Cities Will Blend Together Into Giant Urban Regions

If you journey from Nanjing to Shanghai through Suzhou, a distance of nearly 200 miles, you will be struck by the fact that you pass through almost continuous urban development. The countryside seems to be turning into a new kind of city — “desakota,” a term the geographer Terry McGee once coined. This is a mixture of town and country, an urban sprawl, peppered by many high-rise blocks in what seem to be rural areas.

This is indigenous, perhaps, to China itself, but it is symptomatic of the fact that many cities all over the world are rapidly fusing into…