Megacities
Eight million people is where a city stops being a place and becomes a weather system, with its own speed, noise and horizon. The reward for surrendering to it is an energy no resort can imitate.
A megacity is not a large city. It is a city whose size has become the mechanism — where scale itself produces the arrangements you come to see.
Density forces invention. São Paulo's traffic produced the world's largest civilian helicopter fleet, about four hundred rooftop flights a day, and in 2007 the city banned outdoor advertising entirely and revealed the architecture underneath. Jakarta is sinking as groundwater is pumped from beneath it, and Indonesia is building a new capital in response.
Growth has a rate, and it belongs in the text. Lagos adds roughly two thousand people a day; Shenzhen went from thirty thousand to seventeen million in forty years. Numbers, not adjectives.
The informal city is the city. Dharavi, Makoko and the hillside barrios are not exceptions to the plan; in several of these places they house the majority, and the portraits treat them as subject rather than as spectacle.
Legibility is the traveller's problem. These portraits pick one mechanism and follow it rather than attempting a survey.
Choose a district and stay in it.