The worst city in the Netherlands.

Tom Forth, 24 October 2025.

For more than a decade I’ve spent my Christmases and some Easters five metres below sea level in the Dutch city of Lelystad. Its municipal tile is great: a mermaid lifting towers from the sea. Its reputation is not.

Lelystad is probably the most mocked city in the Netherlands and the teasing extends to people paid to be positive. “Sorry about that” was one year’s banter from a border official at Europoort Rotterdam when I told him my destination. “Sure, no-one would lie about that” is the best Schiphol has offered.

The South Sea works and Flevoland.

The Flevopolder was constructed in two stages and is the third and the largest polder of the major South Sea Works, the Dutch national megaproject driven through by Cornelis Lely to reclaim the land that the ocean started swallowing around two thousand years ago. The first half of the polder was surrounded by dams in 1950 and pumped dry by 1957.

Unlike previous polders, it would distinguish itself beyond farming. Among the perfectly rectangular potato fields, increasingly tended by robotic farming machines and lined by wind turbines, there would be a brand new modern city named after Lely himself. Lelystad.

Spacious modern family homes with garages, gardens, and car parking welcomed families from overcrowded Amsterdam flats 40km to the West. People could get around by car, or by bicycle on a fully segregated walking and cycling system. Schools, doctors, shopping centres, beaches, parks, and more were planned and built.

Lelystad’s first home was completed in 1968. By 1980, when it was incorporated as a municipality, over 40,000 people had moved to or been born in Lelystad. In 1981, over six thousand people moved from the rest of the Netherlands to Lelystad while just two thousand left.

Few in Lelystad understood that their city would soon be overshadowed.

Twenty kilometres to the West a new city was growing. Almere’s first home had been finished in 1976 and its growth had followed a similar pattern to Lelystad’s. But it was closer to Amsterdam and the other cities including Utrecht, Rotterdam, and The Hague that together with Schiphol airport form the Netherlands’ urban core, the Randstad.

A new motorway that would take five more years to reach Lelystad opened in 1980 that made that easily commutable. Almere got a rail connection first too. In 1987 two railway stations opened, connecting it on fast, long, frequent, electric trains to Amsterdam. Lelystad’s sole station opened a year later. The concrete foundations of a second sit in a field outside the city waiting for expansion that never came.

The polder was finished and the jobs in engineering, planning, and administration that came with its construction came to an end. Lelystad had built itself out of a purpose. Net migration to Lelystad flipped negative. Potential residents preferred Almere. Existing Lelystaders who didn’t leave commuted elsewhere for work.

Lelystad stagnated. Almere boomed. When in 1986 Flevoland became its own province and the capital was chosen as Lelystad it was clear that this was less a celebration and more a consolation prize aimed at cushioning the city from further decline.

Today Almere is a major Dutch city with a rapidly increasing population of 230,000. In 2023 its football team entered the Dutch first division, competing with huge names such as Amsterdam’s Ajax and Rotterdam’s Feyenoord. Its six railway stations, the latest opened in 2012, connect it directly to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, the Hague, and Schiphol airport as well as Antwerp and Brussels. It is regularly considered not just a commuter city to the Randstad, but a part of the Randstad proper.

With Amsterdam reclaiming land further and further East there is serious talk that a future expansion of the Amsterdam metro should continue across the sea to Almere. The gap will soon be down to just four miles, less than the distance between Staten Island and Manhattan. While Amsterdam’s inward investment agency promotes both Almere and Lelystad as great places nearby to live, work, and invest, they only provide a phone number for Almere.

In defence of Lelystad.

People exaggerate differences. Lelystad is not as grim as its feature on the Failed Architecture blog suggests. Nor is Almere as close to a blueprint for the future of cities as the BBC’s article on it implies.

The trees that line Lelystad’s cycle lanes through its suburbs have grown tall and handsome in fifty five years.

The allotments are mature, full of flowers and vegetables.

The homes are well-maintained and neighbourhoods of previously identical houses and flats have become more interesting as people expand and alter their properties, gardens, and public areas. Netherlands and Flevoland flags fly from the homes of second generation Lelystaders. Self-design and self-build new homes are regularly permitted and add more variety, as do new residential towers in the city centre and on the waterfront.

Lelystad may not have an Eredivisie football team, but it has a fine Antony Gormley statue on the waterfront looking out to sea, a fantastic reconstruction Dutch colonial ship of the early 1600s, the Batavia, the Dutch land reclamation museum, a huge nature reserve with wild horses, and much more.

The large designer outlet shopping centre is popular with visitors from other cities, but also with the new rich of Lelystad who have moved into high quality detached homes, in new neighbourhoods, with easy access to the A6 motorway. Yacht clubs, golf courses, horse riding, go-karting, and aviation for pleasure offer pursuits that require space to visitors and arrivals from Amsterdam and other large cities. The Marker Wadden, new islands being built as nature reserves off the coast of Lelystad, will be another attraction as they are completed. New fancier restaurants are popping up. The city is busy, especially on market days. There are even a few bars and cafes full of people most days and nights. It’s not Amsterdam, but it’s not the opposite of it any more.

Why Almere grew quicker than Lelystad.

Almere’s economy grew much more quickly than Lelystad’s because it was a perfect commuter town for overcrowded and expensive cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht and also a great place to put land-hungry factories, showrooms, and logistics hubs priced out of those constrained cities. And with many people commuting into major cities, seeing new jobs closer to home, and then taking those jobs, the cycle of economic growth became self-reinforcing.

Little of the same magic benefited Lelystad at first, it was too far from Amsterdam and connected to the rest of the country by infrastructure that was too poor. Attempts by the central government to lure in industries from the Randstad with cheap rent and big plots largely failed. Early employment in the public sector or funded by state contracts related to the heavy engineering of the reclamation of land and the development of the polder for urban, industrial, and agricultural use started to wind down in the early 1980s with little to replace it. An early airport had been built by the Dutch government but Schiphol airport’s long-held plans to move some flights there are so long-held and so unlikely to progress that they are a local joke.

What worked better, just much more slowly than in the far better situated Almere, was the rollout of national infrastructure investments. The Flevolijn connected Lelystad to Amsterdam in 1988 but Almere was always more attractive to commuters to the Randstad. When the Hanselijn connected Lelystad to the East and North of the Netherlands in 2012 this offered it a true advantage and a place at the heart of the country. In combination with the Dutch high speed railway from Amsterdam to Antwerp and on to Brussels via Rotterdam, and the expansion of its station, Lelystad finds itself with fast direct trains to both the most Northern and the most Southern major Dutch speaking cities.

The construction of the A6 motorway via Lelystad is even more important. The same factories, showrooms, offices, and logistics hubs that the Dutch government failed to lure out of the Randstad when the city was first built are now being tempted by national infrastructure investment and local planning permission for building on cheap plots.

Early efforts to use Lelystad as a hub for agricultural innovation have started to pay off. The city hosted 17,268 visitors from 107 countries at the glamorous Potato Europe 2025 conference where fellow Flevoland company Croptimal won gold medal for innovation for their AI potato disease identification system, the Croptiscan 9000. The prize was awarded by the Mayor of World Potato City, Emmeloord, also in Flevoland. The regional government has promoted the region’s large, fertile, and perfectly rectangular fields as a testing ground for agritech research from the world’s leading agricultural university at Wageningen just 60km to the South.

Flevoland will never have the old windmills that tourists flock to in the rest of the Netherlands, but in front of its new wind turbines, and its fields increasingly tended by robots, it feels at times like a place waiting for the future to catch up in a world worried about places being left behind. And with ever more of the fields full of tulips, it retains a clear link to the history of the nation.

With time, Lelystad has adapted to its earlier failures. Its original car-centred city centre has shifted to a public transport one centred on the railway station and a different car-focused one centred on the harbour.

New developments promote self-build or partially self-designed homes. New parts of the city feel less utopian, more messy, and more human in a way that has taken five decades to evolve in the rest of the city. The Netherlands’ national housing crisis has played its role too, by making Lelystad’s distance from the Randstad less of a problem than its cheaper homes are an upside.

From nothing, the population of Flevoland has grown to be similar to that of Cambridgeshire in England. The economy is of a similar strength too. And where it was once trailing behind, Lelystad is close to that average. Lelystad and Flevoland serve a role in the national culture and economy that the country should be proud of and I suspect that in another generation they will be.

Lessons for new cities elsewhere.

New cities seem to be rare in the developed world.

Milton Keynes in the UK is a similar size and age to Almere and has been in many ways an even greater success, though in a country with five times the population, successes need to be five times as great or five times as numerous to have the same national impact. I would love to know more about why Milton Keynes has succeeded, but I’ve spent far less time there than Lelystad and I have no feel for the balance of proximity to Oxford or London, connectivity via the M1 and the West Coast Mainline, ease of gaining planning permission for homes and workplaces, excellent roads, cycle lanes, parks, schools, universities and everything else that has helped it succeed.

Canberra, the planned new capital of Australia has succeeded, but I’ve never been and I doubt I’ll ever go.

So I can only share my feelings, however poorly informed they are, on what a new generation of new cities might want to learn from the Netherlands’ newest province.

0. Don’t build a new city.

Almost always, in the rich world, it’s going to be better to expand and densify an existing city than build a new one. Existing cities have existing institutions, businesses, homes, shops, healthcare, schools, parks, culture, and much more. Almost always you shouldn’t build a new city, you should expand an existing one. Look at the rapidly growing cities of the Southern USA and the South of France. Or you could turn around a failing city, like Detroit or Manchester have been turned around in recent decades. Villeneuve d’Ascq feels like a new city, but it’s really an extension of Lille and a huge expansion of Ascq and that’s probably a better idea than whatever you’ve got planned.

0b. Seriously. Don’t build a new city.

But maybe there are reasons why you can’t expand or densify an existing city. Maybe its historic buildings are too pretty, its suburbs are too constrained by national greenbelt laws, by the sea, or by mountains that you can’t overcome. Maybe its existing population is too comfortable with stagnation and pricing out of a new generation. Then maybe, just maybe, you might want to build a new city.

You still shouldn't build a new city. Those problems with greenbelt laws and anti-growth existing populations are going to follow you wherever you go that's near enough to matter. You should try and fix those problems locally before building a new city where you'll have to fix them too. But maybe,...

If you’re really sure that you can’t expand or densify an existing city, this is how you should think about building a new one,

1. Location, location, location.

Kirsty and Phil weren’t wrong. Almere succeeded because it is near to Amsterdam and the rest of the Randstad, a huge creator of demand for economic growth that cannot be satisfied by its history, its politics, or its geography. Almere was at first a pressure relief valve on that demand, and is now a generator of demand itself. Lelystad failed for decades because it was neither. In the USA, a successful new city would be near the Bay Area. In the UK, it would be near London, Oxford, or Cambridge.

2. Infrastructure is key.

Being close to somewhere on a map is different to being close to somewhere in reality. Without expensive railways and roads connecting Almere to the Randstad it would have failed. Only now, with the Randstad’s housing crisis deepening and pushing demand even further East, and with the benefit of expensive infrastructure, can Lelystad benefit in the same way.

But a lack of infrastructure shouldn’t stop you getting started. Almere’s great infrastructure came years after it got started. Lelystad’s came decades later. You can start building later than you think as long as you grasp the power to build for yourself and demand national solidarity.

3. Local control and adaptability matter.

Your new city will be deeply flawed. It doesn’t matter how many amazing experts in urban design you hire, they will be wrong sooner or later. For a long time Milton Keynes had awful broadband because the expert advice was to use aluminium for its phone lines. Lelystad’s expertly designed city centre has largely failed and the people have voted with their feet to establish two new city centres which do much better. New homes in the city are both more detached and individualistic and more communal and central depending on where they are and who they are aimed at. The city is better for it.

There is a temptation in so much of highly educated society to imagine that if only things were better planned, more precisely researched, and better governed by experts they would turn out better. But economists have known for a long time that the information needed to make good decisions is never centrally available as well as it is distributed. People individually are stupid, but together they are wise. Give them control and adapt to their preferences, both in government through elections and in the market via the way they choose to spend their money.

4. Public sector employment is a trap (except where it’s not).

A hope for Lelystad was that early public sector employment would kickstart a local economy that would take over once the state wound down. That failed. National capital cities can build an economy around the public sector, as Canberra proves. So can culturally cherished cities like Oxford, Cambridge, Delft, and Leiden where ancient and famous universities guarantee large and sustained public support for a sector which incidentally generates private sector growth through innovation. Places like Lelystad can expect no such preference.

California Forever and Forest City One

I wrote earlier that new cities seem to be rare in the developed world. Looking around, with a bias towards the English language, I see two candidates.

In the USA, California Forever’s ambitions are amazing. They seem to align with some of my opinions. They are taking over an existing city in California, near the Bay Area, rather than formally building a new city. Local control and adaptability is built in to that structure. As so often I am intensely jealous of the USA and California’s comparative embrace of localism compared to the UK where such an adventure would never be allowed by Westminster.

In the UK, announced last night, Forest City One aims to build a new city near Cambridge, one of the world’s most intense centres of innovation, and one of the world’s most damagingly constrained small cities. I left Cambridge at just a few days old, and I have little stake in that place beyond that as a British citizen.

We have too many cities, not too few, where I live and we should be focusing on turning around those that we have, not building new ones. But there can be little doubt that a Cambridge of one million people would be a greater asset to the world than the city at its current size. If that ambition is met by Cambridge itself that would be excellent. If a new city to its East takes up the charge for growth, that would be a fine outcome as well. I wish Forest City One every success, even if in failure it encourages Cambridge to become the great city it could be and which Britain would greatly benefit to have.