In the suburb of Oosterwold, a living experiment in urban agriculture, the 5,000 inhabitants find different creative ways to fulfil the uniq
When Marco de Kat starts planning his meals, he doesn’t need to travel far for fresh food. Right outside his house is an 800 square metre plot with all sorts of produce – apples, pears, peppers, basil, beets and cauliflower, to name a few. During the winter months, he and his wife can pretty much survive off the vegetables stored in their freezer. Even after living in Oosterwold for a number of years, it’s something that still excites him. “Yesterday, I forgot to think about what to eat,” he says. “You walk through your garden and you find something and that’s what you eat.” Oosterwold, where de Kat has lived since 2017, is a 4,300 hectare (10,625 acre) urban experiment located in the north-east of the Netherlands, in a suburb of the city of Almere, where de Kat works as a municipal councillor. First visualised about a decade ago by a local network, it was established by local government and Oosterwold planners as a way to challenge the rigidity of Dutch city planning, giving people more freedom – and responsibility – over the urban design process. The area, which has about 5,000 residents and a growing waiting list, is completely self-sufficient. Residents can build houses however they like, and must collaborate with others to figure out things such as street names, waste management, roads, and even schools. But the local government has included one extremely unusual requirement: about half of each plot must be devoted to urban agriculture. “This rule – if you want to live in Oosterwold, you have to produce food on at least 50% of your property – is very unique thinking in the world, and makes it also an outstanding area in many ways,” says Jan Eelco Jansma, a researcher at Wageningen University & Research, who has studied Almere for years and inspired the city to include urban agriculture in the planning of Oosterwold.
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It would be great to do this throughout the country, but unfortunately a lot of land in the west is heavily polluted with PFAS.
