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.
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 (Dutch)).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ah, Almere... The Irvine, CA of The Netherlands! :)
(NB: I have a good friend in Almere and I live in Irvine.)
and there I was thinking this would be about floriade [0], which happens to be in Almere as well.
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."
>> 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.