Under the ambitious “Lantau Tomorrow” plan, Hong Kong will first build a roughly 2,500-acre island—roughly the size of 1,000 football fields—around the uninhabited Kau Yi Chau Island to the northeast of Lantau. This may be followed by an additional 1,700 additional acres of land reclamation around the island Hei Ling Chau, which is roughly two miles from Mui Wo and visible from its shoreline. — CityLab

We’re growing faster than any other metropolitan area in the country, and we have been for the last five years...And the challenges are, with all the growth that we’re having, we’re going to stop being the city that we imagine that we are, that we remember being. We have to grow to be the city that we still recognize. So those challenges are not optional challenges for us to deal with, they’re the challenges for us to deal with. — Metropolis Magazine

China has detailed its urban planning vision, which has been designed to make its sprawling cities more inclusive, safer and better places to live.

[...] policymakers pledged to transform urban development patterns and improve city management.

The last time China held such a high-level meeting was in 1978, when only 18 percent of the population lived in cities. By the end of 2011, in excess of 50 percent of the population called the city their home. — chinadaily.com.cn

Back in 1 A.D., ancient civilizations like the Mayans experienced “urban booms” of their own. This mind-boggling interactive map made by Esri puts thousands of years of global population growth into perspective, ultimately showing us that NYC is kind of just a blip on the radar—or in this case, the 2,000-year timeline of life. — 6sqft

For decades, China’s government has tried to limit the size of Beijing, the capital, through draconian residency permits. Now, the government has embarked on an ambitious plan to make Beijing the center of a new supercity of 130 million people.

The planned megalopolis, a metropolitan area that would be about six times the size of New York’s, is meant to revamp northern China’s economy and become a laboratory for modern urban growth. — nytimes.com

Henry Lin and Abraham Loeb at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics have used models for showing how galaxies evolve based on matter density to propose a unifying theory for scaling laws of human populations. [...]

All of which suggests that the underlying laws that govern some fairly complex human behaviours are the same as those that determined the formation of the very galaxy we live in. — qz.com