Lately the read­ers of Volk­skrant selected 30 year old Almere the ugli­est place in the Nether­lands; aver­age Dutch asso­ciates Almere with bour­geois, bore­dom and absence of cul­ture. Almere’s city offi­cers are des­per­ate;
they look up to cities like Maas­tricht and go as far as buying medi­ae­val cas­tles from Bel­gium at out­ra­geous cost. Envy­ing Ams­ter­dam and Rot­ter­dam, they want to have old ware­houses and fac­to­ries for their ‘cre­atives’. Inspired by medieval cities, Almere desires a city heart, and just got a brand new city center with a heavy shop­ping pro­gram. At a time when old cities them­selves wrig­gle out of generic and con­formist shopping-mall-downtowns, why should Almere be the next sheep in the herd?

Beyond all these hope­less imi­ta­tion adven­tures, Almere is the only grow­ing ter­ri­tory of oth­er­wise stag­nat­ing coun­try. The eth­ni­cally mixed pop­u­la­tion pro­file is rather young, which enjoys the fastest inter­net con­nec­tion in the coun­try. Just as in a museum for con­tem­po­rary archi­tec­ture, beau­ties of early as well as late O.M.A, MVRDV, of British [Chip­per­field, Alsop], French [Chris­t­ian de Potzam­parc] Japan­ese [Sanaa], and native [Archi­tecten Cie, UN Studio] are all in Almere’s panorama. Fur­ther the local gov­ern­ment exper­i­ments with new urban­ism con­cepts, such as selforganized-​city pro­duc­tion; here, one can log on to web and start being part of a plan­ning team. Fur­ther, by now Almere has her global export prod­ucts, such as the Big Brother, which was invented on this young soil a decade ago.

There is the moment where new towns turn ado­les­cent from puberty: they become cities. But is Almere there yet?

All Slides of our air­plane tour over Almere (if you’re read­ing the RSS feed, these images might not show):

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