The Evolving European City - Almere: 2 Almere

By Giuseppe Marinoni and Giovanni Chiaramone

In 'The Evolving European City', renowned urban planner and architect Giuseppe Marinoni and eminent photographer Giovanni Chiaramonte assemble a breathtaking presentation of cities that have undergone profound change in order to combat congestion, pollution, and the unsightliness of industrial wastelands. Marinoni conveys a profound belief that unified urban plans under the direction of one creative vision can bring an enhanced quality of life to city dwellers, provide them with the means to move easily to and from home, work, and at the same time ensure environmental sustainability. Chiaramonte, through his exquisite photographs of sites in the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy, and the United Kingdom, offers readers visual evidence of the architectural and infrastructure accomplishments of European urban projects over the last two decades. Beautifully presented in eye-opening detail, The Evolving European City is a timely representation of environmental sustainability and social progress in the modern age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SMOwnPublishing
• Release date: Jun 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9788899165499

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Almere

Location on the map

On the edges of the Randstad, the city of Almere extends over a territory of 120 km2, snatched from the sea by vast works of reclamation. In 1972, sociologists, ecologists, architects, economists, and landscape architects, organized into an interdisciplinary group, began to plan the new city by examining the new town of Milton Keynes north of London and the residential suburbs at the doors of the great American cities. Building a city for three hundred thousand inhabitants in a few years is surely a complex enterprise, rather risky and with uncontrollable final results. Consequently and conveniently, a morphological structure is placed at the cornerstone of the operation as a polynuclear system of growth over time, clearly revealing the skepticism in the ability of the forecast procedures to program and globally control a decades-long urban development.

As it took shape, the unfolding of the project strategically wove together a comprehensive planning model with the empiricism of incremental adjustments. Arranged like an amphitheatre, around the lake basin of the Weerwater and along the connecting highway and railway lines to the other cities of