The city of Almere, technically soon to be the fifth city of the Netherlands is, in reality, a suburb of Amsterdam. Despite a new city centre packed with ‘starchitect’ creations, it continuously wins the title of ‘ugliest city’ and is widely considered an unpleasant place to live. This reputation is contradictory to the general happiness index in the town, which is in comparison high for the Netherlands. How can the city add character and become successful again?
The city decided to appoint MVRDV as an urban consultant and later even commissioned their city architect. Under the slogan ‘Growing Green Cities’, Almere plans to create 60,000 new homes before 2030. After thorough research, MVRDV created an overall masterplan and detailed four new neighbourhoods adding new vigour to the monotone stock as well as renovating a run-down area. Along a central axis the idea was to create a yuppie area on islands, a sea side town with communal housing featuring experimental architecture, a city centre extension and a DIY urbanism plan with rural accents, which offers great liberty and yet great responsibility. By 2030 Almere will transform itself and offer the young and empty nesters – who are currently moving away – starter homes and new possibilities. In addition, alternative lifestyles are made possible through a build-your-own-dream programme, which attract more affluent inhabitants that take an interest in their construction projects and are loyal to their creation.
As part of Almere’s ambition to organise the World Horticultural Expo Floriade, which takes place every ten years, MVRDV has proposed an as yet unseen innovation. The legacy of this Floriade could be a city centre instead of a park, which is traditionally the legacy of a Floriade. The architects proposed an urban plan that covers a number of small islands in a central lake with a structure that is somehow a symbiosis of a carpet and a Manhattan grid. Each block on this grid would be themed and become a country pavilion and a plant species, organised by alphabet. For example, the T-block could feature the Turkish pavilion as well as the tulip. The densely planned architecture would be covered in the main plant species and, as a result, Almere would grow a great variety of new urban typologies in which plants and people live together in an unprecedented manner. A spa could feature a natural waterfall with ferns and moss, a disco could be in a basement with mushrooms, while a concert hall could be an opening in a birch forest and so on.
Enriching our everyday lives with plants, while creating a world-class, energy and food-generating city centre, will be the challenge of the project over the coming years
MVRDV and Almere developed a bid-book based on this plan that gave the Floriade organiser NTR a new outlook into the relevance and the future of its event; the result of detailed study of many earlier major expos, which projected big ambitions but faced low turn-outs. This plan foresees a dense, exemplary and green city centre extension with a focus on flexibility and is an invitation to the NTR to develop the plan further with the city. Almere won the bid and in 2022 the Floriade will be organised in the city that will leave behind a very new legacy and at the same time create a totally new and specific urban experience.
On the one hand, the Floriade proposal is a Utopian model, a lasting Cité Idéal that will provide a model for sustainable urban development in the Netherlands and around the world. It is a masterplan grounded in the realities of realising sustainable buildings and infrastructure through the processes of multi-stakeholder engagement and phased development. Its ambition to be entirely self-sufficient is zealously combined with the strong desire to support a higher quality of life for its inhabitants and users, through both the power of design and the power of nature.
The Floriade Almere takes as its premise the simple pleasure of plants and trees integrated into our everyday lives and the city around us. This simple idea will translate into an urban landscape that directly integrates the qualities of different species into the built environment, creating a rich variety of architectural and urban experiences that embrace, rather than avoid, the natural world. Can such a symbiosis between city and landscape be a solution to the rapidly growing resource consumption that results from a rapidly urbanising planet? Enriching our everyday lives with plants, while creating a world-class, energy-and food-generating city centre, will be the challenge of the project over the coming years. The plan is currently seen as a flexible framework for development, which will encourage NTR to bring its own expertise to the project. The area has the potential to become many things, especially a hub for biological research and industry, which hold such pride of place, both culturally and economically, in the Netherlands.
One can imagine a city with a university dedicated to agriculture in which each floor represents a different climate zone
To succeed in realising such an ambitious plan for Almere will require ten full years of preparation and work. Both the design and process are innovative. Floriade will be what might truly be called an integrated process on a grand scale that includes participation of national and local governments, knowledge institutions and corporate bodies as well as private individuals. The sheer audacity and idealism of Floriade Almere, given that it will now be realised, is perhaps what makes it such an exceptional example of the changing relationship between people, cities and the environment. It aims to provide a lasting model for integrating, rather than ring-fencing, our urban lives with nature. And, out of this symbiosis, it is hoped that a more sustainable way of occupying space on our planet can be achieved as well as a more sustainable urban future, given our rapid rate of urbanisation. It will also bring a higher quality of life for city-dwellers.
How exactly this interaction between humans and nature is going to be executed is partly open to discussion and will be the theme of a lot of research. It ranges from larger scale questions about the overall percentage of nature in the city to detailed questions on how to mix streetlights with nature: what kind of light, what kind of pole etc. One can imagine a city with a university dedicated to agriculture in which each floor represents a different climate zone, the classrooms will be in mild, sub-tropical, tropical or arctic environments, taking science a step further. The homes in this new urban centre are envisioned to offer plants more space inside and outside, buildings can be overgrown, offer vast balconies with gardens or have large in-between areas, green houses with sub-tropical plants that add to the overall life quality of the citizens. Can an apple tree on a large balcony replace a small suburban garden? The outcome could have a massive influence on urban planning.
Floriade Almere seeks to fundamentally redefine the relationship between municipal and national governments, urban development and the natural world, both in its economic role as a generator and its socio-cultural role as an amenity. The idea of using an event such as the Floriade as a catalyst for positive, sustainable urban development is not a new one, but the global architectural firm’s proposal makes its legacy a permanent upgrade to the site, both in terms of infrastructure and qualitative experience. The large amount of space available for development in Almere is a unique opportunity and an open invitation to realise best practices of building cities. Floriade Almere will fundamentally question the way governments balance the demands of economic development and a sustainable society.
MVRDV further sees this opportunity as a chance to distil the complexities of an urban masterplan into simple statements and constraints, which directly address the theme of reworking urban development models for a more sustainable future. The project’s motto of ‘Reweaving the Urban Carpet’ provides the most general framework for the many ideas. Rather than small-scale intervention on the levels of ecology, economy and infrastructure, Floriade Almere involves all areas of human development and indeed the fabric of the city itself.
All photographs & diagrams: Jan Knikker
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