A Dutch city testing the future of urban life

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)

and there I was thinking this would be about floriade [0], which happens to be in Almere as well.

[0] https://floriade.com/en/

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)).

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