18 ms·

Architectural cross-section of Kowloon Walled City

288 points by hampelm 2y ago

mrtimo 2y ago
Don't miss the link to the full res cross-section: https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828/KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-...
- ssl-3 2y ago
  That link doesn't work at the present time. 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. tl;dr, can't see shit.
  - hedgehog 2y ago
    Seems ok from here in iPhone Safari.
  - a1369209993 2y ago
    > That link doesn't work at the present time. Try: $ A='https://web.archive.org/web/20240701123410' $ B='https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment' $ C='11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828' $ D='KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg' $ wget "$A/$B/$C/$D" (or https://web.archive.org/web/20240701123410/https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828/KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20240701123410/https://staging.c...)
- teractiveodular 2y ago
  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.
refurb 2y ago
If you want to see something similar to Kowloon Walled City, just visit the old parts of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. There are plenty of illegal buildings, modified for residence in a haphazard manner with shoulder-width roads passing underneath them.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Can you visit them and live to tell it? :) Ps: I said that in a joking way but it's a serious question: Is it safe? I would really like to see such a living environment, it is fascinating.
  - refurb 2y ago
    It's not great for inhabitants. 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. https://e.vnexpress.net/photo/news/narrow-hanoi-alleyways-impede-firefighting-efforts-4753569.html https://e.vnexpress.net/photo/news/narrow-hanoi-alleyways-im...
gsuuon 2y ago
This is super cool - would love to see a version with translations
- washadjeffmad 2y ago
  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."
pram 2y ago
Something thats missing from this that I think is interesting was a temple on the ground floor that everything was built around: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cd/ed/93/cded9349a59088ff02dcf6017e66d281.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cd/ed/93/cded9349a59088ff02dcf6017...
- actinium226 2y ago
  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!
freitzkriesler2 2y ago
Hong Kong was always one of my favorite cities and it breaks my heart what has happened to it. I also wish I had a chance to visit his megastructure. Sure it was a slum but an epic one at that.
- novagameco 2y ago
  What has happened to Hong Kong? I've never been
  - kurthr 2y ago
    https://apnews.com/article/47-activists-explainer-national-security-hong-kong-3da0cf03e08624671740f763bd9d8dc2 https://apnews.com/article/47-activists-explainer-national-s... Rule of law has been abandoned. 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. https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/wbr.html?ecode=B10200082023QQ03&scode=230 https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/wbr.html?ecode=B10200082023QQ...
    - KMag 2y ago
      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.
MisterTea 2y ago
This is from the Japanese book that is called something along the lines of Great Illustrated Kowloon City which I have a copy of. https://www.amazon.com/Kowloon-large-illustrated-ISBN-4000080709/dp/4000080709 https://www.amazon.com/Kowloon-large-illustrated-ISBN-400008...
JKCalhoun 2y ago
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. [1] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI
- kiba 2y ago
  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.
  - 6510 2y ago
    It to me feels more like generation space ships. 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.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    "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).
jonfk 2y ago
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]. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WLn_QTFVZgE&pp=ygUFIzJhYWI%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WLn_QTFVZgE&pp=ygUFIzJhYWI%3D
- lloydatkinson 2y ago
  [flagged]
AdmiralAsshat 2y ago
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.
- drooopy 2y ago
  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.
- maxglute 2y ago
  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.
temporarely 2y ago
Bird's eye view https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Kowloon_Walled_City_-_1989_Aerial.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Kowloon_... atm battling roaches in my apt so first thought looking at that ^ was wondering how many millions of cockroaches lived in that thing.
- actinium226 2y ago
  And not just cockroaches :D 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.
  - antisthenes 2y ago
    > 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.
    - actinium226 2y ago
      Yea but the dead grass is adding to that effect and, IMO, exaggerating it. Note how the trees in other parts of the picture still appear green.
      - antisthenes 2y ago
        Yes, the trees in the shadow in the top left part of the image appear more green, since they aren't tinted by the sunset.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
smusamashah 2y ago
If you like very detailed art with so much going on like in the image in article you will be in for a treat at https://reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder https://reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder
standardUser 2y ago
Oh great, now I have to play Sim Tower again! Maybe there's some newer versions to check out?
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  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.
  - standardUser 2y ago
    I ended up buying Mad Tower Tycoon after reading reviews of both.
msephton 2y ago
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/ 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 https://www.fitzroyandfinn.co.uk/journal/georges-perec
initramfs 2y ago
awesome
ropable 2y ago
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.
throwaway2037 2y ago
Read more about this place here: https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/ https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/
- lb1lf 2y ago
  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!)
  - lolive 2y ago
    +1 https://youtu.be/rJA6plpy6F8?si=-fvwdSy5evM2_s9L https://youtu.be/rJA6plpy6F8?si=-fvwdSy5evM2_s9L Note: Greg Girard is a GREAT photographer
thomasfl 2y ago
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.
- NeoTar 2y ago
  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
- actinium226 2y ago
  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.
  - bitcurious 2y ago
    >>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. Sources: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/kowloon-walled-city https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/kowloon-walled-c... https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/category/the_city/ https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/category/the_city/
treprinum 2y ago
That looks like the old Saboteur 1/2 games... Wondering if they drew inspiration from Kowloon.
Lio 2y ago
This seems to be a small thing but it's odd to see people talking about how "Kowloon" used to exist. Kowloon still exists. Kowloon isn't the name of the Walled City, Kowloon is where the Walled City was located. You can still visit Kowloon even today.
kalaksi 2y ago
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.
wkat4242 2y ago
One place I really wish I would have visited. It's been the inspiration of so much fiction.
account42 2y ago
Direct linkt to the image: https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/b21a60cd-a5df-49b5-96e7-2006d8ce91e7/HitomiTerasawa-KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama1997.jpg https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/b21a60cd-a5df-49b5-... Only showing a tiny part and auto-scrolling at a fixed non-user controlled speed is an annoying choice.
bmalicoat 2y ago
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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smGHdOU4Qu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smGHdOU4Qu4 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_Kawasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_Kawasaki
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- isaacfung 2y ago
  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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uZmmTut7Ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uZmmTut7Ak

288 points by hampelm 2y ago

Don't miss the link to the full res cross-section: https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828/KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-...

ssl-3 2y ago
That link doesn't work at the present time. 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. tl;dr, can't see shit.
- hedgehog 2y ago
  Seems ok from here in iPhone Safari.
- a1369209993 2y ago
  > That link doesn't work at the present time. Try: $ A='https://web.archive.org/web/20240701123410' $ B='https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment' $ C='11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828' $ D='KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg' $ wget "$A/$B/$C/$D" (or https://web.archive.org/web/20240701123410/https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/11357255-b6b9-4a57-98eb-823776a4a828/KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20240701123410/https://staging.c...)
teractiveodular 2y ago
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.

refurb 2y ago

If you want to see something similar to Kowloon Walled City, just visit the old parts of Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi. There are plenty of illegal buildings, modified for residence in a haphazard manner with shoulder-width roads passing underneath them.

wkat4242 2y ago
Can you visit them and live to tell it? :) Ps: I said that in a joking way but it's a serious question: Is it safe? I would really like to see such a living environment, it is fascinating.
- refurb 2y ago
  It's not great for inhabitants. 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. https://e.vnexpress.net/photo/news/narrow-hanoi-alleyways-impede-firefighting-efforts-4753569.html https://e.vnexpress.net/photo/news/narrow-hanoi-alleyways-im...

gsuuon 2y ago

This is super cool - would love to see a version with translations

washadjeffmad 2y ago
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."

pram 2y ago

Something thats missing from this that I think is interesting was a temple on the ground floor that everything was built around: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cd/ed/93/cded9349a59088ff02dcf6017e66d281.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cd/ed/93/cded9349a59088ff02dcf6017...

actinium226 2y ago
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!

freitzkriesler2 2y ago

Hong Kong was always one of my favorite cities and it breaks my heart what has happened to it. I also wish I had a chance to visit his megastructure. Sure it was a slum but an epic one at that.

novagameco 2y ago
What has happened to Hong Kong? I've never been
- kurthr 2y ago
  https://apnews.com/article/47-activists-explainer-national-security-hong-kong-3da0cf03e08624671740f763bd9d8dc2 https://apnews.com/article/47-activists-explainer-national-s... Rule of law has been abandoned. 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. https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/wbr.html?ecode=B10200082023QQ03&scode=230 https://www.censtatd.gov.hk/en/wbr.html?ecode=B10200082023QQ...
  - KMag 2y ago
    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.

MisterTea 2y ago

This is from the Japanese book that is called something along the lines of Great Illustrated Kowloon City which I have a copy of. https://www.amazon.com/Kowloon-large-illustrated-ISBN-4000080709/dp/4000080709 https://www.amazon.com/Kowloon-large-illustrated-ISBN-400008...

JKCalhoun 2y ago

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. [1] https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI https://youtu.be/0uMekCFDnkI

kiba 2y ago
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.
- 6510 2y ago
  It to me feels more like generation space ships. 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.
- kibwen 2y ago
  "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).

jonfk 2y ago

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]. [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WLn_QTFVZgE&pp=ygUFIzJhYWI%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WLn_QTFVZgE&pp=ygUFIzJhYWI%3D

lloydatkinson 2y ago
[flagged]

AdmiralAsshat 2y ago

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.

drooopy 2y ago
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.
maxglute 2y ago
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.

temporarely 2y ago

Bird's eye view https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Kowloon_Walled_City_-_1989_Aerial.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Kowloon_... atm battling roaches in my apt so first thought looking at that ^ was wondering how many millions of cockroaches lived in that thing.

actinium226 2y ago
And not just cockroaches :D 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.
- antisthenes 2y ago
  > 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.
  - actinium226 2y ago
    Yea but the dead grass is adding to that effect and, IMO, exaggerating it. Note how the trees in other parts of the picture still appear green.
    - antisthenes 2y ago
      Yes, the trees in the shadow in the top left part of the image appear more green, since they aren't tinted by the sunset.

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smusamashah 2y ago

If you like very detailed art with so much going on like in the image in article you will be in for a treat at https://reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder https://reddit.com/r/wimmelbilder

standardUser 2y ago

Oh great, now I have to play Sim Tower again! Maybe there's some newer versions to check out?

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
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.
- standardUser 2y ago
  I ended up buying Mad Tower Tycoon after reading reviews of both.

msephton 2y ago

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/ 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 https://www.fitzroyandfinn.co.uk/journal/georges-perec

initramfs 2y ago

awesome

ropable 2y ago

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.

throwaway2037 2y ago

Read more about this place here: https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/ https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/

lb1lf 2y ago
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!)
- lolive 2y ago
  +1 https://youtu.be/rJA6plpy6F8?si=-fvwdSy5evM2_s9L https://youtu.be/rJA6plpy6F8?si=-fvwdSy5evM2_s9L Note: Greg Girard is a GREAT photographer

thomasfl 2y ago

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.

NeoTar 2y ago
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
actinium226 2y ago
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.
- bitcurious 2y ago
  >>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. Sources: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/kowloon-walled-city https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/kowloon-walled-c... https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/category/the_city/ https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/category/the_city/

treprinum 2y ago

That looks like the old Saboteur 1/2 games... Wondering if they drew inspiration from Kowloon.

Lio 2y ago

This seems to be a small thing but it's odd to see people talking about how "Kowloon" used to exist. Kowloon still exists. Kowloon isn't the name of the Walled City, Kowloon is where the Walled City was located. You can still visit Kowloon even today.

kalaksi 2y ago

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.

wkat4242 2y ago

One place I really wish I would have visited. It's been the inspiration of so much fiction.

account42 2y ago

Direct linkt to the image: https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/b21a60cd-a5df-49b5-96e7-2006d8ce91e7/HitomiTerasawa-KowloonWalledCityGrandPanorama1997.jpg https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/b21a60cd-a5df-49b5-... Only showing a tiny part and auto-scrolling at a fixed non-user controlled speed is an annoying choice.

bmalicoat 2y ago

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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smGHdOU4Qu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smGHdOU4Qu4 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_Kawasaki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warehouse_Kawasaki

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isaacfung 2y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uZmmTut7Ak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uZmmTut7Ak