How a City Was Accidentally Built for MAXIMUM Density

Описание: This video is for a commissioned map, and tells the story of a city from its origins to the present day - starting with an immigrant businessman who purchased a 17-square-mile island for just five dollars, and how that island became one of the densest places on Earth.

The story begins in the 1950s, as Victor Yue acquires a largely unwanted island on the edge of Norblina City. With little political power but a vast immigrant workforce, Victor begins building infrastructure first — bridges, ferries, roads, housing, and industry - turning the island into a functioning city at extreme speed. But density didn’t happen by accident. Land was scarce, migration was constant, and infrastructure always arrived just late enough to force people closer together.

Over the decades, Pinyin grows into a megacity shaped by top-down planning, worker unrest, class segregation, congestion pricing, gold discoveries, political trade-offs, and controversial decisions that still shape the island today. Fires, discrimination, public housing experiments, elite capture of land, and generational power shifts all leave their mark.

This is not a tutorial - it’s a narrative map explaining how planning decisions, incentives, and compromises can quietly lock a city into extreme density, and why once that momentum starts, it’s almost impossible to reverse.

Some static images in this video use generated images purely to support the storytelling.
Everything else is original - the script is entirely written by me, all narration is my own voice, and the map of Pinyin was fully hand-drawn by me as a commissioned artwork and the video edited by me.
This particular map is not available for purchase. This story is entirely fictional. Music is from uppbeat.