Almere is marking 50 years since a bus of Amsterdam residents travelled to the newest city in the Netherlands in 1976 to receive the keys to newly built homes in a largely empty polder. The city now has more than 232,000 residents and is the Netherlands’ seventh-largest municipality. Despite its size, Almere is still described as having a quiet, relatively unvibrant centre, particularly in the evening. Plans call for tens of thousands of additional homes, a livelier centre, more employment and better regional connections; whether these changes will make the city more vibrant remains to be seen.