> See we agree? :)

Yeah. I was trying to explain why the chaotic parts are there and there are quite some notable exceptions.

> I think to be honest there you need to say cities not towns

TBH I was very hesitant to pick the word town or city or any others because in my mind it was the generic "城/Cheng" in Chinese. I find the nouns are often culturally specific as cities, castles, churches, and towns are European-oriented and more specific than "Cheng".

> Also, but I wouldn't really consider Shanghai a southern city, would you?

It's a southern city. Geographically speaking, China was divided by the Yangtze and the Yellow River into three 1/3 parts. Shanghai is located on the Yangtze so it's in the South. The south/north divider is the Qin Mountain range and Huai River line [0]. That's the line where the culture, climate, and pretty much everything differs drastically.

> pick one--Tianjin

Well, that's a sophisticated example that I happen to know about (I just realized there's even a wiki but in Chinese [1]):

- Almost every taxi driver in Beijing who has been to Tianjin told me how they got so frustrated with the road system. It's not hard to guess, since the roads are around the river and not as perpendicular as Beijing.

- But the old Tianjin was a squared town before the Western countries moved in. The town resides to the west of the river, exactly within today's north, east, south, and west roads (Dong, Xi, Nan, and Bei Malu). In the center it's the drum tower. Outside there were walls and moans and all that.

- So it didn't appear to be particularly chaotic to me at that time, at least there were quite some designs as you can see. And it wasn't nearly as important historically until the West started to settle in China. At least compared to Xi'an, Luoyang, Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, etc.,

- Later, the Western countries set up settlements along the river both on the east and west banks. The city started to grow. That's where the messy road system comes from.

> but what about the suburban places

But yeah, many suburban areas are a mess. While I kind of agree there is some chaotic nature, most culture does that without professional modern urban planning departments. Slums are very, very common outside the first world. Back in the old days in Europe, slums were also easy to be seen outside cities and castles.

Another factor is Tianjin was way messier decades ago. In 1976, there was a great earthquake and Mao died. A lot of the buildings were destroyed or damaged, and a lot of people would then rebuild their houses without proper knowledge and skills. Most of those were lost in the cultural revolution. People would randomly put together bunker-like stuff in random places and call it home. The same situation happened in Beijing - you can find Hutongs in Beijing are very chaotic, which should have been less so before the cultural revolution. Here's a video about the Beijing side of the story [2].

> It permeates the very fabric of Chinese culture

Honestly, I'm not very sure of it. On one hand, it's indeed chaotic as we can often see. There are also Chabuduo (good enough) and Meibanfa (there's nothing can be done) cultures. On the other hand, the Chinese also like to pursue regularity such as a lot of things have to be made in the shape of squares and circles. Numbers in designs and shapes have to be "stable" as 4 and 8. Those are not just for nobles, normal people do care and sometimes OCD about that, too.

I don't know man, if anything, Chinese culture is full of contradictions and confusion as always :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinling%E2%80%93Huaihe_Line
[1] Wiki on old Tianjin (Chinese version only, unfortunately) https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E5%A4%A9%E6%B4%A5%E8%80%81%E...
[2] https://youtu.be/3uo47m-1gQ4