Mountain-biking in the Deltametropool

THE DELTA METROPOLIS represents the changing mosaic of villages, towns, cities and a multitude of urban overspills, innovations and fragments - the sprawling city - in a controlled and carefully managed dynamic maze of scenic and urban components, the synergy of which relies on a sophisticated and interlinked transport and communications system - the compact city. This change is brought about by the transformation of each one of the four components of the spatial planning system: the water in the delta, the man-made landscape, the areas of urban interaction and the transport and communications network.

Forgive me please: two weeks off, but recreating in the middle of the Randstad (=the densely populated western part of the Netherlands) it's impossible to completely forget work ;-)

This afternoon Alex and I explored the Mountain Bike Track "Dirty Hill" near Outdoor Valley in Bergschenhoek. It's a demanding mountain-bike track and we had some hours good fun. The highest point of the route offers a great overview over the complete urbanized area between Rotterdam, the Hague, Zoetermeer and Gouda. The panorama makes one clear that the time of four individual agglomarations is definitively over: this is one big urbanized area. And the MTB-track is squeezed in the middle of it...