Is Amersfoort all its cracked up to be?
Well to tell the truth it seems a bit disappointing in parts - perhaps because I was expecting wonderful things. We are always told that the Dutch and the Germans are streets ahead of us - now I've seen Amersfoort, I'm not so sure.
Let's start with the good side of it. Above you see the serried ranks of bikes lined up at the station. This is clearly a town where the bike is king. Even on a cold December day the roads were empty of everything except bicycles. The town centre has an ice rink at the moment, because its Christmas and everyone who was visiting had come by bike. There were whole families arriving together on bikes of assorted sizes.
The centre of town is small and inviting. We parked in an empty - and expensive - car park then walked down the most charming of streets, a mixture of old a new where there seemed to be no space for your car at all. All these houses were very close to the main station and obviously owned by wealthy people. They all had small gardens in the rear.
Because the main living room is very close onto the street all front windows had etched glass "net curtains" just covering the lower section of the frame.
We also encountered some stunning modern houses in the same street. But these had a different arrangement. Still the very close relationship to the street, but at the rear, which was also seemingly open to public access, there were large parking areas. In these blocks, three stories high, it seemed as though the main living space was upstairs.
But what I found extremely odd was the lack of obvious Eco- design. The window to wall ratio would not pass the UK building regs, there seemed to be no solar panels or sign of any micro generation?
I think these units are designed as live/work, the very glassy room on the ground floor might be an office reception or a small shop.
Going around the back we have more glass and a balcony. 
At least the parking areas are well overlooked. But it seems as if the need to have really small front streets has meant that the rears become tarmac heaven too.
Part of the problem lies in the fact that Ammersfoort is only 40km from Amsterdam and less than 20km from Utrecht. How many of these householders are commuters?
The centre of town looks buzzy but we were dismayed when we drove out to the new suburbs. There are a series of new development zones which have gained fame because of the quality, quantity and dispatch with which they have been built. Ammersfoort is expanding from 130,000 to 160,000.
We looked at a well established suburb of Hoogland and then at Vathorst an extension of an existing village which is still being constructed and will eventually hold 11,000 new homes.
A lot of the housing in both neighbourhoods has two fronts as described above, mainly pretty high density, supposedly up to 100 dwellings per hectare, though surrounding the neighbourhoods is much wasted space. The poulder land here is pretty open and bleak.
An interesting aspect of the project is the use that water has been put to. The masterplanners found that people liked the traditional canal-side dwellings so the latest neighbourhood has been developed in quite a retro style to mimic old Amsterdam.
These are not lifetime homes. In the latest phase of development all the front doors were approached by a flight of steps - possibly in a bid to create some defensible space between the street and the front rooms.
These are very pretty houses but again the pay-off is in the garage courts in the rear.
Each home has at least two parking spaces and the "garages" you see are not for cars but for bikes! However thee courtyards are private and of town and the quality, directness and flatness of cycle routes is impressive. This suburb is about 4 km from the centre.Developers have opted to keep the high car provision because they found that people did still need their cars. However the driving arrangements are fiendish and its impossible to travel easily from A to B. The road layout is illogical and illegible - we kept on getting lost - even though we had a large scale map. We were visiting on a quiet day, but during the week we understand that the traffic jams become horrendous in some areas. Shops, schools and public facilities are buried in the centre of estates, making them inaccessible to passing trade. Consequently the shopping centre in Hoogland looks dire and downright dangerous.
The road layout completely collapses in the centre of this neighbourhood the arrangement of buildings a seemingly random mix of large public buildings amidst car parks. The shops themselves are hidden from what could be an attractive lakeside by a wall of nasty looking flats. Below the concourse there was an evil looking empty public car park. It reminded me of many of the nasty 60's estates we have in London.
Each neighbourhood is encircled by a ring road of mysterious layout. Its a dual carriageway with one carriageway in each direction. On either side are wide verges, a cycle route and a footpath. In some places there is a separate service road in the centre of everything for heavy vehicles. I've never seen such lavish use of kerbs and white lines. But what happens when a car breaks down and where do the buses run? (We did not see any buses)
However there are lessons to learn in the management of the development. A development company owned by the city who prepared the sites and then sold them onto five partner developers at pre-agreed costs.
No architect can design a block greater than 80 houses though the developer all had far bigger chunks. And there is 40% social housing buried in here somewhere. This does make for a mish mash of styles and after a confusing afternoon we were crying out for better design codes! (Something I generally don't like. But you could see all sorts of nutty ideas, which would have been better for stronger codes.)
Anyway I'll leave you with a few images of some of the nicer (and I guess more expensive housing)
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