>> 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.
I do not think anybody is thinking of corn fields here. But replacing spruce, plaintaint and ornamental chestnut with cherry trees, walnuts and edible chestnut. Instead of having fireball, rhododendron or snowball hedges planting black berries, currants and maybe elderberries. And finally giving families a small allotment garden where they can grow some vegetable. Besides that, it's easily possible (as in: I have done that) to harvest enough chili & pepper from June to December to supply one person via one 1m wide office window. Cities will never be food independent but can definitely reduce their food import by 15-20 %
> But replacing spruce, plaintaint and ornamental chestnut with cherry trees, walnuts and edible chestnut. Instead of having fireball, rhododendron or snowball hedges planting black berries, currants and maybe elderberries.
Sounds great to the uncritical hearer, but it's a recipe for a rodent and/or bird plague and lots of disease outbreaks. Unless someone is employed to deal with all of the rejected part of the crop. And that's not easy with tree and bush crops.
The USDA has a very different definition for "urban agriculture" than your claim of simply "fields between condos."
"Urban agriculture includes the cultivation, processing and distribution of agricultural products in urban and suburban areas. Community gardens, rooftop farms, hydroponic, aeroponic, and aquaponic facilities, and vertical production are all examples of urban agriculture."
Maybe urban agriculture doesn’t work in theory, but in practice the Netherlands already has many regions where productive farms mingle with urban areas. For an example, have a look at a satellite view of the Westland region, directly southwest of The Hague.
I'd add to your comment by emphasising that Westland is a super intensive agricultural area with tons of dense greenhouses, trying to eke out as much production out of a small area as possible (and doing pretty well at it).
It's not cutting the climate-change impact of food. It's cutting the climate-change impact of food miles. As you say, overall it's making things worse, e.g. increasing the climate-change impact of every other delivery but food.
Food-miles sound good, but the reality of modern shipping is that it takes far less energy to move food than grow it. The carbon/energy cost of bringing a plant product from a hot country to a cold country is far less than the energy needed to grow that product in a cold country. That's why nobody grows bananas in new york. We could, but the cost/energy to do so is hugely more than the energy to ship bananas from place where they grow easily.
If we want to address global climate change, then we need to look into minimizing total energy put into things like food. Often that will mean growing things where they can grow most easily, with the least amount of energy. A banana brought thousands of miles by very efficient transport is more sustainable than grown in an ill-suited climate through the application of energy-expensive heat/light etc. Distance is not everything.
In-built into this comment is the implicit entitlement of the globalist consumer: that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case. Reducing food-miles by feeding people locally-first would drop food-miles drastically, possibly more than other proposals thus far.
Minimizing total energy is indeed the name of the game. To do that, we have to recognize that we may have over-extended a little bit as a civilization, and to pull back on some of the more hubristic enterprises like bananas in Maine or avocados in Sweden during winter in the Northern hemisphere. We can still have those things, but at a minimum the costs for the consumer should reflect the costs of transportation, including costs normally externalized (excluded) from supply chain analyses.
> that we should have access to anything we want at any time of year. But that doesn't really need to be the case.
Interesting you should mention that, this was actually the dinner table subject a few days ago when I explained to my kids that what they think is 'normal' has only been the case for a couple of decades at best and that in the not so very distant past winter meant that you were not going to have a whole lot of fresh stuff. They found it quite incredible that you would not be able to buy apples or bananas year round.
> If we want to address global climate change, then we need to look into minimizing total energy put into things like food. Often that will mean growing things where they can grow most easily, with the least amount of energy.
The big issue with agriculture and environmental disasters like climate change and biodiversity loss is land use patterns. That implies a need to drastically replace consumption of very land-inefficient uses like beef with mostly plant based foods.
But yes, I completely agree with you that 'food miles' is largely a distraction.
The problem is republicans can cut off food to liberal strongholds when the government drops the facade and becomes tyrannical so they need to look at producing food in the cities and make up a load of lies about land use patterns and climate change hoax funding all this with things like inflation
It's people that have the highest impact milage. We can pack food tightly into a truck and they don't mind waiting when the packing takes some time.
We can't easily pack humans more densely into trucks, so reducing their miles traveled has a much bigger effect (and if the distances are shorter they can also walk/bike/bus instead of single occupancy vehicle).
Maximum tractor-trailer weight in the US is 80,000 lb, with typical weight closer to 44,000 lb. Dry weight is about 32,000 lb, for a maximum payload of 48,000 lb.
An articulated bus has a curb weight of about 35,000 lb and a capacity of up to 92 passengers. At 177 lb each, that's a gross weight of 51,284 lb. (net: 16,284 lb of passengers).
I'd presume a potato's density is close to that of water. As such, capacity is actually mass rather than volume-constrained --- you'd be unable to fill a truck to its volumetric carrying capacity before exceeding gross vehicle weight limits.
Many grocery products have much lower density: chips, bread, paper products, etc.
I still tend to agree it makes more sense to move goods than people, but the differential may not be quite as great as you might think.
Well, as this article is about the Netherlands, you can go and have a look there, at rush hour. Say, boarding a train from Almere to Amsterdam. And the answer is: a lot..
Regardless, the relative price of food is usually a reasonable proxy for the amount of energy that went into its production. If the food from the urban farm is more expensive than equivalent food from an industrial farm, it probably took more energy to produce (and consequently probably released more greenhouse gases during its production).
I find your message confusing, when you say price, do you talk about final retail price or production cost? (fruits and vegetable are high margin products in food distribution)
When you talk about energy, do you take into account human labour? Natural ressources are considered free in our current economic system, that is why it is cheaper to grow food by damaging the amazonian forest with nasty coal/oil fed machine rather than doing local permaculture with more human beings and passive tools.
But this is fundamentally flaws analysis. Lack of economies of scale mean you have to analyze the production of food bottoms-up. What's the cost of getting the resources needed to each of these individual farms and to support the life of people there?
The thing people don't realize is that industrial farming is actually extremely carbon-emission efficient. Even your food coming from a container ship from halfway around the world, transported via freight, and driven last mile in a semi is less carbon intensive than getting a delivery from a local (XX miles away) farm.
This seems to be trivially true as well for an entire city of inefficient farms with any expectation of modern amenities.
Most importantly, transportation is generally a tiny amount of CO2 emissions of food production, iirc, and that is the only thing cut by urban agriculture.
It may have other benefits, such as greater degree of self-sufficiency but it does approximately nothing for the climate.
I'm curious about your measuring/reasoning: so far the most efficient cultivation I know is the classic elderly vegetable garden. It can produce FAR more than large mono-cultures fields per hectare with far less resources.
For farming, surely we need space, poultry and rabbits are the least needing animals but still demand space to produce their own food, however again there is NOTHING more efficient than a classic country home with some animals around: it do not need third party fertilizers, the balance between animals manure and cultivated ground means manure suffice, the resulting pollution is very low, water usage sparse enough to be a non-issue in most cases. Surely it can nourish a limited number of humans PER FARM, but it's absolutely sustainable and effective.
Urbs are not, we never ever have a sustainable city, we have just some needs who justify them. But the rest you mention is needed only for mass distribution, not for nourishing humans but for nourishing business, in money, not in food, and we have enough proof that that's totally unsustainable. Surely we are too much for such classic approach, but we can handle that with a SLOW de-growth pushing toward de-urbanization as much as we can leaving just enough for certain kind of manufacturing and other specific needs.
The sparse small-scale industry is actually ECONOMICALLY inefficient but far more sustainable, self-sufficient on scale, at the human size. It's like a small countryside restaurant, it's economically far less efficient than a modern fast food, but suffice for their owner and satisfy their customers, only managers and the companies behind them are unhappy.
Space-efficient, energy-efficient, and labor-efficient are three different things. A tiny "elderly" farm might create lots of food per square-foot, but only through increased labor. Too much labor and the farm simply cannot produce enough to feed the workers working it.
Additionally, if this urban farm plot exists to the exclusion of several stories of apartments, and those apartments must instead be located further away from where people want to be, the net carbon emissions (not to mention the effect on housing prices) are definitely higher than that of a regular rural industrial farm.
I do not definitely think that urban farms AND urbs at a whole can be sustainable, IMVHO the sole sustainable model in the present time is the Riviera ones, where people work and live in low density areas with a small distributed economy that can evolve instead of creating mega-structures and mega-infrastructures that serve a purpose for a certain period of time, perhaps well, but can't evolve and so cyclically became equally giant issues but my point is totally different and it's that actual farming is effective in economical terms at today social organization notnature. In the actual mass distribution of foods model a classic tiny "elderly" farm is unsustainable economically, but that's not by nature.
Actual way we live is evidently untenable, but actual way of living does not means the sole possible, the sole civilized etc. In practical terms my own personal classic veg-garden is far to satisfy my needs, but having it is nice, do not impede me from being a connected sysadmin, do not even demand much time: irrigation is automated, I only need a bit of manual hours at start and end of the season, little time for harvesting even less to surveil. Of course, I do not achieve self-sufficiency, I just made few month worth of fresh tomatoes and salad to make salads at home, a bit of potatoes and beans+peas again just to be used few months, the former fresh (boiled, fried, oven-ed) and the rest normally frozen, some aromatic plants (sage, rosemary, thyme etc) and sparse red fruits. To harvest enough to be self-sufficient I need more land than a small slice of terrain in the back of my home, I need animals for manure (so far I get it for free from some neighbors who have horses, so that's anyway self-sufficient) etc. Not an easy business and not my own business, but in my region there are still few small farms that sell their product in not so small quantity, not enough for self-sufficiency of the territory but still a significant surplus. For poultry it's not much different, it's untested for me but I think producing some crops+insects to nourish them can be done at a very small scale in space, energy and labor terms, the keeping them do not demand much work: a weekly clean up of the henhouse with a pressure washer in 10', a bit of regular fresh water supply, regular harvesting of eggs, perhaps once an year a bit of work to incubate some eggs and when it's about time to slaughter some chickens, a thing that does not demand much again 1/2h for some, a knife, a simple kind-of-open-washing-machine with hot water and few rubber teethes to quickly remove plumage (a very simple and cheap stuff, energy produced by p.v. also), a bit of butcher works to empty them, a bit of time to make the blood drain, some final touch and they can go to the freezer. When needed a simple scale, plunging them in water + right dose of salt (14/15g per kg) for a night, an oven or a smoker and they are ready to eat. Again not self-sufficiency but still enough to not needing buy eggs and a bit of extra meat per year. Just that at a certain scale lower significantly the need of third party food.
Since the target should be local/regional self-sufficiency, talking about my latitudes, trout farms can be planted in so many places here, enough cereals and fruits are already produced in the plains in the center of the country (France), seas offer a bit of foods etc. Not really a distributed self-sufficiency at the actual overall population but almost there, if well done on scale. In the end in the entire world that was what our ancestors have done for millennia and since we are here is have evidently worked well enough...
Surely modern tech help, especially in a climate change scenario to ensure ability of amassing foods for long time, surpassing locale climate events etc I do not think about classic hoe and pitchfork by bare hands, of course, but that's is. The issue is far more the actual economical model than nature or technical.
Just a BIG load of things we need today is needed only because people mostly have forget how to preserve foods at home. Just knowing how to salt the meat (produce sausages and dried meat products at home) and making preserves in jars + using freezers ENORMOUSLY lower a big set of actual food needs. That's is personally tested, when I was living in a big city I usually buy food constantly and that means crapload of packaging AND relevant processing/supply chain behind, now I buy food once a month in quantity having space to stock, I have better quality food and far less industrial/supply chain work needs behind. Just frozen bread and some kind of cheese who can be frozen issueless was game changing with essentially no effort. On scale that means pushing riviera model, with individual homes and enough space, WFH for eligible jobs etc cut perhaps 1/5 of our actual food supply chain needs, not enormous but very significant to start a new economy.
Permaculture is an example of farming on a small scale that is extremely complex but efficient and sustainable.
The Netherlands soil is of very low quality in terms of nutrients (soil depletion). There is an ecological debt because of intensive farming: if we would take that into account in the final price, it would lose it's appeal.
Urban agriculture doesn't have to be monoculture. It's better for the soil to have some diversity anyway. A healthy mix of plants requires more human labor to maintain than an industrial farm of the same area, but for people in cities getting contact time with plants is beneficial in itself.
It helps by being exactly the kind of nonsense that attracts votes and money from well-meaning but ignorant people. Virtue signaling is always more powerful than actual virtue.
Well-meaning ignorant person here, but always willing to learn. I'll take your comment in good faith.
Some of my ignorance may be because the knowledge has been abstracted away, deprived of its nuance, and physically kept at a distance from where I have lived and worked.
My view is that most people are not fully opposed to industrialized farming. But rather I don't want there to be farms (or companies for that matter) that exploit workers, pollute the environment, bribe politicians (in essence, rigging the once free market) [1]. That's my main gripe. We live in a society, and profits should not justify treating others like they were less than equal to ourselves.
In my opinion, some of those companies are too large to properly behave like well-run businesses (not too large to fail), and they have accrued a critical size and mass that they bully away competition, and no longer have the interests of the customer in mind.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams:
If it maintains high prices like a cartel, and restricts competition like a cartel, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a large association of nefarious manufacturers or suppliers on our hands.
I'm not super knowledgeable about this however NL is a powerhouse of agricultural technology, they're a tiny country that's the 2nd largest food exporter in the world. There is a lot of really really interesting technology implemented there that will possibly make them a superpower once food crises become more frequent with climate change.
Being Dutch, seeing this perspective is quite interesting. See, we have a nitrogen crisis in NL: there is too much being deposited in the soil, ruining the local environment. Farming a is a big source of that nitrogen. Can't build many new houses, because building those will also emit too much nitrogen. Speed limit has been reduced for the same reason (with a very small effect).
A popular view in NL is that the Dutch farmers mostly work for export and that we shouldn't do that anymore.
There's also a counter-movement of farmers and their supporters stating they're proud of the farmers, for providing our food, and reducing resource usage per unit food significantly over the years.
The suggestion by a politician to half the amount of livestock caused riots with tractors.
I'm kinda torn: importing more food is bad for the environment as a (global) whole as our farms are very efficient. But should we sacrifice our local environment for it?
The real question is: should it really be used to for that purpose. Does it make sense that the Netherlands is the second biggest exporter of tomatoes in the world? The easy answer to that is: no. The more complicated one is: also no.
To actually produces these vegetables in -let's be generous- less than ideal climate, they have huge gas-heated greenhouses, with 24/7 lighting. That is anything but sustainable.
Of course they are highly-efficient greenhouses, combining heating with electricity production, allowing to minimize the use of chemical inputs etc, etc, etc. But in the end, the gas prices they got were so cheap, that they would simply burn gas to produce and resell electricity, and vent the heat in the atmosphere.. Oh well..
What about them pigs? Does it make sense to have about as many pigs as inhabitants in such a densely populated country?
It drastically helps. Each little unit producing food is less food required to be made by a commercial farm. 1000 little farms might not be as efficient as one commercial farm, but it is still less impact and less run off environmentally.
The water in the photo at the top of the link is fresh (all of it, even the large lake in the background). They can probably find a way to not use treated water for irrigation.
In farming, being less efficient has an almost 1:1 correspondence to being worse for the environment. Less efficient farms need more space and more energy input to produce the same amount of calories. (Some exceptions to this simplification of course apply)
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.
I think you forget that everyone owns a bicycle, everyone rides their bicycle everywhere, and almost every single street has a separated bicycle lane. There are more bicycle lanes than in any other country on earth (22,000 miles in a country ten times smaller than California) [1], there's even bicycle highways and intersections.
Public transport is exceptionally good as well. Everything is highly walkable and accessible, everything you want to do is doable and everywhere you want to go is reachable. You should check it out sometime, these pictures don't really show it.
(jacquesm in this thread is spot on too though. There's not that much life going on in Almere itself.)
Urban areas are not just walkable but walk-centric. They are built under the assumption that most people don't move faster than 4-5 km/h. Places that want to attract people must be close to each other in local centers, or people don't go to them.
Bicycles are more suburban than urban. Because they allow people to move flexibly at a relatively high speed, they encourage suburban structure, where things are spread out over a larger area. They are functionally similar to cars, but on a smaller scale.
You have clearly never been to any Dutch city. Bicycles are priority #1 even in the most crammed and tight spaces, and thus the distinction between "urban" and "suburban" becomes completely mangled. There's simply places with less space (Amsterdam) and places with a little more space (Almere). Does that make Almere a suburb? Possibly depending on your perspective, but there is nil relation to bicycles.
Now, of course, you could argue that that makes the Netherlands a relatively suburban place in general - the fact that it is one of the most densely populated countries on earth would disagree.
I live in Amsterdam and I think he has a point. Many major Dutch cities are old, so they don't really work as a counterexample. Looking at new developments, like Almere or even the outskirts of Amsterdam, it's clear that they don't have the same structure.
He was talking about a relationship between bicycles and urban/suburban areas. He’s suggesting that bicycles are a suburban phenomenon and that urban areas are focused on walking.
I don’t know about you but that seems untrue to me
I meant that in the other direction. The speed and flexibility of personal vehicles encourage suburban development in the city. Cars created the low-density suburban sprawl. Bicycles seem to encourage moderate-density mixed-use areas where the services are spread out all over the area.
That was for dense urban areas where people walk instead of using a bicycle. If most people are comfortable using bicycles, businesses have fewer reasons to concentrate on more expensive central areas, as people can reach them equally well a bit farther away. The more mobility people have on the average, the more mobility the society will expect from everyone.
Almere looks very similar to large parts of Florida, just with more town houses. Both look like master planned subdivisions with layouts that look interesting from the air interspersed with canals surrounding commercial areas.
I think it's fair to compare Almere to American suburbs. It's significantly more suburban than many other cities, and it arguably a suburb of Amsterdam. Many people living there work in Amsterdam. And much of Almere is fairly car-centric; build for cars coming from highways, down arterial roads, to local access roads to cul-de-sacs. (I've had family living in such a cul-de-sac for ages.)
But on top of that, there's bicycle paths and sidewalks everywhere. Cars are not your only option; just one of the options for leaving the city (there are also plenty of trains and buses). It's a well-designed suburb, rather than the bleak car-only sprawls of the US.
People may have different definitions for "urban" and "suburban". Regardless of the words used, there is a huge difference between a city designed for walking and a city designed for people using vehicles (cars, public transport, bicycles).
I would just like to say that “bicycle” is considered equivalent to “pedestrian” over here in NL, at least in the context of city planning. This allows for this additional “reach” of distance for many families without using a car or bus (which is important for children and teenagers), and it’s a big difference from e.g. the US way of approaching things.
It’s easy to see why it almost takes a completely different way of thinking, or “you got to see it for yourself”, before you can fully appreciate the little advantages it brings. The other way around is also true: I took me a while to understand the dependence that quite a few people have upon their car and/or public transport. Walking 10km is certainly a bit too much to ask, but common enough a distance to work or school, and very reasonable for the bicycle.
I'm originally from Finland. Our urban planning used to combine pedestrians and bicycles into "light traffic". That approach became obsolete 10-15 years ago, when it was widely realized that they are two different modes of transport that operate at different speeds and scales. The change has improved the bicycle infrastructure significantly, as the old approach didn't really see bicycling as a form of traffic that should be taken seriously.
Just move bicycles from being grouped with cars to being grouped with walking, and you're correct.
Dutch cities are designed for walking and bicycles. It helps that the bicycles are also designed for dutch cities. Upright, comfortable, a bit heavy and slow, and can be locked up for short times without needing to be locked to anything.
You can't design a city for both walking and bicycles. You can only make compromises between them. The slow Dutch bicycles are still 2.5x to 3x faster than the average pedestrian, which makes them convenient for distances most people would not consider walkable. If most people are comfortable with using bicycles over such distances, it encourages a more spread out urban structure.
People often use bicycles in cities because they are convenient and as fast as or faster than driving a car or using public transport. That is the reason why bicycles should be grouped with other vehicles and not with walking.
>You can't design a city for both walking and bicycles.
Your assertion shows that you have never visited a Dutch city.
Most Dutch cities were originally designed for walking (they are old, at least in the core), then (like most places) the car took over in the 30s - 70s, but since the 70s there's been a concerted effort to re-establish bicycle supremacy, along with strong public transport.
The outcome is that pretty much everyone (including the elderly) cycle everywhere because it's most convenient. And walk around perfectly fine once you've parked your bike. And if you need to go a bit further afield when you're done? Jump back on the bike.
The hybrid of public transport/bike/walking works incredibly well, everyone co-exists perfectly, without making any compromises. Obviously, this wouldn't happen without there having had been a concerted effort to build good multi-modal infrastructure nationwide for the last ~50 years, but it really pays off. The urban environment is really nothing like pretty much anywhere else.
It'd be more apt to group them on their own if anything, just as Dutch cities tend to have separate lanes for cyclists, drivers and pedestrians. At least for The Netherlands, cyclists often feel like a protected group both pedestrians and drivers have to pay attention to.
The latter is more apparent in old roads and areas where there's no clear distinction between road and sidewalk, where cars are generally not allowed but bicycles are. Watching for cyclists feels like playing Frogger at times. Also cases where cyclists just ignore pedestrians and expect priority, when it is obvious pedestrians have priority (zebra crossings, traffic lights).
The above does illustrate why cities made for walking alone and cities made for walking and cycling would or should differ.
It is becoming very clear from your comments you have not seen the thing you're criticizing, bur rather argue from a paradigm you're familiar with. So I am going to join the chorus here and advise you to visit a dutch city, so you can yourself experience that there's more than one design paradigm that is valid, when it comes to urban planning.
> You can't design a city for both walking and bicycles.
It seems more appropriate to me to say: You can't optimise a city for both walking and bicycles. You can certainly design it for both (and even public transport and cars), with the necessary trade-offs.
I think you're meandering a bit from the topic. Manhattan is not similar at all to Almere. Manhattan is filled with multi-use zoning and multiple modes of transportation options on every block, while still being highly walkable. It's also not a great biking city.
But while people ride bikes in both areas, it's a bit absurd for the article at hand to call Almere the "future of urban living".
As someone who's lived in cities inspired by Garden City, this looks very British (by their own admission) and extremely suburban. So I gotta agree with the parent's observation. The only difference being small streets which inherently slow traffic, and probably better bike and public transit infrastructure, but everywhere has good public transit if it's tiny now. The garden city movement was a giant compromise between city and rural life, almost by definition. This is one of the most suburban places I've ever seen, it just might be marginally more Dutch of one. There's literally a Dunkin' donuts, Starbucks, and Chanel store all within what looks like a place you drive or bike to to then walk around for a bit and leave, which to me is reminiscent of some places on the outskirts of L.A.
Seems like it would probably be better to just ride your bike to Amsterdam if what you want. On the other hand, that's just my observation. What did you get out of living there? Was it the quiet, or the parks? Did you meet people easily?
I was not a particular fan of Almere (please refer to jacquesm’s post on details), however, it being a Dutch city, various general benefits of Dutch city design and engineering also apply there - these are what I am really trying to point at.
Almere itself is rather boring and devoid of life. It’s simply artificial land reclaimed from the sea with no history or story to it.
I've never been there and was just making a quick assessment by Google Maps. It is nice that you can bike anywhere, but I'm mostly seeing residential neighborhoods (~10 blocks wide of identical row homes) pretty spaced out around a town center without amenities in their area.
So in terms of meeting someone for a coffee/meal/beer/event it looks like you'll have to hop on a bicycle unless you want to go on a 20-30 minute walk past monotonous homes. Which is not that different than suburbs anywhere else.
Of course there's going to be some level of separation between residential areas and other areas - but contrary to, for example the US, where you have to walk for miles or put your life in danger bicycling between a suburb and the city center - the distances are quite negligible and the space in between is friendly towards anything that is not a car.
Public transport intervals are measured in minutes, and unlike in the US, it not only connects the suburbs to the city center, but the suburbs to other suburbs as well.
Really, everything you want to do is doable and everywhere you want to go is reachable. I miss it.
Regarding coffee/meal/beer, there's little shops or cafes or restaurants mixed into the residential areas as well.
Yes, in the USA people choose between living in a city or suburb. If you pick suburb you need to use a car all the time or be on one of the few major rail lines. People are just bringing up how this design seem to capture some of the worst parts of suburb living while managing to doge the benefits of city living.
I guess so but I'm seeing 1-2 restaurants/bars in sub-neighborhoods that are about 1.5km wide.
I'm not saying the city is bad by any means, I'm just saying that it falls very short in what I would hope to be the "future of urban life". Maybe the future of smaller towns or exurbs. But there seems to be a lack of necessary dynamic spaces that change in character throughout the day as people flow in and out that you look for in great urban areas.
I mean, it is an experiment. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm sorry the BBC is dependent on clickbait titles, but Almere is really nothing too special as I have also mentioned in my original post referring to another users great post here. Some of these concepts have been in place in other cities around the Netherlands for a while, and (imo) work better there.
There is not much life going on in Almere, which might explain the lack of density of restaurants or whatever you see.
It's really just that Almere is artificial land reclaimed from the sea, so they have quite a lot of space there to experiment with their weird metal houses and green roofs. Almere is a little less dense than other cities nearby.
But that's exactly what you're missing. Hopping on a Dutch bicycle in a dutch city is like walking, but better. No helmet required. No hassle of dealing with cars trying to kill you. No pain from hunched over road bike posture. Just unlock your bike and go.
Walking in a urban area well designed for it also requires no helmet, no hassle of dealing with cars trying to kill you, and no pain from hunched over road bike posture. You also can stop and chat or pop into businesses easier and don't have to park or lock up your bike anywhere.
I love biking, but it's a bit shortsighted to think that bicycling in urban areas can replicate the same benefits of a city that is well designed for walking.
>I love biking, but it's a bit shortsighted to think that bicycling in urban areas can replicate the same benefits of a city that is well designed for walking.
That's exactly the point, in the Netherlands it can and does. Sometimes you walk, sometimes you cycle, it just depends on the context of your specific trip. (Are you going one place or many? Is the weather a bit cold today? Will it rain a lot later?). Both options are pretty much as good as each other.
Well my original larger point is that the city we're all discussing here is not walkable at all. And you can't make up for that by saying, "Well I know it's a 1.5km walk through identical rowhomes to the nearest pub, but the fact that you can bike there instead makes it the future of urban living."
Almere looks to be a commuter suburb to Amsterdam, where no culture, events, or urban life of any significance takes place. The fact that it is bikable is nice, but there are plenty of suburbs with well designed bike infrastructure. And that in no way does bikability supplant a well design urban area with residential, commercial, park, & event spaces combined together to create a dynamic living environment.
Almere is the Dutch equivalent of US suburbs I agree.
Obviously America is bloody BIG compared to the Netherlands and the distance between Almere and Amsterdam is smaller so you can use a bicycle. But the concept is the same: a place where middle class people with families live and commute to the city for work and entertainment.
Almere is a one off because Flevoland was created. We don't have the space for more Almeres- and thank God for that.
I don't think anyone in this thread (at least anyone with experience of NL) is really in agreement with the parent article's point that Almere is particularly good. It's just an average-ish Dutch city.
But even average Dutch cities are much more walkable and bikeable than basically anywhere else.
Bikeable, yes. Walkable.. arguable. If you include public transport with walkable, sure. I haven't found other cities to be particularly less "walkable" than Dutch cities when you take away public transport and bikes.
It really depends on what one considers "walkable" if anything.
I think the question here that might lie at the core of the disagreement here might be: what advantages do you think a 'properly' walkable city has, that a city designed for both walking and cycling does not have? (i.e. if walking is not a goal in and of itself?)
Not exactly. Almere is not walkable but it is bikable. The main issue is whether or not bikability can supplant walkability in terms of providing everything an urban area needs to thrive.
For me, walking > biking > cars and you cannot create the same dynamic urban environment if an area is not walkable.
Yes, that's why I asked what a "walkable" city can provide in terms of providing everything an urban area needs to thrive, that a city with Almere's infrastructure can't?
The way I see it, the city centre is perfectly walkable and thus can provide everything needed (the reasons it doesn't have more to do with Almere's history), while being accessible to everyone in the "suburbs" with practically zero of the downsides of cars (accidents, pollution, noise pollution, etc.). So I'm really curious what you think Almere cannot provide due to its being so bikable.
I don't know if there is a language barrier going on but I'm explicitly saying that Almere is not a walkable city (in most of the residents being able to rely on walking to complete most of their daily tasks). The majority of neighborhoods where people live are ~10 blocks wide stretches of identical row homes pretty spaced out around a town center without amenities in their neighborhood.
There is a lack of necessary dynamic spaces that change in character throughout the day as people flow in and out that you look for in great urban areas. There is no real mix of residential, commercial, park, and event space that create a dynamic living environment.
We can keep going back and forth but it seems like you don't really understand the value of having an entire city be walkable, not the the city center. Because just having a walkable center is not a great urban city; it's the definition of poor planning reminiscent of suburbs all over the world.
> I don't know if there is a language barrier going on but I'm explicitly saying that Almere is not a walkable city
It feels like it :P I'm not asking if Almere is walkable or not, but why you think that it is bad that it is not.
In other words:
> We can keep going back and forth but it seems like you don't really understand the value of having an entire city be walkable
Indeed, I'd like you to explain this to me, especially in the context of a city that is bikable. What does it mean for an environment to be "more dynamic"? As far as I can see, people switch between residential and commercial areas, parks, and event spaces all the time - it's just that they take the bike to do so.
Ok, but I'm talking specifically about Almere. Which unless I'm massively mistaken, does not look walkable (in most of the residents being able to rely on walking to complete most of their daily tasks) at all.
I work for a company who's headquarters are there. It has great infras (railway, bicycle lanes), everything is modern but...it is pretty boring, lacking character.
You can't create and buy a thousand years of history.
Indeed, Almere is a sleeping city. Many inhabitants moved from Amsterdam to Almere since gentrification has made housing in Amsterdam almost unobtainable for people with a median income. Almere is comfortable enough and you can get by without a car. But the fun still is in Amsterdam only a half an hour train ride away. In the US it would be called a suburb of Amsterdam.
Of course there's still cars. They are just not used exclusively or frequently. If I remember the statistics correctly, in cities trips are made 30-45% by bicycle, 25-40% by public transport and the rest is cars.
Almere is very walkable, just a bit boring. Cycling is okay too, although it needs a bit of work I think. In regards to cycling, it is not that popular in Almere.
Not sure why, it could be that rudimentary, half of the people is upper middle class that is doing everything by car, the other half was born in another country and could more easily find a house in Almere compared to Amsterdam but they don't share the cycling culture much.
Edit: And every neighbourhood has supermarkets and small fastfood and bar locations. It is not that different from other dutch cities.
Sure, but it falls a bit short to be in the vision of "future of urban life". There are a sprinkling of commercial businesses in the gray areas of the map outside the city center. But not nearly enough to be considered urban by any means. And most of the areas where people live seem quite far away to be considered "walkable" from the commercial district.
I'm sure it's a nice place to live, but this is not the future of urban life.
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)).
I grew up in Hoofddorp, and it's fairly similar. Not a lot to do there. Rapid growing town where people sleep while they work elsewhere, although that has been changing. Also built in a polder, although a slightly older one than Almere.
And there's another road called Aresstraat that contains rows of totally unique houses, reportedly so up-and-coming architects can try out their weird ideas. Here's a funky looking tilted level "House in House" designed by Marc Koehler in 2011, which was just up for sale for around 700,000 EUR.
(Look up and down Aresstraat at all the different architectural styles! Down the street a bit it flashes back in time to street views from 2009, before most of the neighborhood was even built, showing the wide open sand peppered by a few houses and construction sites.)
>PROJECT ARCHITECT(S): Marc Koehler;
CLIENT: Privately;
BUILDER: Ubink and Co BV;
REALIZATION:
2011
>According to the architect, “House in house” is based on a reinterpretation of a traditional Dutch canal house with an attic. An arrangement of three 'boxes', which accommodate the necessary functions of sleeping, office and entrance, structures the interior space.
>The slanted attic window ensures a striking presence of the house in the streetscape. Here is the sleeping area with skylights to see stars and moon. The floor is placed horizontally, which is visible from the outside. The office is retracted on the first floor, with its own entrance via a spiral staircase. Living takes place in the residual space between the boxes. That space is a route with stairs that spiral upwards. What are usually the landings is here transformed into a series of spacious places, for hobbies, music, watching TV or eating. This design keeps living flexible and dynamic. The house is also equipped for new interpretations that people want to give to the concept of living.
Almere still does quite a bit of that, for instance, it was the first municipality where they allowed 'tiny houses', though, truth be told what they are selling those for you might as well buy a normal house.
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.
You weren’t wrong as a child - a city has a story and takes time to grow. Attempting to do it all at once gets a suburb or hotel at best - or maybe a Disneyland.
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)
Oh wow, indeed. In case you want to see them on streetview, the address is Pastelstraat 1, Almere. Here is a link: https://goo.gl/maps/mpXgFFd4kGLBinge9
People would probably get in trouble if they painted buildings in the colour as in the BBC article (people actually have gotten in problems with the city council, and at the very least it would be a Rijdende Rechter episode). Dutch people are allergic to bright colours or something.
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.
Its not made clear in the article but Almere is exactly one of these Brutalist cities. Its only since the late 90s or early 2000s they built the new 'city centre' which is an architects wonderland to start overcoming its monotony. There's still huge expanses of fairly simple, cheap, robust and boring 70s housing. This is close to the train station [0] and a typical suburban street [1]. Regardless of the buildings the Netherlands is the world leader in street design which makes this slightly less bleak than others of a similar era.
Not 1950s, but 1970s; Lelystad. They did not mention this at all in the article, which is quite a miss. Lelystad was the earlier experiment, a bit more up north in Flevoland. It is not growing anymore because some parts have failed and not many people move there anymore. Housing is still quite cheap, even now. Some neighbourhoods are quite good neighbourhoods, some are just awful with many residents living on wellfare, many people into drugs, etcetera. They didn't plan for mixing different cultures and classes in society, they planned for somewhat segregated neighbourhoods, which was a wrong choice. If there is a city in the Netherlands where you can guess income and status from the postal code, Lelystad is the place.
We still have to see what will happen to Almere, Almere Haven is just 30 years old. Not all parts there are good :) It is often 30 or 40 years, that a neighbourhood can go from good to bad, at least that is usual in the Netherlands.
No love for the roads, but many of those brutalist buildings in Birmingham are considered masterpieces of architecture. That's why they are listed. And I can't think of one from before 1960, either.
In particular, the floating houses they show. Not sure how that scales (or if we want it to scale) and for sure that is going to be an expensive maintenance option.
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.
Can't invoke history where there is none. Can't create history when most of the city is running off to other places for those "rustic, authentic" experiences. Can't build with a bit of chaos when prices have to be kept low, density high and requirements must be met which naturally prefers prefabs and cheap, stale-looking materials.
The criticisms are valid, but people haven't exactly given Almere a chance to be anything other than hypermodern, either.
If they had taken a more organic approach from day #1 I think that could have been avoided, but then the growth would have been much slower. It quite literally feels like a city designed behind a drafting table instead of something that matured over time. And that's not something that you can buff out a few decades later.
Yeah, you see almost the exact same in new streets and new sections of existing cities. They aren't made with the idea of being organic or adding a little chaos to simulate it. They are made with the intent of putting down prefabs in the cheapest way possible while still hitting requirements and budgets.
Every new project around say, Utrecht, has the same "hypermodern" feel to it. Little contrast, straight lines, visible patterns, flat and rectangular. They try to add a little more chaos to it (probably to avoid being compared to Almere) and some more greenery, but it's a far cry from the old European city look.
I've always wondering why can't some architects build small, twisted, imperfect, or maybe just small.
In particular, in Japan here are lots of older buildings or collections of buildings with tiny businesses. At some point developers come in, bulldoze the place, put up a high-rise building. The bottom 1-3 floors of the building have shops, but they are all 4x larger than the shops they displaced. The result is those shops end up being 90% chain stores such that there's now nothing drawing anyone to the new building (well, there are tenants).
My wish is that some architect would break with convention, build the bottom 1-3 floors with tiny spaces and then be hailed as the new fashion in architecture and see it spread.
Sure it's not the old imperfection, but I'd hope given smaller spaces you'd get the variety that was there before.
You should be able to move the timeline to 2022 and see it now.
Before there were 10 tiny indie businesses. Now there is 2 chain restaurants, 1 chain supermarket, one chain clothing store. (though at least they have 3 varying food trucks for lunch)
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.
The US has somewhat similar problem: flood insurance is heavily subsidized by the federal government so the market doesn't remotely factor in future flooding risks into housing prices.
There have recently been plans to raise prices but since Florida is such an important state to Federal elections there's a massive political hurdle
No, that's not what would happen. There are a great many secondary and tertiary systems in place, a breach in one place would not automatically flood the whole country, though of course if you lived in the area just behind the breach it would be a major problem. NL has lived with water long enough that the risks are reasonably well understood. Of course nature can still surprise you, the intensity increase of especially rain has caused some pretty serious problems in recent memory.
But even though we occasionally have a dike that fails something at the level of 1953 isn't going to happen 'just like that', though you can never entirely rule out the possibility.
Much more money has gone into water management since then, it is our 'Los Alamos', special water management taxes have been used for massive investments into infrastructure including pumps, dikes, flood barriers and all kinds of less visible work. It isn't perfect, but it is really quite good and I would much rather live here than a few hundred kilometers upstream during a heavy rain season. At least we are no longer in denial that water management is something that you postpone until after the flood.
Does the Netherlands export their knowledge of handling below sea level engineering? With coasts around the world more prone to flooding it seems like it could be a lucrative industry
One interesting bit about the Kansai Airport work was that the Dutch advised the Japanese to leave the reclaimed land untouched for a while (20 years or so) so it could settle, the Japanese ignored the advice because they had run the numbers and realized dealing with the damage from the settling was more profitable.
We're cheap, it's a local joke that copper wire was invented by two Dutch traders fighting over a single coin, I think the idea of wasting good materials on unstable ground just didn't sit right with the Dutch engineers but the Japanese had no problem with it at all. I wonder how the Japanese look at this today from a financial perspective.
Not sure what the downvotes are for. I live here and I worry about what happens if I buy a new house (which is ridiculously expensive nowadays — like 3x-4x more expensive than just 5 years ago) — will I be able to sell it in 30 years when people start worrying about 30% of the country flooding in another 30 years? It's not some nutjob idea that only I have, the newspapers have written about how the market currently completely ignores the issue: https://www.trouw.nl/duurzaamheid-natuur/wanneer-zullen-klim... In my pension plans I already planned for the worse by assuming that my house will be devalued by 50% rather than having risen in value.
jacquesm seems to believe that we have a solution. That's not the sentiment being brought forward by the newspapers. Even reputable newspapers are like "this time we're really screwed, we can't win this one". I'm not a water management expert so I don't know any better than what I hear, but I've yet to hear from someone authoritative that it's going to be okay — the authorities just seem to be quiet on this issue. That really doesn't help me with my long-term plans.
If you're nervous about this go visit the Delta works and the various storm barriers, then look at them when there is a really bad storm and check the margins. You'll be fine, unless you will live to be 300 or so, on those timescales anything could happen. But the next 100 years are definitely covered.
I would not buy anything in Venice though, they will likely be done for and we'll remember it like we remember Atlantis. Money + engineering are a pretty good combination, similar to how Japan manages to do quite well in spite of very bad and regular earthquakes.
I think the way the Dutch deal with water is probably best described as symbiotic, we don't force it but we guide it and when we really can't do it any other way we'll bring out the pumps.
Oh, that's another one for your list of stuff to visit: the pump cassettes next to IJmuiden's Northern most locks, those things are straight from a SF movie, 260 cubic meters per second.
This isn't as big a problem as some make it out to be. The dikes have always been a porous solution, not perfect, 'kwel' (water that seeps under the dike) has been there as long as there are dikes. But concentric circles of staged dikes are one way in which you could deal with this. It will require massive geo engineering but nothing on a scale that the Dutch have not done before.
There are some voices that NL will have to abandon terrain, I think we'll see the exact opposite: more terrain will be created with the express goal of being used as basins for increased control over water. The important bit when you construct dikes is the delta between the water table on one side of the dike and on the other and we already have areas where there are three such dikes in a row to be able to deal with fairly extreme differences in water levels.
If you drive or cycle in the North of the country every now and then you'll find yourself crossing through a dike with a concrete lintel built into the dike body, this is where in the case of high water the dike can very rapidly be closed again and turned into a functioning part of the water defenses.
Those dikes are called 'sleeping' dikes they are still there and ready to be activated but normally they are transparent to traffic.
Other evidence that this can be done is that there are some massive artificial lakes constructed all over the world with dams that have a 'head' that is much higher than anything that NL will ever have to deal with.
A bigger problem than keeping the sea out will be to deal with the rain water coming into the Netherlands by way of the very large rivers. These carry massive flow (from a total area much, much larger than that of the country itself) during some times of the year and to accommodate that flow and ensure that the land behind the river dikes doesn't flood is - in my opinion - a much bigger problem when the sea level rises. During some storms you see a reversal in the flow of the rivers in the delta.
Several interesting constructs are located near Rotterdam and Zeeland, transparent to shipping but it can be closed quickly if such reverse flow threatens the land:
Countries with mountains are much more vulnerable against climate change and the extreme weather. Last extreme rain took away, via the rivers, many houses in Germany. Whereas The Netherlands is relatively safe as we are more downstream and also more prepared against river floods.
To some extent. There are some relatively narrow passages that have to carry extreme amounts of water, mostly in the south of the country where the river banks are steep. As soon as the river breaks out of that limited area it will flood the surrounding countryside which isn't all that well prepared.
You could see this during the flooding that destroyed those houses in Germany, it didn't go much better in NL, but fortunately on a smaller scale.
Still, you are right that 'upstream' this problem can get much worse due to terrain geometry and lack of preparation, as well as building into areas that really belong to the river.
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.
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."
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.