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…
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 28th, 2023 at 1:38 PM and is filed under Communism, Economics, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Kowloon Walled City is often held up by libertarians as this example of complex lawlessness that managed to function beautifully in an idyllic Ayn-Randian nexus, somehow infinitely relocatable to any other polity on Earth.
I went there in the 80s. Twice. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. Half the female residents were prostitutes and the other half scraped by on the black market. It never existed in a libertarian nexus as its entire existence was precariously determined by whether or not certain police and political officials got their payoff that month so the city didn’t shut off the water mains, which incidentally they did tens if not hundreds of times.
Kowloon Walled City is an example of government ineptitude, corruption, and in-action. The entire thing would’ve depopulated in a month and collapsed in 6 had the city just decided to turn off the mains, destroy the transformers, and barred the media for a year long period for a mile in any direction from KWC. If anything they avoided it for so long because KWC was a containment zone for HK’s underclass….as long as it was up you knew where at least 75% of HKs criminal element was at all times.
Stop using it as an example of libertarianism. It is a terrible example.
Incidentally, thanks for providing these written summaries of interesting videos. I can read faster than I can listen, so getting these in text form is a delight.
It’s an extreme example that people can use to support things like zoning, building codes, etc., and I wouldn’t want to live there either.
On the other hand, my experience with zoning and building codes is mostly inspectors sniffing around for bribes to ignore violations (or sometimes “violations”).
Judging by the number of things we find missed by building inspectors of all sorts, I think the entire industry is a rent-seeker’s dream, meant to insulate people from the consequences of their piss-poor decision-making skills. And to make construction way more expensive than it needs to be…
Y’all would not believe the things that get passed, or what gets missed by mandatory loan inspections. I know one local business that got a loan from SBA to purchase the property. Passed the due diligence inspection the buyer insisted on, the bank inspection, and the Small Business Admin inspection. None of those “inspectors” noted that there were underground storage tanks clearly visible that had never been dealt with or even inspected/certified. There was an amnesty about thirty years ago for the things, and nobody got these on it, so… Still had fuel in them, too.
I pointed that out to the property owner, and let him go from there. Remediation was in the six-digit range, and to be quite honest, that property should never have sold without that being taken into account in the sale price. Inspections were useless, because the idiots doing them apparently didn’t know what they were looking at, and didn’t do what I did and take the caps off the tanks. I mean, literally… They were unmissable, about two feet from the wall of the building, and apparently, they just moseyed on by on their way towards collecting their inspection fees.
Lived in an apartment building that went condo; owner had the units inspected. Three different inspectors did my unit, over my tenure. Exactly one of them bothered to pop their head into the attic to discover that the insulators had apparently missed insulating that unit… I’m like “Gee, that explains the high heat bills in wintertime…”
Most home inspectors aren’t worth the powder to blow them up. Had an acquaintance buy a house, showed me the pictures he took in the crawlspace; the builder had used ICF on the foundation, but for some reason chose to lay the joists for the floor system on the foam, not the concrete. First time I’ve ever seen “structural foam insulation”. That got missed by the inspector, and when my acquaintance noticed it and brought it to his attention, they were like “Oh, that’s how you do that…”
[…] and Reports from Cuba: Man dies in another partial building collapse in Havana BattleSwarm: Kowloon City as Rhizome, also, LinkSwarm for September 29 Behind The Black: More than a year after the New Shepard […]
Kowloon Walled City is often held up by libertarians as this example of complex lawlessness that managed to function beautifully in an idyllic Ayn-Randian nexus, somehow infinitely relocatable to any other polity on Earth.
I went there in the 80s. Twice. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. Half the female residents were prostitutes and the other half scraped by on the black market. It never existed in a libertarian nexus as its entire existence was precariously determined by whether or not certain police and political officials got their payoff that month so the city didn’t shut off the water mains, which incidentally they did tens if not hundreds of times.
Kowloon Walled City is an example of government ineptitude, corruption, and in-action. The entire thing would’ve depopulated in a month and collapsed in 6 had the city just decided to turn off the mains, destroy the transformers, and barred the media for a year long period for a mile in any direction from KWC. If anything they avoided it for so long because KWC was a containment zone for HK’s underclass….as long as it was up you knew where at least 75% of HKs criminal element was at all times.
Stop using it as an example of libertarianism. It is a terrible example.
Since the core of Libertarianism is Utopianism, I think you protest too much.
Incidentally, thanks for providing these written summaries of interesting videos. I can read faster than I can listen, so getting these in text form is a delight.
It’s an extreme example that people can use to support things like zoning, building codes, etc., and I wouldn’t want to live there either.
On the other hand, my experience with zoning and building codes is mostly inspectors sniffing around for bribes to ignore violations (or sometimes “violations”).
Judging by the number of things we find missed by building inspectors of all sorts, I think the entire industry is a rent-seeker’s dream, meant to insulate people from the consequences of their piss-poor decision-making skills. And to make construction way more expensive than it needs to be…
Y’all would not believe the things that get passed, or what gets missed by mandatory loan inspections. I know one local business that got a loan from SBA to purchase the property. Passed the due diligence inspection the buyer insisted on, the bank inspection, and the Small Business Admin inspection. None of those “inspectors” noted that there were underground storage tanks clearly visible that had never been dealt with or even inspected/certified. There was an amnesty about thirty years ago for the things, and nobody got these on it, so… Still had fuel in them, too.
I pointed that out to the property owner, and let him go from there. Remediation was in the six-digit range, and to be quite honest, that property should never have sold without that being taken into account in the sale price. Inspections were useless, because the idiots doing them apparently didn’t know what they were looking at, and didn’t do what I did and take the caps off the tanks. I mean, literally… They were unmissable, about two feet from the wall of the building, and apparently, they just moseyed on by on their way towards collecting their inspection fees.
Lived in an apartment building that went condo; owner had the units inspected. Three different inspectors did my unit, over my tenure. Exactly one of them bothered to pop their head into the attic to discover that the insulators had apparently missed insulating that unit… I’m like “Gee, that explains the high heat bills in wintertime…”
Most home inspectors aren’t worth the powder to blow them up. Had an acquaintance buy a house, showed me the pictures he took in the crawlspace; the builder had used ICF on the foundation, but for some reason chose to lay the joists for the floor system on the foam, not the concrete. First time I’ve ever seen “structural foam insulation”. That got missed by the inspector, and when my acquaintance noticed it and brought it to his attention, they were like “Oh, that’s how you do that…”
That is emphatically not how you do that.
If you have committees organized to deal with crime, sanitation, etc., and negotiate with outside governments, then you have a government.
[…] and Reports from Cuba: Man dies in another partial building collapse in Havana BattleSwarm: Kowloon City as Rhizome, also, LinkSwarm for September 29 Behind The Black: More than a year after the New Shepard […]