Why it looks like this

President Manuel Quezon founded the city in 1939 to replace crowded Manila with a spacious modern capital. Its plan shows the ambition: an enormous elliptical rotunda — now holding Quezon's memorial and mausoleum — with grand avenues fanning out, and a 400-hectare reserve for a government centre that was only partly built.

The capital title moved here in 1948 and back to Manila in 1976, but Quezon City kept growing into the largest city of Metro Manila — university campuses, broadcast networks and vast residential districts filling the plan's generous spaces.