I am not sure why I am continually fascinated by this place.
I suppose, having written the old Mac computer game Glider, it might be obvious why I am drawn to it since it kind of looks like an insanely large "house" that someone might have created for the game.
On the other hand I feel like I have had dreams in spaces that I imagine are like this — and I feel like these dreams may have pre-dated the game I wrote?
Or maybe it's a kind of Blade Runner vibe of the future that the city gives off — or like the early police chase scene in Chung King Express ... [1]
I imagine it as having both good and bad qualities. I imagine crime is always present — but that too exploration is always there too. A younger me would have loved to try to get lost, try to find my way home.
It’s the sci-fi death star cyberpunk dystopia aesthetic. The place was demolished before most of us ever heard about it, and yet we feel like we’ve been there, crawling through its air ducts, picking up a health boost at its meat markets, buying ammo from its shady traders, escaping from the cops through its windows, getting an achievement for doing it all without injuring the civilians…
By the way, 8 year old me loved Glider! Nice work.
"Death star"?! To me that evokes "designed", "manufactured" and "no need to think too much about human scale". See Seattle Central Public Library - especially at night when it's open to interstellar space.
There was a subway station in Paris - Etoile I think - that was like that: No need of 90 degree angles, stairs here and there in unpredictable locations, and colorful and brightly lit underground "strip mall". A bowling alley or something. Most subway stations are mostly corridors populated only with people and wall poster advertising, while that one because it had a bunch of stores and other venues, felt so much larger and confusing from a navigation point of view.
Some glimpses of it in the movie Subway I think? It's not the main station in that movie, which is Chatelet Les Halles - vast spaces where it's hard to keep track of orientation yes, but seemingly very simple vertically: flat. Which is misleading: most Paris subway stations are complex vertically because of the need to straddle and connect different sides of rail tracks crossing at different levels, while leaving intact different sides of other tunnels, sewers, etc.
Okay. It's interesting that most of the Death Star's interior views failed on that. Yes a droid is useful to make sense of the plans but most of it seems... flat floors and vertical elevators and "vertical" shafts.
Even the Seattle Central Public Library - a real building - did it better, with tilted multi-floor window planes, escalators, multi-floor corkscrew walking path with numbering on the floor, unexpected openings overlooking big open spaces, etc.
"I am not sure why I am continually fascinated by this place."
If you're into technology - like anyone on Hacker News - you're probably fascinated by seeing high complexity in a small space. That's one of the things about tech that makes it exciting to me. Look at my smartwatch - so much complexity crammed into something so small. Such high entropy. It's just fundamentally interesting because there's so much there.
I know it was no treat for the people that lived there, tho. Conditions sucked.
(Bit of a tangent, but I also wonder if there's a link between this and my (very bad) social media addiction. There's just so much stuff to look at on a place like reddit or tiktok. Such high information density.)
This diagram sort of reminds me of playing Sim Tower, or those books of cross sections of things that were popular entertainment when I was a kid. I guess they hit the same part of the brain.
Maybe it's non-normative ways of living? In many places, people are not allowed to live in whichever way they please - there are rules and regulations, mostly in the name of safety (from crime, fire/flood, infection, etc).
Kowloon seems to exist outside/before these restrictions, and might therefore feel more "free" in some way. It might also be why fantasy/science fiction fantasy tends to take place in a slightly more "lawless" and uninhibited world.
> Kowloon seems to exist outside/before these restrictions, and might therefore feel more "free" in some way.
I doubt most of the people who lived there felt that way. There were rules enforced by the powerful people living there, it just wasn’t enforced formally via laws. Instead, strongmen imposed their own rules.
sort of - most of the people there also didn't have good options to leave. I suspect most would leave if given a better option. Note however that better option needs to somehow include your friends and family.
Agreed! Fantasy tends to assume your basic needs are satisfied, especially the unsexy ones. E.g. you rarely see someone use the restroom in space, and I bet that the “fantastical” nature of Kowloon is interrupted in reality by waste management
When I say “free” and “uninhibited”, I am talking only about the mind playing with fantasy, not the actual lived experience of residents
Many did not want to leave, for want of having better options.
The dentists were especially attached to the place.
>Medical and dental care were no problem at all: many of the residents were doctors and dentists with Chinese qualifications and years of experience but lacking the expensive pieces of paper required to practise in the colony. They set up their neat little clinics in the City, oases of cleanliness and order, and charged their patients a fraction of what they would pay outside.
Source: City Of Darkness: Life In Kowloon Walled City (1993)
It‘s because to the domesticated observer, the walled city symbolizes an idealized vision of chaos. A place you could have inhabited where you would finally be free from the dictates of society. The ideal space of opportunity where you could have forged your own path, the realities of KWC be damned.
In the same way that people living in Chaos yearn for a Franco or an old King because they symbolize order, regardless of the realities of their reign.
Just a projection space that is sufficiently ill-defined that it becomes a canvas.
I think of kowloon as a preview to the hyperdense cities of the future in a way.
Acrologies would be a more workable vision of hyperdense cities, as you also need green spaces rather than just a bigger version of dense concrete jungles that is defacto state of many cities.
Right now, space is criminally underused in cities or allocated so inefficiently that we don't really need acrologies yet. We can get more green in cities and making these places more pleasant and human space to live.
"Dense" cities are necessary for achieving the efficiencies of density, but "hyperdense" cities are not. You can have a city where all residential buildings are five- to six-stories, with ample green spaces and every street lined with trees; that would be a dense city, despite being less dense than Manhattan.
I don't foresee a future where any city feels the desire to model itself after the Kowloon Walled City in terms of density, because in order for that to happen it would have to imply that physical space itself is the bottleneck for the population, rather than things like the availability of energy/food/water (which was true for the KWC for historical/political reasons).
Note that the walled city is just a small part of Kowloon district. The famous Kai Tak Airport was also in Kowloon (now converted into an event space), where airliners flew scarily close to buildings on final approach.
I lived in Hong Kong just under 10 years, and a friend of a friend grew up in the walled city.
According to Wikipedia, China actually handed over sovereignty of Kowloon to the British to facilitate demolishing it. They must have really hated the place.
The more interesting question is why so many people feel this place in the first place. Why this puzzling fascination? I don't have this with any other place.
Why do the pictures feel like home?
While I shouldn't, I remember it as people struggling to make ends meet but also as an incredibly happy place because of the tightly knitted social fabric. The need to help others and the need to be helped creates top notch relationships.
It's basically the inspo for every cyberpunk dystopia ever from Blade Runner on forwards. Right down to the black markets, prostitutes, drugs, unlicensed doctors and dentists plying their trades, etc.
Most recently, the setting of the video game Stray is basically Kowloon with the serial numbers filed off.
Not just the Kowloon Walled City, but other locations in Hong Kong inspire lots of cyberpunk scenes. After living in Hong Kong for a few years, I re-watched Ghost in the Shell and was surprised to recognize the final scene as taking place under the circular pedestrian overpass on Queens Road, just east of Victoria Park.
Sadly all the neon (and other noble gas installations) in Hong Kong and elsewhere is going away. It is sometimes but not always replaced by LED which doesn't necessarily give that same aesthetic.
And one thing that was great in Blade Runner was to recognize "the tyrrany of weather". Instead of erasing that from their source material. Because many Los Angeles concept teams might not even understand that. The designers cherished it and made us of it, for lighting, for mood, for how the business stalls might be set up. Still great to this day.
I think it's because it's inspired so much fiction. Blade runner, there's references to it in Ghost in the Shell, in the game Stray, and many others. Many people are fascinated by it.
I share your fascination and perhaps from the same genome; I haven't figured out what yet, but I've always thought some MMORPG game based on the city would be spectacular.
Yes, I’m rereading Young Lady’s Primer right now and although Dr. X’s lair is far northward, my mind’s eye sees Kowloon photos tinted by Kar-wai and Doyle’s works.
Wow, how much fun times my friends and I had with Glider. We probably could not possibly thank you enough for making something that caused us to spend so much time together. If only I had more rubber bands...
No need to thank me. I enjoyed writing it. When I first wrote it it was both a personal challenge (to write a game) and also kind of fun for me to play as well.
Nothing can beat a Glider PRO house in terms of surrealism and trickery, though! And cozy charm. In fact, I think it's time I downloaded a copy of SheepShaver and reinstalled it – and all the extra houses...
Thanks, this is great. The people alone make this like Where's Waldo: find the mahjong parlor, the elementary school, the dude taking a dump, the couple having sex, etc.
And the main article doesn't show any interesting parts of the image on mobile; just the left side with a lot of white space and some words that I cannot read.
Can't scroll to the right. Can't zoom out. Can't long-press and open the image separately.
It's not a temple but an alms house. It still exists. All of KWC was taken down except for this building which was preserved in-situ.
The alms house is the center of present day Kowloon Walled City Park. It's a nice place, I've been there. I learned a fair bit about KWC I didn't know before, like there were only 2 standpipes for water for 35 fucking thousand people!
It's always bothered me how yellow-tinted this image is. I guess there was a heat wave or maybe they had just finished reseeding the grass or something.
Note the "hole" in the center - that's where the alms house was/is.
> It's always bothered me how yellow-tinted this image is. I guess there was a heat wave or maybe they had just finished reseeding the grass or something.
It's literally just a sunset (which adds a rose-yellow tint). You can tell by the building shadows.
Since finding out about Kowloon walled city, I have been fascinated with it. Most cities have sections (usually older parts of them) that are maze like, and they are often my favorite parts of those cities.
It reminds me of the hive cities of Warhammer 40k.
Another analysis of Kowloon I enjoyed is this one by the architect Dami Lee [1].
Fascinating. I saw this earlier via waxy blog, who got it via colossal, which pointed to an interactive version that also referenced some short videos/documentaries about it: https://www.rioleo.org/kowloon/
It reminds me of "Doubling Up" the 1946 drawing by Saul Steinberg that was one of the sources for Georges Perec's "Life a User's Manual" which - no spoilers - is a book set in a similar densely populated building (aside: a couple of years ago I pitched a Playdate game based on these things) https://www.fitzroyandfinn.co.uk/journal/georges-perec
September of last year 54 died in a fire because trucks couldn't get close enough to fight the fire (not to mention no fire exits, bars on windows, people couldn't escape).
This past May fourteen died in a fire. Fire department was handing out axes and told resident to bust through walls if a fire happened.
Some photos here, but these are relatively decent houses, many of them not illegal, just built long ago. They get much, much more complex and much, much more run down condition, including lots of illegal construction.
You can see a bit of the Walled City in the old Van Damme movie, Blood Sport [1].
There used to be an incredible multi-story arcade outside Tokyo, あなたのウェアハウス [2], with two of the floors being themed as KWC. The weathering on all the elements (including the escalator and crane games!) was fantastic.
There's a recently released kungfu movie whose story happened in the Kowloon walled city. The government is planning to relocate the movie set to the original address for exhibition.
More generally, all economic growth has been moved to mainland China. This started to be true around 2016, but was very clear by 2019, and is fully complete now. This is true of construction, shipping, travel, and finance.
I lived there 2012 to 2021, and left my heart there. I'd likely still live there if I felt it were a better place to raise kids.
In the treaty between China and the UK handing over HK, the people were promised eventual universal suffrage for the Chief Executive (governor/mayor). The elections for Chief Executive are held every 5 years, and there are protests every 5 years asking for universal suffrage. In 2014, there were tents on the main roads, and students making makeshift barricades, a small number of people being beaten and/or pepper sprayed by police.
The protests in 2019 were very different. It looked crazy on television, but in person it actually wasn't very scary. I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants from Fujian province who got in a big brawl with protesters half a block from my flat. Unfortunately, some subway stations and a few shops were burned, but it wasn't random arson. The subway company is majority-owned by the government, and police were using stations as makeshift police stations. The businesses that got burned had owners with large business interests in the mainland and had spoken out against protesters. That's not to say the arson was justified, but I was never worried someone would torch my building.
Though, as an obvious Westerner, any protester would have assumed that I supported at least peaceful protest for democracy. On the other hand, with all of the propaganda/rumors saying all of the protesters were organized and paid by the CIA, I was careful not to do anything that would feed into that. I had a strong sense that as long as I minded my own business, both the police and the protesters would likely leave me alone.
In 2019, a journalist was charged with misuse of a police database because they looked up the license plate of a van that dropped off a bunch of triad thugs to beat up protesters in a subway station. The journalist discovered the van belonged to a pro-mainland politician.
Also, sometime around the 2019 protests (a bit earlier, if I remember), there was a dual-citizen bookstore owner in Causeway Bay who published a book about Xi's mistresses . He disappeared. His wife didn't know where he was. The Hong Kong government had no record of his having crossed passport control at any airport, pier, or land crossing with mainland China. A bit later, he showed up in the mainland to give a televised statement that he had gone to the mainland of his own free will to confess to a DUI case several years prior, and asking his second country (Sweden or Switzerland, I forget) to stop investigating his disappearance. Absolutely nothing fishy about that. (As I remember, the bookstore had 5 owners, and at least 4 of them had similar legal troubles. I believe only the one had an unexplainable border crossing into the mainland.)
2024 is another election year. I worry a bit what will happen, but I get the feeling the government has finally broken the will of the protesters.
> The protests in 2019 were very different. It looked crazy on television, but in person it actually wasn't very scary. I lived in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrants from Fujian province who got in a big brawl with protesters half a block from my flat.
Did you also live in North Point? I still remember the eerie vibes of the days after, almost every single shop was closed, and corners were guarded by certain people. A couple of days after, I went out for a walk, and came home to a standoff between protesters and riot police. I ended up going to Macau for a couple of days so to avoid the chaos.
I also felt that as a foreigner it was rather difficult, protesters would assume you're on their side, until you slightly criticized some of their actions, then you were just labelled as misinformed, and "you wouldn't understand as a foreigner". So I mostly just stuck to myself and refrained from discussing it with locals.
Yes, in North Point, right over the Wellcome near the MTR station. It was also right near the pedestrian overpass to the Chun Yeung Street Wet Market. (The overpass was covered when I moved in, but one morning the homeless encampment on the bridge caught fire and damaged the roofing enough that the roofing was removed. I don't remember if the fire was before or after the protests.)
How did I ignore it? I know it was North Point because the reference to Chinese gangsters, I also lived there, I know what happened. Never denied what happened.
Yes, but it seems I mixed up some details between the disappearance of Gui Minhai and the disappearance of his colleague Lee Bo. Gui Minhai was last seen in Thailand who showed up on Chinese TV asking Sweden not to investigate, and Lee Bo is the one who went to deliver some books in the Chai Wan district of Hong Kong and was apparently kidnapped to the mainland.
The Kowloon Walled City is probably the closest IRL structure there is to the (thankfully) fictional hive cities depicted in the Warhammer 40000 universe. Just image that structure, except scaled upwards and outwards by thousands of times.
Kowloon was a sizable locale in the videogame Shenmue 2. I don't know how true to life that section was, but it was honestly one of the most depressing environments I've ever encountered in a videogame. It was racing up and down dozens of identical floors featuring nothing but dank, claustrophobic apartments.
Call of Duty has a pretty lame Walled City level. I wonder if there's surviving blue prints for the apartment blocks and enough archival information to faithfully recreate it virtually one day.
I will never forget that part of Shenmue 2. It blew my 14 yo mind at the time when I found out that not only Kowloon city was real but it was also 10x more depressing in real life.
The labels are in Japanese if you want to try with your phone. The intro through Google Translate:
"The survey conducted by the "Kowloon City Expedition" first produced an east-west cross-sectional view. This panorama depicts life when Kowloon City was at its most lively on top of that cross-sectional view. Based on the remnants of life that remained in the area, we have added documentary materials and the results of interviews. If you look at Kowloon City as a whole, where each room was colored by its own lifestyle, you will see that it was a dense city where "anything goes", embracing both the sacred and the profane."
Living in a place like Kowloon Walled City must be much better than living out of a car. Areas with no legal restrictions on what can and will be built, could help solve the extremely damaging housing crisis in western countries.
None of the apartments had running water. People emptied their chamber pots out the window so the streets and walls were literally covered in shit. There were no elevators despite many buildings going up 14 floors.
Now on top of all that imagine sharing your apartment, which is not much bigger than a car, with your entire family.
>>None of the apartments had running water. People emptied their chamber pots out the window so the streets and walls were literally covered in shit. There were no elevators despite many buildings going up 14 floors.
I was wondering about the credibility of these claim and they seem functionally true, though wrong if taken literally. Speaking to water, it seems many apartments had some running water, but not potable/drinking water.
>As with every other alley in the City, it is lined overhead with water pipes installed by private water suppliers linking tanks on the roof to individual premises. Occasionally the water tanks were filled via illegal connections from the mains, but more usually it was ground water supplied for the suppliers’ own boreholes and not fit for drinking.
>Fresh drinking water for the whole City was supplied from just eight standpipes, seven on the periphery and just this one actually inside the City’s confines. Unsurprisingly, many of the Walled City’s food factories tended to choose premises nearby and the myriad of hoses allowed tanks to be filled directly, rather than by bucket as most of the residents had to do, even those living on the upper levels.
Likewise, the elevator fact was true for most residents.
>There were only two lifts in the entire City, so most people had to walk up with one or two buckets-full every day.
Sewage seems like it was addressed at some point, but not clear to what extent this was available within apartments.
>Health problems were also a major concern. Before the Government got together with the Kai Fong to install a mains sewage line in the 1970s, raw human waste exited the City via open drains driven down the side of the tiny streets. Much of this sewage seeped away, forgotten, into the ground, leaving the underlying geology of the area like a giant septic tank.
And create a housing crisis which is deadly - I cannot imagine the carnage that a major fire or earthquake would cause in a Kowloon Walled City like environment.
But I do think that some building regulations need a rethink - I believe there is a requirement in many American cities/states to have two staircases in apartment buildings, which really restricts how you can organise the building
Contractors VR (a MP FPS game) has Kowloon as one of the stock maps. It'd be fascinating if it'd be modelled after some real location. Maybe it is, I don't know.
I own this photo book, and I can't recommend it enough. Full of glimpses into life in the KWC, interviews with loads of its tenants.
If you find the idea of the KWC even vaguely fascinating, you could do worse than ordering this book. (No affiliation except as a very happy customer!)
Project Highrise is a relatively new clone/successor to Sim Tower. It was okay to good when I last played and didn't suffer from the issue I always had with Sim Tower which was the waves of people leaving.
I suppose, having written the old Mac computer game Glider, it might be obvious why I am drawn to it since it kind of looks like an insanely large "house" that someone might have created for the game.
On the other hand I feel like I have had dreams in spaces that I imagine are like this — and I feel like these dreams may have pre-dated the game I wrote?
Or maybe it's a kind of Blade Runner vibe of the future that the city gives off — or like the early police chase scene in Chung King Express ... [1]
I imagine it as having both good and bad qualities. I imagine crime is always present — but that too exploration is always there too. A younger me would have loved to try to get lost, try to find my way home.
[1] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI
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