Qualla: Almere

Almere: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Until 1968 there was no ground here, only water. The southern Flevoland polder, the patch of seabed on which Almere stands, was pumped dry between 1959 and 1968 as part of the long Dutch project to reclaim the Zuiderzee. The first house in the new town was completed in 1976. By 1984 there were enough houses, schools, and shops to declare Almere a municipality of its own, two years before its province, Flevoland, officially came into being in 1986. Today, on land that anyone over sixty can remember being open water, roughly 230,000 people live in the eighth largest city in the Netherlands. The city's own ambition, set down in agreements with the national government in 2007, is to reach 350,000 inhabitants by 2030.

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Almere: Naming a Town That Did Not Exist

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the early drawings, the planners called it Zuidweststad: South West City, a working title for a place no one yet lived in. In the 1970s the name Almere was chosen instead. It came from the medieval lake Almere, the earlier name of the body of water that would later become the ...

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Almere: Districts in a Field

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Almere did not grow outward from a historic core because there was no historic core. Instead it was assembled, deliberately, from districts and boroughs spaced across the polder. Almere Haven was the first, on the south coast, modelled as a small-scale ideal town. Almere Stad bec...

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Almere: An Experiment in Living

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Almere was built to relieve postwar Amsterdam, which by the 1960s was running out of room. The first plans imagined it as a town of multiple centres rather than a single downtown. That idea was eventually abandoned in favour of neighbourhoods like Tussen de Vaarten and a more con...

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Almere: The People Who Showed Up

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A city built from scratch needs people who are willing to be early. The first arrivals in the 1970s and 1980s came largely from Amsterdam, lured by larger houses and quiet streets. Later waves brought families from across the Netherlands and from former Dutch colonies, particular...

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Almere: What a New City Looks Like at Fifty

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the air, Almere reveals its origins. The straight edges where polder meets water. The rectangular fields giving way to neat residential grids. The Floriade horticultural exhibition site of 2022 along the Weerwater, with its planned grid of green squares. The forests planted ...

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