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On Sunday May 10 MovingCities flew back to Beijing. A short inter-European flight from Brussels to Stockholm was followed by a longer Stockholm-Beijing flight. Only the first leg of the travel provided excellent conditions for aerophotography, especially while flying over a cloudless Belgium and The Netherlands.

On Tuesday May 4 MovingCities flew from Lisbon to Brussels. The conditions for aerophotography were perfect; a windowseat and a morning flight. Leaving under a bright blue and open sky we flew North, with a excellent view on the 17 km Vasco da Gama Bridge, and landed hours later in a characteristically cloudy Belgium.

According to statistics Belgium is 99% urbanized. Driving through it, one is forced to rethink one's "Chinese" perception of urbanization. Belgium is fully peri-urbanized, offering a strongly mixed territory of housing developments, roads, warehouses, churches and open fields. Some coined "nebular city" for this development which is most visible in Flanders, located in the Northern half of the country.

In 1968 the Belgian architect Renaat Braem published a manifesto on his native country called "The Ugliest Country in the World". In 1979, on the eve of the 150th anniversary of Belgian independence, architect and artist Luc Deleu (T.O.P. Office) laid 'the last stone of Belgium' in his small front garden in Antwerp. Today, rather surprisingly, Belgium still exists. Some snapshots and background to a 99% urbanized territory.

A visit to the destruction of the PostCS-building and to the notorious Bijlmermeer-area, a seventies high-density housing development in the South-East of Amsterdam, was the apotheosis of MovingCities' recent Amsterdam trip. A couple of snapshots and related Rem Koolhaas stories.

On Thursday April 9 MovingCities arrived for a short stay in Amsterdam. The first day mainly consisted of crisscrossing the city center, avoiding the rain, tourists and creative commercialization of the inner city.

On Tuesday April 7 MovingCities flew from Stockholm to Brussels to embark on a five week inner-European journey. Departing under clear skies, Stockholm rapidly disappeared into an abstraction organization of architectures. With a new tag, called "aerophotography", we document our past and future impressions of monitoring cities from the sky/airplane.