Almere in the metropolitan region of Amsterdam. Suburbanization has been a prevalent process of post-war, capitalist urban growth, leading to the majority of citizens in many advanced capitalist economies currently living in the suburbs. We are also witnessing, however, the reverse movement of the increasing return to the inner-city. This contradiction raises questions regarding contemporary urban growth and the socio-spatial production of the suburbs. This paper draws on the case of new town Almere in the metropolitan region of Amsterdam to cast light upon the changing suburban–urban relationship, by investigating the mobility to and from Almere for two decades through socio-economic, demographic data between 1990 and 2013. We demonstrate that Almere has developed from a typically suburban family community to a receiver of both international unmarried newcomers and families; its population has also become relatively poorer, yet the levels of upwards income mobility have remained stable. These trends emphasize alternative types of mobilities emerging in concert to the more typical suburban migration. The town’s transformation challenges the urban–suburban dichotomy, pointing to alternative explanations of contemporary urban growth and metropolitan integration.
With the post-WWII boom of Western capitalism and the increasing emphasis on consumption by the newly formed, socially mobile classes, consumption paradises were embodied in suburban settlements. In the decades that followed WWII, population growth manifested mainly in suburbanization, with the contemporary middle class itself emerging with the development of the suburbs. Moving away from the mounting inequality and class violence concentrated in often run-down, unsafe inner-city neighborhoods, the continuously forming middle class flocked to the suburbs (Champion 2001). Leaving the city and moving to the suburb soon grew from a middle-class dream to a general trajectory for many, leading to the emergence of metropolitan, sprawling places like the archetypically suburban Los Angeles. Despite the ‘collective effort to live a private life’ becoming widespread ideology primarily in the US (Mumford 1938, cited in Fishman 1987, 10), and despite the diversity of suburban communities for the socially mobile, from the mass-produced housing in Long-Island’s Levittown and the utopia-driven New Towns such as Milton Keynes in the UK, and Almere in the Netherlands, these settlements represented a concerted attempt to escape from post-WWII cities. Suburbanization has thus gradually replaced older, traditional urbanization processes as the dominant form of habitation; people living in suburbs are now a majority in the advanced capitalist world.