One Pioneer, Many Legacies. The Province of Flevoland and the Randstad Metropolitan Area, the Netherlands

The territory known as Flevoland was created in the twentieth century after land was reclaimed from the sea. You could say it was a pioneer in its field. A special place where time is encapsulated in modernity, accelerated and compressed between two sheets of glass. But nevertheless, what we see today is not moving towards homologation. Globalisation appears to be separating the destinies of cities and territories that have developed based on the same institutional and infrastructural conditions. We believe that the genealogy of these urban formations (especially Nagele, Lelystad and Almere) has become more complicated; in fact, their legacies seem to multiply, shatter and become non-univocal. The pioneers appear reborn in the inhabitants who settle in this new, maiden land, sparking a real estate supply determined to support this oneiric projection. Nagele with its exemplary aura is clearly occupied by inhabitants who ignore the intellectual travail leading to its creation; a little like Chandigarh: “authentic” delimited modernity that have not influenced the real settlement dynamics of our contemporary age, in short a “niche” product. Lelystad poses questions that remain extemely urgent, e.g., how to create new urbanity and social cohesion. However, the process appears doomed to irreversible failure because it involves new designs which, although they add aesthetically beautiful objects, are incapable of eliminating the sense of abandonment and stagnation communicated by the city. Although Almere appears to have followed in Lelystad’s footsteps, it later developed in a discontinuous polycentric manner. It was reborn in the nineties when the influence of the urban dimension of Randstad and its priority in the Dutch and European urban agenda led to investments and a successful outcome. The current crisis lifts the lid on earlier interrelated conditions. Seen from Flevoland, the twentieth century looks like an uninterrupted series of crises that cannot be solved because they are all structurally diverse, immeasurable and randomly enhanced by certain works, trends and autorial figures. The crisis that began in 2007 initially appears to have acted as a simple multiplier of ongoing trends and later became a sort of basis on which to elaborate more and different scenarios.