Nursakti Pratomoatmojo just published his first paper. He developed a new Urban Patch Expansion (UPE) framework that characterises five different ways in which cities expand. In addition to the commonly defined types of expansion (infill, edge expansion and outlying development) he distinguished two types of coalescence: merging and joining. Merging is defined as the amalgamation of at least two initial patches whose combined area is smaller than the newly added urban area merging them, while joining refers to cases where the total area of the initial urban patches is larger than the newly developed urban area connecting them. This growing together of multiple smaller urban patches is a notable characteristic of quickly developing cities in the Global South as this paper illustrates for the functional urban area of Bandung (Indonesia) in the period 1975–2015.