During travels, I am a trying-hard-to-blend-in tourist: my favorite activities are sitting in coffee shops pretending like I am a local, and walking around the city mindlessly with Google Maps turned off. Walking in travel cities is something very sacred to me: every step I take, I imagine myself tracing the footsteps of historical people before me, of the students after class or the workers rushing to work, the wars that unfolded and the prosperity that bloomed where conflict once stood.
With that hobby, I naturally became interested in urban planning and architecture. My favorite anecdote to tell new friends is that I was severely disappointed by the buildings when I first moved to London. As someone who grew up in a rapidly developing metropolitan, whose summer vacations consist of megacities like Shanghai or Singapore, skyscrapers are so familiar to me that I naturally come to expect it in any major city.
If you are living in Europe, you would know that this is not the case (except for London’s Canary Wharf, but I would argue is not the same). The Western urban landscape is characterized by straight lines of middle-level houses, wide pavements, and leveled floors. Obviously, this is because the cities are so old that at the time of building, the technology could only build so tall. The Western buildings are more focused on architecture, as a result of the classical and renaissance design ideals that predate modernism.
Asian architecture is fascinating, because it is rare to see how architecture reacted to such a rapid bloom in population and economic growth. With such rapid development, cities fall into one of two cases: the first is “prim and proper” with grid-based urban planning, like Kyoto whose design resembles the grid layout of ancient Chinese capitals, or Chandigarh in India, which was designed by the famed modernist architect Le Corbusier.
[kyoto’s city design]
[chandigarh’s planning]
The second case, which is also the case that I am more fascinated about, are the “messy” ones: cities that are built according to their natural topography. Take, for instance, Hong Kong: the urban landscape twists, turns, distorts, warps, bends, straightens, then deforms again, carrying the weight of concrete and glass of the multiple high-rise corporate buildings and apartment complexes. Its design might make New York city planners laugh and even offended, but that is the beauty of it. You can wander along the bustling, smallest pavements in Kowloon and never know what you are going to find: either it is a random shop, a family-run cafe, people whose jobs you’ve never known of, or the love of your life! It’s not designed to be picturesque. It’s designed to be lived in.
To cover all of the cities with “messy” urban design would take a novel, so I want to focus on one city that I have long been fascinated by but yet had a chance to visit: Chongqing, China.
Chongqing—Day
Chongqing is famous for many reasons. On TikTok, it is known as the city with no ground level. One TikTok user went viral with a video documenting his morning routine going to work, passing through many elevators and continuously going down. The city felt like an endless maze, with complex, interconnecting pathways that require native knowledge to get around.
In the early 2000s, China was looking for a city that could be its development hub in the southwest region, connecting with prosperous eastern cities like Shanghai. Chongqing, lying in the heart of southwest China, surrounded by mountains and facing the Yangtze (China’s biggest river), became the natural answer. Some years prior to this, the Three Gorges Dam was built near the Yangtze River, resulting in the relocation of over a million citizens. Most of these citizens moved to Chongqing, causing a significant and sudden boom of inhabitants. Because this growth wasn't organic, residential buildings needed to be built quickly and in large numbers to accommodate the resettlements. What followed was a construction frenzy, marked by towering skyscrapers, sprawling bridges, and multi-tiered transport systems that sliced through the city's steep topography like threads through fabric.
Not only residence, Chongqing also possesses an interesting public transport system: it is arguably most famous for its train station called Liziba, which is located inside a residential building.
The train track and the building it runs into were built at the same time, with the intention of maximizing space while connecting transport as efficiently as possible. To run the trains smoothly without disturbing the lives of residents inside the building, special engineering modifications were made to keep the tracks quiet and vibration-free. These sorts of improvised architectures exist throughout the city. There are shops nestled under flyovers, pedestrian bridges doubling as community spaces, and escalators that climb hills instead of stairs. Each corner feels like it was designed by necessity first, aesthetics later—and yet, in that necessity, an aesthetic of its own was born.
People say Chongqing does not have a ground floor because the city lies within a mountainous area with steep hills and cliffs. Therefore, when building the city, architects had to stack towers vertically like Jenga, building them on top of already high mountains. Due to the mountains, a building’s first floor can be another building’s tenth floor.
Chongqing—Night
When night falls, Chongqing lights up and the scenery becomes something straight out of Ghost in the Shell. It is quickly coming for Tokyo’s place in popular culture when talking about cyberpunk.
Despite never having been to Chongqing, I was in Shanghai a lot as a kid, and my favorite thing to do was to go to 南京路 (Nanjing Road, which is Shanghai’s shopping center and among one of the world’s busiest shopping districts) for night walks. I don’t know how to explain to someone that grew up in a less urban city the scene in Nanjing: the breeze coming from the river, the blend of multiple sources of music and chatter, the colorful lights from the high high towers above, and the weird blending feeling of overstimulation and excitement. Street vendors, K-Pop dance covers, kids eating tanghulu, older couples dancing to old tunes—it’s all chaos, but comforting chaos. These experiences are unique to Asian metropolitans, as I found out strolling through Canary Wharf seeking the same sort of excitement and coming up short.
[nanjing road!]
The Pleasure of Dystopia
Why do we love cyberpunk cities so much? Why does the moving, translucent light allure people of all ages, inspiring movies and culture and aesthetics? In essence, cyberpunk is the aesthetic of dystopia: The Matrix-esque streets, dimly lit alleyways, flashing advertisements, surveillance cameras, face masks, neon signs layered on top of concrete skeletons. It is the imagined future that never arrived, and somehow still feels relevant.
The reason for our love for dystopia and megacities is well captured in a Reddit comment I found:
I think that dystopian art is appealing partially because it signifies our survival through even the worst of conditions. That finding of joy in an otherwise seemingly joyless world.
Asking why we love cyberpunk megacities is the same as asking why people love to play Call of Duty, write apocalyptic fiction, or in more extreme cases, become survivalists. It’s the beauty of survival in a world so developed and complex that the humans within it can no longer make sense of it. But within it, they still build noodle shops. They still walk to the station together. They still decorate their balconies with plants. There is something heartbreakingly human about creating little pockets of meaning inside an overwhelming, chaotic system. And maybe that's what we love most: not the dystopia, but the fact that we find ways to live inside it anyway.
As promised, here is next week’s articles,, I wanna talk about how nostalgia is killing creativity, with discussion of wong kar-wai
Share this post