The land here was under water until 1968. The Southern Flevoland polder, an ambitious slice of the Zuiderzee Works, was pumped dry through the 1960s and left to settle. Within a decade the first house was finished. The earliest families who moved into De Werven, Haven's first neighbourhood, were genuine pioneers. They watched trees take root in soil that had been seabed within living memory. They watched the rest of the district go up around them, cul-de-sac by cul-de-sac, each cluster of houses arranged around a small park, every neighbourhood designed so children could walk to school without crossing a busy road. The architectural goal, written into the master plan, was a model city. Everything that came later in Almere would be measured against this beginning.

Walk through Almere Haven today and the most striking thing is what you do not see. There are no main streets pushing through the residential areas. All the local roads dead-end. A ring road, well screened by trees, loops around the borough like a moat of its own and provides the only car access in and out. The result is a community where children play in the streets because the streets go nowhere except home. Almost every house has a view of greenery. Forests of poplars press in from the edges: Beginbos to one side, Waterlandsebos to the other, full of buzzards and foxes and small deer and owls. A bus rapid transit line threads a long loop through every neighbourhood, with a stop near almost every door. The traffic noise that defines older Dutch towns is largely absent here. So is the traffic.

Haven has a small working harbour and a marina opening onto the Gooimeer. The mall at the centre of the borough deliberately echoes a small Dutch downtown rather than a strip of big-box retail. The first permanent building inside it was a multifunctional centre called De Roef, long since reinvented as a clothing store. The first school, De Bijenkorf, opened in 1978 in De Werven and slowly emptied as younger families moved to newer parts of Almere. In December 1993, before the school could be quietly closed, someone pushed firecrackers through its mailbox and the building burned down. The police identified those responsible but never prosecuted. The school was never rebuilt. By the early 2000s houses had been built over the site and no trace of it remains.

Haven's defenders will tell you it is the most idealistic district in the most idealistic city the Netherlands has ever built. The plans for Almere as a whole soon ran into pressures the pioneers had not anticipated: a target population pushed higher, then higher again, land values that rose, compromises that the original design did not contemplate. Later districts of Almere added density, glass towers, and bolder architecture. Haven mostly kept its original shape. The clustered houses, the little parks, the disappearance of cars into the periphery, the easy access to forest and water, are still here. So is the slight unreality of a town that turned fifty before any of its residents had grandparents who remembered the land as dry.

What Almere Haven cannot manufacture is centuries. The canal-house facades along the Kerkgracht are facades. The brick patterns and street widths borrow from older Dutch towns whose layered history they cannot share. To some visitors this feels uncanny: a stage set inhabited by real lives. To the families who arrived in the seventies and stayed, it feels like home, and home is what the architects promised. The buzzards still circle. The bus still loops. Children still ride bikes down streets that lead nowhere except to other children. The Future, in Dutch planning, was supposed to look like this.