Oosterwold is a 4,300 hectare (10,625 acre) urban experiment located east of Amsterdam, in a suburb of the city of Almere.
First conceived about a decade ago, 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: half of each residential 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 percent 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.
Rositsa T Ilieva, the director of policy at the City University of New York’s Urban Food Policy Institute, also highlighted its novelty. “While other cities have integrated urban agriculture into planning, few have implemented it as a non-negotiable land-use requirement or handed so much responsibility for development to residents,” she said.
Residents and experts alike emphasise the potential for replicability of this alternative way of living. “Some of the things that we do could be implemented in other places in the Netherlands and beyond,” says Jan-Albert Blaauw, a resident of Oosterwold and founder of the city’s food cooperative.