Ommoord's 15 sub-neighbourhoods read like a botanist's index. Bloemenbuurt for flowers. Heidebuurt for heather. Mossenbuurt for moss. Klaverbuurt for clover, Doornenbuurt for thorns, Varenbuurt for fern. The detached houses, where people are more likely to own their homes, line the streets named for plants - and notably, those street names drop the usual Dutch suffix 'straat'. You don't live on Rose Street here; you live on Roses. Inside the great square of avenues, the high-rises take over. Their addresses bear the names of Nobel Prize winners, most ending in 'plaats' meaning square, though many of those squares are actually parking lots. It is the kind of nomenclature only a planning committee could love, and the residents long ago worked out a different system: tell people which metro station you live near.

Next to a parking lot on President Wilsonweg stands a large wooden chicken. She started life as an advertisement for De Blijde Wei - 'the Happy Meadow' - a children's farm tucked behind the apartment blocks. But the community adopted her. De Ommoordse Kip became a landmark, then a mascot, then something stronger than either: a piece of shared identity that football hooligans periodically painted orange during European championships, and that the neighbourhood patiently restored each time. There is something very Dutch about this. A planned community designed on a drawing board ends up loving the one piece of folk art nobody planned. The chicken has outlasted bus routes, library reorganisations, and the whole borough-level government that once ran the place.

The Calandlijn metro arrives on elevated tracks, splits, and serves Ommoord with four stations: Graskruid, Romeynshof, Binnenhof, Hesseplaats. Two lines run right down the centre of the district, and from the windows of an apartment on the fourteenth floor you can watch them slide past like silver beetles in a model. The crossings used to be dangerous - people would step out after one train passed, not seeing a second train arriving from behind it - and several were killed before the signalling was overhauled. From Binnenhof, the terminus, you can reach Rotterdam Centraal in about ten minutes. From there, Utrecht in thirty, Amsterdam in seventy. Ommoord was built to be a self-contained world, but it was also built to be wired into everywhere else.

Walk through Ommoord on foot and the planning becomes legible. Cars are pushed to the outside roads; the inside of each block belongs to pedestrians and cyclists, with their own network of paths threading between the towers. During rush hour, a bicycle beats a car for almost any errand - parking alone takes longer than the ride. It is, as much as anywhere in the Netherlands, infrastructure designed around the assumption that you do not need to drive. Whether the district fully lives up to that assumption is a more complicated question. Some elderly residents avoid walking after dark. Parking lots fill past capacity after office hours. The mix of incomes that the original plan envisioned has shifted, as social housing always shifts. But the bones of the place - the green corridors, the metro spine, the four-avenue square - remain almost exactly as drawn.

From above, Ommoord sits at the inland end of the Rotterdam conurbation, just south of the slow brown line of the Rotte river. To the north lie the recreational waters of Lage Bergsche Bos and a curious artificial ski hill built on a former landfill at Bergschenhoek. To the southwest, the cranes and refineries of the world's largest seaport begin to fan out toward the North Sea. The new A16 motorway extension now slides past on the western edge, completing a road network argued over since the 1970s. Coordinates 51.96°N, 4.55°E. Best viewed at 3,000-5,000 feet. Nearest airport is Rotterdam The Hague (EHRD), about 10 km southwest; Amsterdam Schiphol (EHAM) lies 60 km to the north.