Why it looks like this

When export manufacturing exploded in the Pearl River Delta, Dongguan's farming towns each built their own factories, worker dormitories and street grids. Thirty-two towns and districts urbanized in parallel, and the fields between them filled in.

The result is one of the strangest maps of any megacity: a carpet of medium-density urban patches with no dominant core — a polycentric city where the 'centre' depends on which town you are standing in.