'Ideas and dreams can become reality'

Looking out to an extension of the sea, once planned to be a polder but currently a lake, from atop the dike of Almere Harbor.


Giant map of Almere in the planning office we visited; constantly changing and evolving.



Jonathon and Jamuna, drawing on the train ride to Almere.



Sugar! Oh my gosh, it's so beautiful. For you JJ. This was a spread at the cafe we stopped in for lunch, where I fell in love with my lunch (and with the green roofs).


Lunch on the terrace overlooking a green roof above a shopping center in the Almere citadel, with housing on the far edge.


These panoramas are all from various parts of the residential developments, all integrated with water.





Today we went to Almere, the newest town in the Netherlands built on the newest polder, which was reclaimed from the sea in 1969. Almere is the fastest growing city in the Netherlands, and is under pressure to keep up with the overwhelming need to add infrastructure for its growing population, including schools, burial places, facilities, universities, mental health clinics, as well as reserve space for the future. In a country that has been pumping water to create land since the 1500s, Almere was started from scratch 30 years ago, and thus in many ways has the look of a United States suburb in terms of the vast space, though the buildings reminded us of a design studio run rampant. With nothing on the land to respond to, Almere set its own programmatic goals: create places for urban areas, recreation, nature and agricultural land. Like many cities in Europe, transportation is the backbone of this planned city, with six metro stations that connect to Amsterdam and Utrecht, and multiple bus lines that reach all the residential neighborhoods of the city. The population is incredibly young, and the architecture is bold, giving this place a futuristic yet somehow temporary feel.

What struck me most today was the presentation we had by Ria van Dijk, a landscape architect with the city of Almere, and her discussion of the housing policy they have in the Netherlands. Affordable housing here is subsidized by the government, and the municipality has much more control over who develops the land than we do in the states. There is a value placed on social wealth as well as on monetary wealth; money from land development does not only go to the developer, it also goes to the city, which then turns around and invests it in services for the whole community. Everybody wins. In term of what the built landscape looks like, at least in theory, a house that is considered 'affordable' and one that is considered 'average' can look exactly the same from the outside. Homeowners, and to some extent renters, have choices in what their houses will look like, even though they are built as a part of a development. They can choose the location of their yards, the setbacks, the materials, the amount of windows, the color, and other things within certain design standards. The thought of giving individuals control and creative input on their houses that are built en mass seems completely unreal to us as students from the U.S. taught that money is the bottom line, and conformity our unfortunate jailer. We were all amazed, and somewhat saddened, that our country can overlook things so basic to human health and happiness in terms of where we dwell that actually are the reality in other parts of the world. What we dream up for the world is possible!