Almere had been envisioned in the 1970s as a relatively compact satellite to Amsterdam. By the late 1990s the central government and the municipality were thinking on a much larger scale. Almere's population target was being revised upward, its role as a counterweight to Amsterdam recast more ambitiously, and the western edge of the city, facing the IJmeer and the lights of Amsterdam-Oost, looked like the obvious place to grow. Almere Poort, literally the gate, was the answer. It would be the front door rather than the back garden, a district that introduced itself to Amsterdam across the water. The first residents arrived in the mid-2000s. Construction continues today.

Almere's older districts used the Dutch word wijk for neighbourhood. Poort decided on kwartier, quarter, and gave each one a theme. Homeruskwartier puts buyers on plots they can build themselves, on streets named for figures from the Iliad and the Odyssey: the most experimental piece of free-form Dutch housing policy in a generation. Europakwartier rises in higher-density apartment blocks on either side of the railway, its streets a small geography lesson. Columbuskwartier takes the explorers. Olympiakwartier and an attached office park were planned around the station as the district's prestige centre. Duin offers beach condominiums and artificial dunes near the Almeerderstrand. Cascadepark, a green spine between Homerus and Europa, was planted with its first trees in 2008. The themes are heavy-handed in a way Dutch planning sometimes is and sometimes is not, but they have given Poort a personality its older sibling, Almere Haven, never tried for.

Poort ends at the water. The Almeerderstrand, an artificial beach on the IJmeer, forms the western boundary of the borough, the municipality, and the entire province of Flevoland. On warm summer weekends families spread blankets on sand that was engineered rather than deposited, looking out across a lake that until 1932 was the open Zuiderzee, connected to the North Sea, and until 1968 still being drained. Behind the beach, the Marina Muiderzand fills with sailing boats and motor cruisers, and a coastal zone called the Kustzone is being developed with hotels, restaurants, and apartments. A former event station, Almere Strand, served the area until 2012, when its iron platforms were dismantled. The permanent Almere Poort railway station, on the Flevolijn, opened in December 2012 and has anchored the district ever since.

What sets Poort apart from the older boroughs is not just its newness but its texture. Almere Stad and Almere Haven were built around large-scale, repeating single-family housing developments arranged according to a common plan. Poort allows something looser. Self-built houses sit alongside dense apartment blocks. Land parcels are sold for private development. The A6 motorway runs along the southern border with a dedicated exit at Poortdreef, the Hogering runs along the east, and the Flevolijn slices diagonally across the borough, making Poort one of the most accessible districts in Almere even though it is the newest. The commercial zones, Hogekant for small craft firms, Middenkant for mid-sized businesses, Lagekant for larger international service companies, line up in a careful hierarchy that is very Dutch and very planned.

If Almere Haven was built in 1976 as a model of the careful, equitable, low-rise Dutch new town, Poort was built thirty years later as something almost opposite: dense in places, themed, market-driven, deliberately varied, oriented across the water toward Amsterdam rather than inward toward the polder. Both still belong to the same city. Both are part of the same long Dutch experiment in inventing places from nothing. The contrast between the borough's harbour and its gate, between the pioneer ideal of the seventies and the metropolitan ambition of the 2010s, says more about how Dutch urbanism has changed than any official document could.