Retired City Planner
According to Jan Frans de Hartog, water cannot be destroyed. No expensive housing can be easily built on top of the water, so making a lake in the middle of a city will lead to inhabitants always seeing the horizon above the lake. A story of building Almere Haven from one of the city’s founding fathers. A memory of young people with little experience but lots of enthusiasm, discovering that the polder’s emptiness is a paradise for city planning.
Retired Civil Engineer and soil researcher
Imagine you arrive at a huge empty landscape without any buildings and only sand and some vegetation. What kind of city will you build in this space? With Bouwe we talk about the soil that is the base for the city of Almere and the work of a civil engineer. What is the role of water in de engineering of a new city?