With a hotchpotch of neighbourhoods focused on innovative architecture, sustainability and social enrichment, can Almere give us a glimpse of what living in cities could be like in years to come?

随着各种社区注重创意建筑、可持续性、社会富足，阿尔梅勒能否让我们窥见到未来的城市生活？

A little over a century ago, anyone looking out over the water on the eastern edges of Amsterdam on a clear day would have seen Dutch fishermen hauling their nets from the sea. Today the view is very different – more than 200,000 people now live in a spot that was once covered by the waters of the IJsselmeer, an inland sea created when the opening into the North Sea was cut off by a long dyke in the 1930s.

一个多世纪以前，人们在晴天俯瞰阿姆斯特丹的东部沿海时，会看到荷兰渔民从大海中拉网的身影。如今的景象大不一样，20多万人居住在艾瑟尔湖曾经淹没的地方。20世纪30年代，北海入口被一条长堤坝截断后形成了这条内海。

The settlement created where water once lay is Almere – the newest city in the Netherlands, growing from non-existence in the 1970s to the country's eighth-largest city today. If Atlantis was the ancient city myth says disappeared beneath the waves, Almere is the modern riposte, risen from the sea. And it has done so as perhaps the world's most experimental city, realising differing expressions of the concept of "design for living".

这片曾经被海水淹没的居住地是荷兰的最新城市阿尔梅勒，从20世纪70年代的空白发展成为当今荷兰第八大城市。如果亚特兰蒂斯是传说中消失在洋底的古城，那么阿尔梅勒就是从大洋中兴起的现代都市。它可能是世界上最具实验性的城市，各种表现形式无不体现出“设计以生活为本”的理念。

Many of Almere's expanding array of distinctive neighbourhoods provide a forum for both urban innovation and individual personal expression. Over the past 15 years, for example, the Homeruskwartier neighbourhood has provided a canvas for around 1,500 self-builders to give free rein to their imagination, creating a cornucopia of individualized homes set within tree-lined boulevards, parkland and waterways, accompanied by local schools, markets and community facilities.

阿尔梅勒的独特社区越来越多，为城市创新和个人的自我表达提供了平台。举例来说，过去十五年来，Homeruskwartier社区为大约1500名自己动手的建筑师提供了画卷，让他们自由放飞想象力，在林荫大道、绿地、运河的环绕下，创造出大量的个性化房屋，并配有当地的学校、市场、社区设施。

The district manager behind the first decade of this blast of people-led architectural self-expression was Dutch experimental architect Jacqueline Tellinga. "Designers agreed on one thing: Almere should not be high-rise, anonymous, monotonous," she says. For her, the huge diversity of houses all across Almere would simply not have been possible if conventional developers had been in charge.

在这场以人为本的建筑自我表达潮流中，最初十年的区域经理是荷兰实验派建筑师杰奎琳·泰林。“设计师达成的共识是：阿尔梅勒不应该高楼林立、千篇一律、单调乏味”，她说道。她认为，如果将阿尔梅勒的管理交给因循守旧的开发商，那么整个阿尔梅勒的高度多样化房屋根本无从实现。

Within this general freedom of development, some areas of Almere channel intriguing specific themes. In Regenboogbuurt (Rainbow Neighbourhood), kaleidoscope colours rule – tall curvy yellow houses butt up against aquamarine semis and bright red residential towers (the Rode Donders), which reference grain silos once typical of Dutch agricultural landscapes.

在这种自由发展的大环境下，阿尔梅勒的某些地区展现出有趣的独特主题。Regenboogbuurt（彩虹社区）以五颜六色为主题：高大黄色的曲线形房屋、海蓝色的半独立式住宅、亮红色的公寓大楼（红色闪电）交相辉映。后者的灵感源于谷仓，它们曾经是荷兰典型的农业景观。
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The split level architecture in Almere makes use of flat roofing to create green spaces for residential apartments

阿尔梅勒的错层式建筑利用屋顶平台为公寓打造绿色空间。

De Fantasie (The Fantasy), meanwhile, is an enclave featuring eye-popping buildings that won a 1982 design competition setting radical rules for its entrants. These included banning any use of foundations in their construction and rewarding designs that played ingeniously with materials and internal living spaces. The cluster of remarkable homes that resulted now attracts architecture fans from around the world to admire the contrasting results – from the Paneelhuis's duo of fairytale-like geometric thatched houses fashioned in startling triangular planes, to the Psyche house which integrates materials as different as mahogany, glass and aluminium into a structure featuring a wing-like living space supported by bent column trusses.

De Fantasie（幻想社区）是一块以令人惊叹的建筑为特色的飞地，曾在1982年的设计大赛中获奖。比赛规则很极端，包括建筑物禁用地基，只有将材料和内部生活空间巧妙结合的作品才能获奖。如今这些令人赞叹的获奖住宅吸引着世界各地的建筑爱好者前来膜拜风格迥异的获奖作品：Paneelhuis——童话般的拥有茅草屋顶的几何体并联板房，以惊人的平面三角形塑造外观。心灵家园——该建筑融合红木、玻璃、铝等迥异材料，以弯杆型桁架为支撑，拥有翅膀形的生活空间。

But cities are not just inhabited by those with the wherewithal to build such outlandish structures. The Almere Poort district features low-cost homes designed to offer quality housing designed by local architects for families with annual household incomes below €20,000 (£16,800/$22,000). But rather than greying tower blocks and crumbling neighbourhoods that accompany the cheapest housing in most global cities, Almere Poort combines this affordability with an uplifting quality of life thanks to a natural setting including woodland and a fine neighbourhood beach.

但是，城市里不光住着有能力建造这种奇特建筑的人。Poort社区以廉价住房为特色，旨在为年收入低于20000欧元（16800英镑/22000美元）的家庭提供由当地建筑师设计的优质住房。在全球大多数城市里，最廉价的住房意味着灰白色的公寓大楼和破旧的社区，但阿尔梅勒的Poort社区兼具经济适用性和高品质生活，这得益于林地和优美的海滨等自然环境。

"It's the interplay between experiments and proven techniques that makes Almere such a fascinating model for others," says Winy Maas, founding partner of Rotterdam-based global architecture and urbanism practice MVRDV, whose Almere 2030 masterplan provides a loose template to inspire the city's development over the next decade, working in partnership with those who live here.

“实验与成熟技术的相互作用使阿尔梅勒成为有吸引力的楷模”，总部位于鹿特丹的全球建筑与城市规划事务所MVRDV的创始合伙人韦尼·马斯说道。MVRDV制定的“阿尔梅勒2030总体规划”提供了自由模板，旨在未来十年与当地居民合作促进这座城市的发展。

"We don't believe that any city should be the result of the vision of just one person or one organisation," says Maas.

“我们认为，城市不应该只是某个人或某个组织想象出来的产物”，马斯说道。

The birth of a new city

新城市的诞生
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The creation of the world's largest artificial island – christened Flevoland, and covering just under 1,000 sq km (386 sq miles) – at the end of the 1960s provided the land where Almere sits, with the first inhabitants arriving in the late 1970s. It provided the nucleus of the municipality formally established in 1984. The pioneering new city took its name from the early medi Dutch word for the inland sea from which its land was created.

20世纪60年代末，世界最大的弗莱福兰人工岛诞生，面积不到1000平方公里（386平方英里），它为阿尔梅勒提供了土地。20世纪70年代末，第一批居民到达阿尔梅勒，为1984年正式成立的市政府提供了核心。这座开创性新城市的命名源于中世纪早期的荷兰语“内海”，即这片土地的诞生之源。
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The principal practical reason for Almere's creation was to relieve housing pressure in one of the most densely populated parts of the Netherlands, providing a blank canvas in an unspoilt natural setting to relieve cramming more people into the two principal nearby cities, Amsterdam and Utrecht.

事实上，创造阿尔梅勒主要是为了缓解荷兰一个人口最密集地区的住房压力，提供一个自然环境未受破坏的空白画卷，从而缓解周边这两座大城市的人满为患，即阿姆斯特丹和乌特勒支。


The Regenboogbuurt in Almere features brightly coloured residential buildings including Rode Donders, which echo Dutch grain silos that once dotted the landscape

阿尔梅勒的Regenboogbuurt社区以颜色鲜艳的住宅建筑为特色，包括“红色闪电”，它借鉴了荷兰曾经的风景线谷仓。

For initial inspiration, Almere's city planners looked in part to a model provided by a movement that took shape in England in the early 20th Century – exemplified by planned new towns like Letchworth Garden City and Welwyn Garden City to the north of London. The blueprints for these came from a visionary British urban planner with a name like a Dickens character.

在某种程度上，阿尔梅勒城市规划者的灵感源于20世纪初英国兴起的一场运动，以伦敦北方规划的新城为代表，诸如莱奇沃思花园城、韦林花园城。蓝图出自一位远见卓识的英国城市规划师，城市名称类似狄更斯笔下的人物。

"Almere was a variation on the Garden City principles of Ebenezer Howard," explains JaapJan Berg, a researcher in urban planning with ties to the influential International New Town Institute. He described Almere in his 2007 Dutch-language book Adolescent Almere as a place of "ideals, ambitions, guts and experiments".

“阿尔梅勒体现出埃比尼泽·霍华德的‘花园城’理念”，与国际新市镇研究中心关系密切的城市规划研究人员贾普扬·伯格说道。他在2007年出版的荷兰语著作《少年阿尔梅勒》中，将阿尔梅勒描述为一个充满“理想、雄心、勇气、实验”的地方。
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The ideals of Garden Cities include an abundance of living space, up-to-date housing designs, schools and health care centres integral to neighbourhoods, good public transport, and short distances between living areas and green surroundings.

“花园城”理念包括充裕的生活空间、时髦的住宅设计、配有学校和保健中心的社区、便捷的公交、生活区靠近绿化环境。

It was an approach mocked at the time by some Dutch town planners used to ideas of high-rise modern city living which dominated much post-war planning. One leading 1970s architect, Carel Weeber, described the first parts of Almere to be built as examples of Nieuwe Truttigheid ("New Foolishness").

当时有些荷兰的城市规划师嘲笑“花园城”理念，他们习惯的是以高层建筑为特点、主导战后多数城市规划的现代都市生活理念。卡洛·韦伯是20世纪70年代著名的建筑师，他将阿尔梅勒的第一批待建区域称为“现代蠢事”。
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The initial template for Almere was laid down by the world-renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, via his award-winning practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture. Koolhaas began by creating a distinctive three-tier city centre. This concentrated car parking underground, complemented by ground-level shopping and leisure facilities now rendered free from traffic. The triple stack design was completed by an upper layer of planted green spaces on the rooftops of the ground-level buildings, on which houses and small blocks of apartments sit.

阿尔梅勒的最初框架是由著名的荷兰建筑师雷姆·库哈斯及其获奖的“大都会建筑事务所”制定的。库哈斯先是设计了一种独特的三层结构市中心。停车场集中在地下，地面辅以购物和娱乐设施，现已解决交通堵塞问题。三层结构的顶层是高层建筑屋顶上栽种的绿地，这里建有房屋和小型公寓楼。
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Nature was also integrated from the start into a city in the shape of over 40km (25 miles) of coastline and 400km (249 miles) of dedicated cycle paths. "Residents mostly live within five minutes of parks, cycle paths and public transportation," says Liesbeth Hollander, a spokesperson for the Almere's tourist board. "People often mention it as an important reason why they appreciate living in Almere so much."

自然环境从一开始就融入到城市中，包括40多公里（25英里）海岸线和400多公里（249英里）自行车专用道。“居民所住的地方距离公园、自行车道、公交系统通常不超过五分钟路程”，阿尔梅勒旅游局发言人利斯贝特·霍兰德说道。“人们经常提到，这正是他们喜欢居住在阿尔梅勒的一个重要原因”。

The freedom provided to Almere's residents to play a key role in the development and appearance of their city has also caused raised eyebrows. When MVRDV first presented their vision of Almere as a sort of "open source" collection of scattered resident-designed neighbourhoods, architectural and urban planning peers at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, Winy Maas says some European colleagues viewed the idea as so radical to be almost insane. Some Latin American colleagues, meanwhile, warned of negative parallels between the free rein being given to residents and what they saw as the chaos of places like the higgledy-piggledy favelas of Brazil.

阿尔梅勒的居民可以在城市发展与面貌方面发挥关键作用，这种自由也令人惊讶。在2012威尼斯建筑双年展上，建筑设计事务所MVRDV首次向建筑和城市规划同行描述了阿尔梅勒的愿景：一片由居民设计的“开源”分散化社区。威尼·马斯说，当时一些欧洲同行认为该想法太极端，简直是疯了。与此同时，一些拉丁美洲同行警告说，允许居民自由发挥无异于他们眼中的混乱之地，就像杂乱的巴西贫民窟。

A living experiment

生活实验

Ask Maas whether Almere is basically an experimental city and he gives a nuanced response. "Almere is not an experimental city exactly, but a city in which experiments can happen," he says. "The difference is subtle but important. The city has always incorporated tried-and-tested features of urbanism – multiple cores, strong transport connections, and so on. But we find ways to experiment within those frxworks. Or more importantly, we find ways to let others experiment."

当马斯被问到阿尔梅勒是不是一座实验城市时，他给出了微妙的回答。“阿尔梅勒不是一座实验城市，但它是一座可能发生实验的城市”，他说道。“两者之间存在微妙但重要的差别。城市往往拥有久经考验的城市主义特征——多重核心、强大的交通连接等等。但我们想办法在这些框架下实验，或者更重要的是，我们想办法让别人实验”。

Part of that process has drawn on a revolutionary approach to urban planning using game play – the brainchild of Ekim Tan, founder of a game-based initiative called Play the City, created in 2009 as a product of her PhD research at Delft University of Technology. The game can be created in different versions tailormade to explore the practicalities of locations with differing characters and needs.

在这一过程中，我们采用了一种革命性的城市规划方法，即利用游戏。2009年，《Play the City》游戏项目创始人埃基姆·塔恩提出这一想法，并成为他在荷兰代尔夫特理工大学的博士研究成果。这款游戏能创建多个版本，专门用于探索不同地点的可行性，每个地点拥有不同的角色和需求。


Almere has been built on land reclaimed from the IJsselmeer inland sea and some neighbourhoods feature floating villas

阿尔梅勒的土地来自艾瑟尔内海的围海造地，某些社区以水上别墅为特色。

Play the City brings together groups of locals to make choices about various aspects of land use and infrastructure design within an interactive game environment, which requires compromises to be made at different stages for the game to progress. This approach aims to discover what city dwellers actually want in their living environment, while also sparking collaborative decision-making and conflict resolution using cards, boards and interactive videos.

游戏《Play the City》将当地人团结起来，在游戏的互动环境中对土地使用和基建设计的方方面面做出决定，只有在各个阶段做出妥协，游戏才能继续下去。这种方法旨在探寻城市居民在生活环境中的实际需求，同时利用卡片、木板、互动视频来激发居民协同决策和解决争端的能力。
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Almere residents have played Tan's "game" regularly over the past decade to provide input into the evolution of different neighbourhoods – a process which also provides insights for urban planners like Tan, who get to see "which rules people used most, for which reason – or which rules they avoided or broke".

过去十年来，阿尔梅勒的居民经常玩塔恩的这款“游戏”，为各个社区的发展提供意见。塔恩等城市规划者也能从中发现“人们最常用哪些规则及其原因，或者他们避免或违反哪些规则”。

Take the use of Play the City to guide the evolution of the Almere district of Oosterwold, a unique area designed to encourage local food production. Around 60% of its area is set aside to support "urban agriculture", giving residents not only the physical and emotional benefits of harvesting their own food, but also cutting the climate-change impact of food miles.

例如，通过游戏《Play the City》引导Oosterwold特区的发展，该地区旨在促进当地粮食生产。大约60%土地被用来支持“城镇农业”，居民不仅从收获自己的粮食中获得身心益处，而且减少了食物里程对气候变化的影响。

Around 1,000 people came together for Play the City: Oosterwold in 2011, mixing local residents with farmers, Almere city planners, legal experts, and the Dutch national water board – insights from the latter being important in a nation mostly below sea-level. (Read more about the 1,000-year history of the Netherlands' water boards.)

2011年，游戏《Play the City: Oosterwold》约有1000个玩家，包括当地居民、农民、阿尔梅勒城市规划者、法律专家、荷兰国家水利委员会，后者的见解对于一个几乎低于海平面的国家来说很重要。（详情参阅荷兰水利委员会千年史）

Among outcomes from the game play was a clear wish by people to build their homes as near to water as possible – prompting the city authorities to amend a previous planning criteria about having a 2m (6.6ft) access strip on each side of every building plot. Players also found themselves guided by the game play into community compromises such things as road layout, after realising that everyone spreading their plots haphazardly would not work well.

其中一个游戏结局是人们明确希望，尽可能在靠近水的地方建造房屋，市政府为此修订了之前的规划标准，即在每块建筑用地的每一侧留有2米（6.6英尺）宽的通道。玩家还发现在游戏的引导下学会了社区妥协，以道路布局为例，大家认识到任意扩大自己的地盘没有好结果。

These citizen games also fed into MVRDV's masterplan. "We didn't really plan anything in concrete detail, but instead allowed residents to build their own neighbourhoods," says Maas. "In return they have more responsibility – to plan streets with their neighbours, to arrange their own energy provision, and so on. That part sounds radical to some people – but it's really just how cities were built for centuries."

这些居民游戏也影响了MVRDV事务所的总体规划。“我们确实没有规划过具体细节，而是允许居民建造自己的社区”，马斯说道。“他们反过来有更强的责任感与邻居一起规划街道，安排他们自己的能源供应等等。这对某些人来说很极端，但几个世纪以来，城市就是这样建造的。

New neighbourhoods set to take shape during the coming decade include Almere Pampus – a neighbourhood whose avenues of experimentation include proposals for 500 floating houses on a giant lake.

未来十年将形成新的社区，包括Pampus社区，其实验方法包括在一个巨型湖泊上建造500座水上住宅的提议。

Almere will also be using its hosting of Floriade 2022 – the world's largest international exposition in the field of horticulture – taking place later this year (from April to October) to create a permanent new green neighbourhood in the heart of the city once the exhibitors have left.

今年晚些时候（4-10月），阿尔梅勒将举办世界上规模最大的国际园艺博览会2022 Floriade，参展方离开后，阿尔梅勒将在市中心新建一个永久性的绿色社区。

A template for others

树立榜样

Almere's evolution is inspiring other cities too, by providing examples of innovative urban planning in action. "Professionals – politicians, architects, city planners – come from all over the world to look and learn from Almere," says JaapJan Berg, citing particular interest from China. "They have been working on new towns and cities there on a completely different scale – places like Shenzhen. In the UK, I would mention Milton Keynes, and in France, Marne-la-Vallee."

阿尔梅勒的发展也鼓舞着其他城市，因为它提供了开创性的城市规划实例。“世界各地的政客、建筑师、城市规划师等专家观摩和学习阿尔梅勒的经验”，贾普扬·伯格说道。他提到中国对此特别感兴趣：“他们一直在建设新的城镇和都市，规模大不相同，例如深圳。我在英国会提到米尔顿凯恩斯，在法国会提到马恩拉瓦莱”。

MVRDV, meanwhile, have drawn on principles from Almere in their ongoing redevelopment of the city centre of the Dutch city of Eindhoven, which aims at allow that city to expand significantly, yet still retain an air of "cosiness". Cues from Almere include creating green city centre living spaces and using brightly-coloured buildings in striking shapes to enliven the feel of the cityscape.

与此同时，MVRDV事务所正在对荷兰埃因霍温的市中心进行重建，他们借鉴了阿尔梅勒的理念，旨在使这座城市大规模扩张的同时，仍然保留“惬意”的氛围。阿尔梅勒的启示包括打造绿色的市中心生活空间，利用颜色鲜艳、造型独特的建筑物给城市景观增添活力。

Principles learned in Almere are also being deployed on a smaller scale in the little Dutch village of Overschild, which saw almost 80% of its homes badly damaged as a result of earthquakes triggered by fracking in the area.

阿尔梅勒的理念也被小规模地应用到荷兰小村庄Overschild，该地区近80%的房屋因水力压裂引发的地震而严重受损。
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Hot water that heats up to 25,000 houses is piped to Almere in an 11km-long (6.8-mile) pipe from the Diemen combined heat and power station

Diemen热电厂通过11公里长（6.8英里）的管道向阿尔梅勒输送热水，为多达25000个住户供暖。

Key ideas trialled in Almere that are being introduced here include the chance for residents to design their own new homes, alongside collective decision making on infrastructure and facilities. "Residents were asked what their wishes were and how they felt the village should look like in 10 years – [then] we have given the residents a toolbox which will give them the help and inspiration needed to take the future into their own hands," says Winy Maas.

阿尔梅勒试验的关键理念正在这里得到推行，包括居民自己设计新住宅，集体对基础设施及其他设施做出决定。“居民被问到他们的愿望是什么，十年后的村庄应该是何种面貌。于是我们给了居民一个工具箱，向他们提供必要的帮助和灵感，让他们把未来掌握在自己手中”，韦尼·马斯说道。

While Almere is providing a bold test bed for urban experiments and open-minded approaches to city planning, Jacqueline Tellinga, the project manager of Almere's Homeruskwartier neighbourhood, cautions against losing sight of some practicalities, such as the risk of urban spread. "Distances are large, the roads are nice and wide – more reason perhaps to drive your car instead of walking, biking or taking public transport," she says.

尽管阿尔梅勒正在提供大胆的城市实验平台和开明的城市规划方法，但Homeruskwartier社区的项目经理杰奎琳·泰林警告说不要忽视实用性，例如城市扩张的风险。“距离很远，道路整洁宽阔，人们可能更有理由以开车代替走路、自行车、公交”，她说道。

But unlike many cities around the world – where residents are priced out of city centres, leading to an expansion of the suburbs – Almere is showing signs of becoming less suburban rather than more so. It has led some researchers to describe Almere as an example of a new type of hybrid suburban town.

在全世界的许多城市里，居民因物价过高而迁离市中心，进而导致郊区扩大。但有迹象表明，阿尔梅勒的郊区正在缩小而非扩大。因此，有些研究人员将阿尔梅勒描述成一种新型的混合式郊区城镇的典范。

JaapJan Berg offers a more positive spin on Almere's lack of the typical continuous urban spread some see as inherent in the idea of a city. "Almere is at its weakest when judged as a normal city," he says. "But its unfinishedness gives Almere room in choosing and keeping multiple options open. Maintaining this spatial as well as mental idea of unfinishedness give the city a continuous momentum."

有人认为持续扩张是城市的固有特点，但贾普扬·伯格对于缺少这种特点的阿尔梅勒给予了积极评价。“作为一个普通城市，阿尔梅勒正处于最薄弱的阶段”，他说道。“但未完工的状态给了阿尔梅勒选择的余地。在空间和思想上保持未完工的状态，能给这座城市带来持续的发展动力。

Winy Maas agrees. "Successful cities always arise from the input of multiple people over years, decades, sometimes millennia," he says. "It's this belief that has led to Almere's reputation for experimentation – how we allow individuals to add their own vision."

韦尼·马斯赞同此观点。“成功的城市通常源于好多人耗费几年、几十年乃至上千年的投入”，他说道。“正是这种信念才使阿尔梅勒以实验而闻名——我们如何允许个人注入自己的构想”。