Almere Oosterwold

Almere Oosterwold is a do-it-yourself urban-agriculture district on polder land between Almere and Zeewolde, Flevoland, the Netherlands. The full plan is about 4,300 hectares across two municipalities, with room for 15,000 homes, work, landscape and city farming. Development started from the 2012 strategy Land-Goed voor Initiatieven; people have been moving in since 2016. There is no master-plan street grid. Initiators buy or lease a plot and are responsible not only for the house but for the plot road, water storage, wastewater, utilities, publicly accessible green, and food growing. The core planning rule: 51% of every plot is reserved for stadslandbouw (urban agriculture). In practice that ranges from serious market gardens, bakeries, vineyards and pick-your-own plots to a few fruit trees. Researchers have found that not every household hits the 51% target. The area still produces a dense mix of small food businesses. Lived-in Almere part (roughly gebied 1A/1B): on the order of 600 hectares and about 5,000 residents as of 2024, with hundreds of homes still completing each year (419 delivered in 2024). Later phases in Zeewolde are much larger and not fully open. Inside the district sit tighter communities such as ’t Eemgoed (82 homes on 7 ha with shared gardens and a gemeenschapshuis) and the residential group at organic farm Vliervelden — list those separately if you want map pins on the clusters. This is a municipal experiment run by Team Oosterwold (Almere, Zeewolde, Rijksvastgoedbedrijf, Province of Flevoland, Waterschap Zuiderzeeland). It is not a single co-op membership.