is usually super crowded already and the only places where you can still expand is at the edges, and municipalities tend to be very conservative to help the new areas blend in with the older ones. I have some family living in Almere, they work on the other side of the bridge so over the years (they have lived there now for 35 years) that took up a lot of commute time, but where they live is child friendly and it is a much nicer house than they would have ever had anywhere else in NL on a much larger lot. But there isn't - even today - a whole lot of life in Almere compared to other Dutch cities and likely this will remain until it is so old that it no longer stands out as the 'newest city'. Second generation citizens of Almere already are much more at home there than those that moved out from Amsterdam (and especially from Bijlmermeer), and with every passing generation that will improve. But it will be a long time before people will go to Almere to see the city center. What would really help Almere is a second bridge into Amsterdam but there are many reasons why that likely will not happen in the next 20 years or so. (see: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJmeerverbinding https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJmeerverbinding (Dutch)).

Scarblac 4y ago

PortiaBerries 4y ago

Some of those buildings remind me of The Objective Room in "That Hideous Strength." "They suggested some kind of pattern. Their peculiar ugliness consisted in the very fact that they kept on suggesting it and then frustrating the expectation thus aroused."

dncornholio 4y ago

Almere broke my child imagination of what a city was. I was very young when Almere got build and I was so confused on how people could build a city in one go. I always thought it would take hundreds of years to develop a city. I always thought cities were the product of generations and generations.. and there I was standing in NL's newest city. It's not something worth to visit. It's still too sterile. Nobody visits Almere for the city.

jacquesm 4y ago
For the longest time it was called the bedroom of Amsterdam.
bombcar 4y ago
You weren’t wrong as a child - a city has a story and takes time to grow. Attempting to do it all at once gets a suburb or hotel at best - or maybe a Disneyland.

FooBarWidget 4y ago

Unfortunately it is now uncertain whether any of this matters 100 years from now. It is expected that sea levels will rise by more than 2 meters, and that dykes will no longer work beyond an extra 2 meter extension, not because they can't be extended but because Dutch soil is too soft and seawater will just go under the dyke. Almere will probably be amongst the first to go. It seems nobody has proposed a solution, but in the mean time life goes on as if it won't happen. You don't see this being factored into plans or housing prices.

throwaway6734 4y ago
The US has somewhat similar problem: flood insurance is heavily subsidized by the federal government so the market doesn't remotely factor in future flooding risks into housing prices. There have recently been plans to raise prices but since Florida is such an important state to Federal elections there's a massive political hurdle
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Imagine every American east coast city flooding at the same time. That's what would happen in the Netherlands if the levies break. At least Florida can be abandoned in a worst case scenario and the US would continue to function.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    Florida doesn't really have many evacuation routes. In a worst case scenario it isn't just the land which gets abandoned.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    No, that's not what would happen. There are a great many secondary and tertiary systems in place, a breach in one place would not automatically flood the whole country, though of course if you lived in the area just behind the breach it would be a major problem. NL has lived with water long enough that the risks are reasonably well understood. Of course nature can still surprise you, the intensity increase of especially rain has caused some pretty serious problems in recent memory. But even though we occasionally have a dike that fails something at the level of 1953 isn't going to happen 'just like that', though you can never entirely rule out the possibility. Much more money has gone into water management since then, it is our 'Los Alamos', special water management taxes have been used for massive investments into infrastructure including pumps, dikes, flood barriers and all kinds of less visible work. It isn't perfect, but it is really quite good and I would much rather live here than a few hundred kilometers upstream during a heavy rain season. At least we are no longer in denial that water management is something that you postpone until after the flood.

imilk 4y ago

It's interesting - but it's hard for me to see this being the future of urban life when most of the city looks entirely suburban (not very walkable), separated from the main commercial area without bars/restaurants/shops in their own sub-neighborhoods. I would expect a key part of future urban life would include one of the most important parts of current urban life; walkability and a harmonious melding of commercial, residential, and public spaces.

Mo3 4y ago
I lived there for a year. I think you forget that everyone owns a bicycle, everyone rides their bicycle everywhere, and almost every single street has a separated bicycle lane. There are more bicycle lanes than in any other country on earth (22,000 miles in a country ten times smaller than California) [1], there's even bicycle highways and intersections. Public transport is exceptionally good as well. Everything is highly walkable and accessible, everything you want to do is doable and everywhere you want to go is reachable. You should check it out sometime, these pictures don't really show it. (jacquesm in this thread is spot on too though. There's not that much life going on in Almere itself.) [1] https://www.opencyclemap.org/?zoom=7&lat=51.48412&lon=8.08713&layers=B0000 https://www.opencyclemap.org/?zoom=7&lat=51.48412&lon=8.0871...
- sandworm101 4y ago
  But every parking spot in the picture seems to have a car parked in it.
  - Mo3 4y ago
    Of course there's still cars. They are just not used exclusively or frequently. If I remember the statistics correctly, in cities trips are made 30-45% by bicycle, 25-40% by public transport and the rest is cars.
- imilk 4y ago
  I've never been there and was just making a quick assessment by Google Maps. It is nice that you can bike anywhere, but I'm mostly seeing residential neighborhoods (~10 blocks wide of identical row homes) pretty spaced out around a town center without amenities in their area. So in terms of meeting someone for a coffee/meal/beer/event it looks like you'll have to hop on a bicycle unless you want to go on a 20-30 minute walk past monotonous homes. Which is not that different than suburbs anywhere else.

sandworm101 4y ago

>> Around 60% of Oosterwold is set aside to support "urban agriculture", cutting the climate-change impact of food miles I don't see how this helps. An urban farm is not nearly as efficient as a true industrial farm. They don't have the economies of scale. They are limited as to chemical use (both pesticides and fertilizer) and have to deal with noise complaints. Urban farms are also, nearly universally, fed by potable water sources which can never scale to appreciable food production (acre-feet rather than liters). If we actually want to produce food near consumers, urban farms are not the way. It only works using enclosed buildings, ugly industrial greenhouses, not pretty little fields between condos.

martincmartin 4y ago
It's not cutting the climate-change impact of food. It's cutting the climate-change impact of food miles. As you say, overall it's making things worse, e.g. increasing the climate-change impact of every other delivery but food.
- nostrebored 4y ago
  But this is fundamentally flaws analysis. Lack of economies of scale mean you have to analyze the production of food bottoms-up. What's the cost of getting the resources needed to each of these individual farms and to support the life of people there? The thing people don't realize is that industrial farming is actually extremely carbon-emission efficient. Even your food coming from a container ship from halfway around the world, transported via freight, and driven last mile in a semi is less carbon intensive than getting a delivery from a local (XX miles away) farm. This seems to be trivially true as well for an entire city of inefficient farms with any expectation of modern amenities.
  - beembeem 4y ago
    Composting and rain water harvesting give you much of what you need. Not much is needed from far away.
    - 4y ago

kkfx 4y ago

Sorry but no. Images shown are not a future of anything, just yet another erotic dream of some archistar. The future means an age of cheapness and scarcity, at least in the short term, witch can only means a Sarajevo-style semi-abandoned cities. An a bit more far future will be like modern China: poor concentrated in open-sky prisons named smart-cities, capsule-hotel style, far more dense that the fictional dutch scenario, and some more wealthy living in small areas of individual homes, villas-alike. Sparse tall buildings and hallway spaces are not likely at all and have no purpose at all. Floating constructions is a tempted and failed way, too much humidity, cracks and fissures, problems of sewage and networks in general (water intakes, TLCs etc) so again might sound nice on paper but a failure otherwise so very unlikely as well. To architects: when you design something imaging it's usage BEFORE start drawing. We built for some reasons, beauty is one of them, but secondary, an added thing to something with more practical reasons; anything designed first than adapted to some purpose end up in expensive failures. To my fellow Citizens: please when you dream your future dream it really: where and how do you really want to live? In a Goshiwong/capsule-hotel room in a dense area with some hallway and common areas in general to loitering aimlessly, maybe with a stupid smile drawn on face for the "happy-o-meter" part of the new social score? Or you dream a low density area where you can work and live in homes, with a bit of nature ALL AROUND, leaving tall buildings to specific purposes like hospitals, schools etc? Perhaps considering that single family homes can evolve, being recycled and rebuilt perhaps at generational change, while no tall building can evolve so even if it's well designed now will be a disaster in 40+ years and no one know what to do then?

fleddr 4y ago

Almere is painful. The lack of history makes everything so sterile. Everything is hypermodern, clean and new. You won't have that cute old bar, infrastructural imperfection, clash of cultures, hybrid of old and new, it's entirely without soul. It feels like a VR game. Maybe I just hate modern architecture.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
Can't invoke history where there is none. Can't create history when most of the city is running off to other places for those "rustic, authentic" experiences. Can't build with a bit of chaos when prices have to be kept low, density high and requirements must be met which naturally prefers prefabs and cheap, stale-looking materials. The criticisms are valid, but people haven't exactly given Almere a chance to be anything other than hypermodern, either.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  If they had taken a more organic approach from day #1 I think that could have been avoided, but then the growth would have been much slower. It quite literally feels like a city designed behind a drafting table instead of something that matured over time. And that's not something that you can buff out a few decades later.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Yeah, you see almost the exact same in new streets and new sections of existing cities. They aren't made with the idea of being organic or adding a little chaos to simulate it. They are made with the intent of putting down prefabs in the cheapest way possible while still hitting requirements and budgets. Every new project around say, Utrecht, has the same "hypermodern" feel to it. Little contrast, straight lines, visible patterns, flat and rectangular. They try to add a little more chaos to it (probably to avoid being compared to Almere) and some more greenery, but it's a far cry from the old European city look.
    - 4y ago

theYipster 4y ago

Ah, Almere... The Irvine, CA of The Netherlands! :) (NB: I have a good friend in Almere and I live in Irvine.)

ramesh31 4y ago

For the dutch, sure. But architecture begins with the local culture, landscape, environment, ecology, and climate as foundational axioms. The European model has never worked in North America because of vast differences in those conditions.