On the early drawings, the planners called it Zuidweststad: South West City, a working title for a place no one yet lived in. In the 1970s the name Almere was chosen instead. It came from the medieval lake Almere, the earlier name of the body of water that would later become the Zuiderzee and later still the IJsselmeer. So a town born of drained sea took the old name of the sea itself. The first house went up in 1976 in a neighbourhood called Oostvaardersdiep, though it was the next district, Almere Haven, that grew into a recognisable borough first. While construction continued, the new community was governed not by a mayor but by a Landdrost, an old Dutch title revived for the unusual job of administering a place still half mud and scaffolding.

Almere did not grow outward from a historic core because there was no historic core. Instead it was assembled, deliberately, from districts and boroughs spaced across the polder. Almere Haven was the first, on the south coast, modelled as a small-scale ideal town. Almere Stad became the centre, splitting eventually into Centrum, Oost, and West. Almere Buiten and Almere Hout extended further across the polder. Almere Poort opened in 2005 as the gateway facing Amsterdam across the IJmeer. Almere Pampus is still being designed. The result is a city of pieces, knit together by separated infrastructure for cars, bikes, and buses, with the A6 and A27 motorways running through and the Flevolijn railway, opened in stages between 1987 and 1988, linking Almere to Weesp and Lelystad in a single seamless commuter line.

Almere was built to relieve postwar Amsterdam, which by the 1960s was running out of room. The first plans imagined it as a town of multiple centres rather than a single downtown. That idea was eventually abandoned in favour of neighbourhoods like Tussen de Vaarten and a more conventional central district, but the city kept experimenting. The Stripheldenbuurt, inaugurated in 2004 at the suggestion of the Amsterdam comics dealer Kees Kousemaker, gave every street a comic-strip name: Asterix, Donald Duck, the lot. The Regenboogbuurt allowed striking, individually designed houses where earlier districts had insisted on uniformity. International architects sketched towers along the Weerwater. Each district is in some sense a hypothesis. A few of them have aged well. A few have not. The city as a whole keeps building, watching what works, and shifting its plans accordingly.

A city built from scratch needs people who are willing to be early. The first arrivals in the 1970s and 1980s came largely from Amsterdam, lured by larger houses and quiet streets. Later waves brought families from across the Netherlands and from former Dutch colonies, particularly Suriname. The current mayor, Hein van der Loo, took office in 2023; the office has changed hands more times since 1984 than the office of mayor in most older Dutch cities has in a century. The notable residents page reads like a snapshot of recent Dutch popular culture: the kickboxer Remy Bonjasky, the rapper Ali B, the field hockey silver medallist Maartje Scheepstra, the footballer Frank Rijkaard who would later coach Barcelona, the young winger Sergino Dest who plays for the United States. Most of them grew up in a city younger than they are.

From the air, Almere reveals its origins. The straight edges where polder meets water. The rectangular fields giving way to neat residential grids. The Floriade horticultural exhibition site of 2022 along the Weerwater, with its planned grid of green squares. The forests planted on purpose. There are still empty fields earmarked for districts not yet built. There are still neighbourhoods where the trees are too young to throw real shade. The Netherlands has been making land out of water for a thousand years. Almere is the most recent and most complete answer to a question Dutch engineers have been asking since the Middle Ages: if we drain it, can we live there? After fifty years, with a quarter of a million people on what used to be the bottom of the Zuiderzee, the answer is yes.