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Almere mayor welcomes immigrants to newest city in Netherlands
NCKU Press Center
[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.
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