The now-torn down Kowloon Walled City was a megastructure/hyperslum/gangster paradise situated just outside Hong Kong proper.
Kowloon City was an acknowledged influence on William Gibson’s urban dystopian cyberpunk: A hyper-dense, interconnected, lawless locale whose buildings and infrastructure grew organically without rhyme, reason, planning or building codes. It was one inspiration for the phrase “Temporary Autonomous Zone” briefly popular among anarchists and Libertarians in the 1980s and 90s.
In this video, YouTuber Dami Lee argues that Kowloon City is best understood as a rhizome, a kind of horizontal-growing root that intertwines with everything.
“When we first started looking into the Kowloon Walled City, also known as the densest city in the world, we thought for a place that’s essentially a slum full of crime and drugs, with subhuman living conditions, there sure is a lot of romanticization about this place.”
“The city looks like it came straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel.”
“It’s a giant megastructure part architecture, part living organism, and it’s actually something architects have been dreaming about for years. One continuous structure where you could access all the necessities of daily life but evolves and grows with time.”
New York City has a population density of 11,000 per square kilometer. Kowloon City had a population density of 1,255,000 per square kilometer.
“Kowloon Walled City was a city within Hong Kong that was technically a part of China.” It started as a fort, but after being abandoned Chinese refugees flooded there after World War II.
“It was known as the only Chinese enclave that the Hong Kong government couldn’t touch. But after that, it included anyone and everyone from gangs, criminals to doctors to entrepreneurs, people trying to escape poverty or people trying to capitalize on this unregulated haven.”
“Crime naturally flourished there with gangs, drugs, brothels. If you had an industrial business, you could ignore the fire codes, the labor codes or safety codes So you could produce goods at a fraction of the cost. You could also sell things that were banned anywhere else, like dog meat.”
“With unbeatable prices, industry kind of thrived here and lots of things made in Kowloon Walled City made their way back to China, Hong Kong, and sometimes even overseas. They were known especially for their fish balls and dumplings.”
“in Kowloon, buildings will get built, leaving these small gaps for air and light. But very quickly they get filled in with stairways, which sometimes connect it to three or four buildings. The city of Kowloon had around 350 buildings, but eventually the all merge into this one giant megastructure. The rooftops would connect, forming one giant rooftop, and even the residential units were connected to each other. And since not all the units had electricity or other resources, it allowed them to share things like power out of a single source.”
“It especially allowed businesses to expand strategically and organically.” Such as a strip club that lured people in to make real money in the gambling den a floor down.
“New buildings could attach and be integrated to existing structures. And with every new building, new circulation paths and collection points are formed which evolve and expand with the growth of the city. And at the intersection of these connections or stairs or alleys, nodes would organically merge.”
“Chinese doctors and dentists who couldn’t afford to get relicensed in Hong Kong, set up shop here and offer services for bargain prices, which attracted customers from outside the city.”
Factories gravitated to ground floors with vehicle and water access, while residential went to higher floors. “But most of the residents actually moved through the hundreds of alleys and secret paths, which all twisted and turned and stepped up and down and cut through multiple buildings. So unlike a typical city where you have one point of connection, you had multiple points of connection vertically and horizontally between multiple spaces.”
The hard limits of the city forced it to expand upward and inward.
“Even though they didn’t have a government, the residents self-organized to fix problems as they came up to deal with crime. They formed groups of volunteers to escort single women. And when the Hong Kong government released plans to demolish the city, they organized the Kowloon City Anti Demolition Committee that fought against the plan for years. Even the five Triad gangs organized garbage cleaning teams and helped settle disputes between businesses.”
Kowloon City was demolished in 1994.
At it’s height, Kowloon City was an an example of “spontaneous order” that can arise from the intersection of capitalism and low- or no-regulation environments. But much of its success was based on a rare combination of things, namely its proximity to a huge, thriving, international city, private ownership of land, ethnic homogeneity, and a ready populace of low-wage workers, many of whom had fled communism.
By contrast, Seattle’s antifa “Autonomous Zone” thugocracy had none of these things going for it, and the only industry they brought to the area was shaking down existing businesses for protection money ‘donations.”
I can imagine it both as a place of tremendous economic dynamism as well as someplace I personally would never want to live. Just imagine if you had a factory using deadly chemicals right below you. And I imagine the illegal activity providing a significant portion of Kowloon City’s income.
It was an interesting, unintentional experiment, and I’m sure the vast majority of residents there fared better than they would have under the Great Leap Forward…