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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.

After grinding the euro out Ground Euro, MovingCities went scanning the skyline from two of Brussels' largest urban balconies, the RAC and PARKING58. The RAC (Rijks Administratief Centrum) was the location of Brussels' most brutal buildings. Some video's for disappearing buildings.

The recent plans developed for Ground Euro painfully show the reality of the city of Brussels. On top of that, the infamous Capital of Europe was recently unmasked as the most boring city in Europe and a fire broke out in the Berlaymont building, the European Union commission's headquarters. Between 2003 and 2006 MovingCities followed and participated in the discussion around the presence of the European Union in ...

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.

On Thursday April 16 MovingCities flew from Brussels to Lisbon. While leaving and landing, some additional "aerophotographical" archiving was done. No tacky wildlife-shots from airballoons, no shoots from helicopters while using a tilt-shift lens but snapshots while ascending architectures, while diving and touching down in cities.

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.