Almere mayor welcomes immigrants to newest city in Netherlands
Tainan, Taiwan, November 23rd, 2011
To relieve the overcrowded population in the capital Amsterdam, the Netherlands built a city 35 years ago. “Almere is the newest city in the Netherlands. We welcome young people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to start a family and lead an exciting and fruitful life there,” said Annemarie Jorritsma-Lebbink, the city’s mayor, in a seminar at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, southern Taiwan on Nov.18.
According to Lebbink, who is a former Dutch deputy prime minister, Almere is one of the fastest growing cities in the Netherlands created 35 years ago in the province of Flevoland, which was just a patch of water in the beginning of the 20th century.
The city is an echo of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city idea that aimed to help decentralize the congested London metropolitan region. “Almere was seen as one of the solutions to metropolitan congestion and overcrowding in the Netherlands,” the 61-year-old female politician said.
Based on the statistics provided by Lebbink, roughly a quarter of the people who moved to Almere in 2010 were former residents of the Amsterdam region and a little under 20% of the city’s new residents moved to Almere from another country.
A striking feature of this unique and colorful city is its cultural diversity: Almere is home to 190,000 residents of 181 different ethnicities and 153 different nationalities. The largest ethnic group after the Dutch is Surinamese who make up 11% of the city’s population, while other large ethnic groups including Moroccans, Turks, Germans and Indonesians account for 3.6%, 1.7%, 1.6% and 1.2% of the city’s population respectively.
In addition, roughly one-third of the population in Almere is under the age of 25. A mere 9% is 65 years or older. By comparison, elsewhere in the Netherlands about one-fourth of the population is aged 25 or under and nearly 16% are 65 or over.
Lebbink said that Almere is currently the seventh largest city in the Netherlands, and it has an ambition to become the fifth largest city in the country, with 60,000 new houses and 100,000 new jobs, over the next twenty years.
To relieve the overcrowded population in the capital Amsterdam, the Netherlands built a city 35 years ago. “Almere is the newest city in the Netherlands. We welcome young people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds to start a family and lead an exciting and fruitful life there,” said Annemarie Jorritsma-Lebbink, the city’s mayor, in a seminar at National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, southern Taiwan on Nov.18.
According to Lebbink, who is a former Dutch deputy prime minister, Almere is one of the fastest growing cities in the Netherlands created 35 years ago in the province of Flevoland, which was just a patch of water in the beginning of the 20th century.
The city is an echo of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city idea that aimed to help decentralize the congested London metropolitan region. “Almere was seen as one of the solutions to metropolitan congestion and overcrowding in the Netherlands,” the 61-year-old female politician said.
Based on the statistics provided by Lebbink, roughly a quarter of the people who moved to Almere in 2010 were former residents of the Amsterdam region and a little under 20% of the city’s new residents moved to Almere from another country.
A striking feature of this unique and colorful city is its cultural diversity: Almere is home to 190,000 residents of 181 different ethnicities and 153 different nationalities. The largest ethnic group after the Dutch is Surinamese who make up 11% of the city’s population, while other large ethnic groups including Moroccans, Turks, Germans and Indonesians account for 3.6%, 1.7%, 1.6% and 1.2% of the city’s population respectively.
In addition, roughly one-third of the population in Almere is under the age of 25. A mere 9% is 65 years or older. By comparison, elsewhere in the Netherlands about one-fourth of the population is aged 25 or under and nearly 16% are 65 or over.
Lebbink said that Almere is currently the seventh largest city in the Netherlands, and it has an ambition to become the fifth largest city in the country, with 60,000 new houses and 100,000 new jobs, over the next twenty years.
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