Why it looks like this

In 1979–80 China chose the farmland and fishing villages across the border from Hong Kong for its boldest experiment: the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Factories, then towers, then one of the world's great tech industries followed; the city's population multiplied several hundred times within four decades.

The plan gave it broad parallel avenues running east–west along the border. But inside the superblocks, the original villages rebuilt themselves as 'urban villages' — tight lattices of eight-storey 'handshake buildings' where new arrivals first land. The map is both cities at once: the drawn metropolis and the village map that refused to disappear.