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Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance (2013)
- jeyoor 2y agoThere are Heterotopias in the US too. Some of the border regions in Southwest Texas intermittently occupied by cartels or smugglers come to mind.
- tonijn 2y agoThe pictures give you a Blade Runner feel
- lelandfe 2y agoKowloon Walled City is a classic, almost trope-y, touchstone for cyberpunk aesthetics.
- cess11 2y agoAnd rock music aesthetics. https://theperpetualmotionmachine.bandcamp.com/album/gambling-on-the-richter-scale https://theperpetualmotionmachine.bandcamp.com/album/gamblin...
- out_of_protocol 2y agoIt's other way around - most of Cyberpunk aesthetic heavily inspired by Kowloon
- ForHackernews 2y agoIf you're interested in Kowloon, check out https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/ https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/
- crabl 2y agoI feel like Kowloon is a decent metaphor for software design at most typical large SaaS companies: small changes accreted over time that lead to an impenetrable, wandering structure that only the residents (developers) truly understand.
- seanw265 2y agoIt's a fascinating comparison—I've seen this happen at companies too. Makes you wonder if imposing something akin to building codes for software development could prevent this kind of sprawling complexity.
- yungporko 2y agoi've never seen coding standards properly enforced on any large project, nobody has time to read through and scrutinize 30 files of code every time somebody creates a new feature when everybody has their own work to be doing too. at my last job we had mandatory code reviews and some days half of the entire day was just doing that. it didn't long before reading turned into skimming and skimming just turned into clicking approve.
- Groxx 2y agoSadly I have to agree. It has to be mechanically enforced or it doesn't actually last, even with good intentions. (Or a BDFL, but those have scaling limits and Life™ stuff) Which is a shame because I'm pretty convinced that slowing down and having time to do those reviews is net-good in the (not-very-)long run. Much of the space (and bugs) in even a very well run large project are from accumulating gaps until nobody knows how things truly work - it takes time to eliminate them and end up in a simpler, smaller, more sustainable state.
- seanw265 2y agoI was thinking less about self-imposed code reviews and more about regulatory frameworks—principles borrowed from architecture and construction, like mandated documentation, reviews, and inspections. There's some precedent for this: software in medical devices face strict regulations after incidents like Therac-25. While most software might not carry the same life-or-death risks, data breaches are increasing in frequency and impact. We should at least be thinking about how we can improve our processes as an industry.
- bobthepanda 2y ago
- zabzonk 2y agoWilliam Gibson, Idoru. Heroine Chia Pet ends up (after some adventures, in cyberspace and meat) with place in the walled city. It's a good book.
- zzzeek 2y agosorta mind blowing to look at what's there now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City_Park#/media/File:Kowloon_Walled_City_Park_Overview_201807.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City_Park#/medi...
- jansan 2y agoA bit unrelated, but since people with Hong Kong knowledge may be reading: How are the Chungking Mansions doing? The atmosphere there was sometimes compared to Kowloon Walled City, and I remember when my roommate stayed there in the 90s he reported that from his window that faced the inner courtyard he could not see the ground, just darkness. Also, it was reported to have rats as big as cats and cockroaches as big as rats (I hope jokingly). How is it doing now? Still as dystopian?
- notpushkin 2y agoI've stayed there about half a year ago. [0] Pretty interesting place, although not nearly as dystopian as you describe it! No cockroaches or anything, but ground level is very noisy, and elevator queues are pretty bad. [0]: If you want to give it a try, open up any hotel booking website and sort by price – pretty much anything under $25 is in the Mansions.
- dagenleg 2y agoA few months ago I had a long layover in Hong Kong, so I did a quick visit - it looked a bit emptyish, though there was still a bunch of budget hostels, food joints and some touting going on. The rats are pretty gigantic though.
- bcsab1 2y agoI have stayed there for 2 weeks last month. It is indeed a distinctive experience. I managed to rent the smallest apartment I have ever been to. When I entered the room I burst out laughing at its size. There was basically nothing but a small bed and a toilet/bathroom where you could have showering while sitting on a toilet. It was definitely a memorable feeling to stay there. Every time you enter the building many (mainly Indian looking) man approach and try to sell you drugs, stolen stuff or prostitutes. I wandered quite a bit around because you always had to wait a lot for the elevator so I used the stairs to go to the 8th floor. There was piss and trash all over the stairs. At first day I was really close to changing my location but I eventually got used to the place. I have witnessed at least 3 fights during the 2 weeks staying there. On the last morning at 6 am when I arrived to the first floor after checking out I heard loud noises and when the elevator opened two guys fell inside fighting each other, accompanied by several woman shouting. I managed to step over them out of the elevator and left the building safely. It was chaotic to be honest. But at least I saw no bugs and rats. Overall I think it might have some resemblance to how it must have felt staying in the Walled City.
- Kydlaw 2y agoI am adding a blog post, shared on HN a couple months ago, that show an architectural cross section of the city. https://cohost.org/belarius/post/6677850-architectural-cross https://cohost.org/belarius/post/6677850-architectural-cross (I am not the author of the blog, nor the original poster, but I just want to share the link because I found this incredibly cool)
- deadbabe 2y agoAnyone found anything cool in there? I saw someone holding a rifle, aimed at another person’s back as they crouched down in fear.
- dasil003 2y agosearched and grabbed it at https://imgur.com/a/kowloon-walled-city-holdup-txskztK https://imgur.com/a/kowloon-walled-city-holdup-txskztK I love this illustration it, gives me the same vibe I got from Richard Scarry books when I was 5.
- prepend 2y agoReminds me of Geoff Darrow’s artwork on Frank Miller’s HardBoiled, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Boiled_(comics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Boiled_(comics)
- CapmCrackaWaka 2y agoWow, coolest thing I’ve seen while doom scrolling this week. I wonder how accurate that is. It must be an especially dense cross section, because it doesn’t leave much room for hallways or other non living space. Also was hoping to see more of the structural elements… that drawing really makes it feel like the entire thing is made of cardboard, hopes and dreams.
- kibwen 2y ago> that drawing really makes it feel like the entire thing is made of cardboard, hopes and dreams. In the same way that corrugation gives strength to cardboard, it's possible that the city could have been so dense that it may have been relatively resistant to collapsing.
- pessimizer 2y agoKowloon Walled City was very neat. If you want to get a feel for what it was like, there's a German language documentary from 1988 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9PZ05NLDww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9PZ05NLDww) that was filmed inside of it. This essay, however is pompous word salad of the worst type.
- jengjenghk 2y ago> What remains unclear is why there was such little protest over its demolition Why would there be? This seems like one of those "people living in squalor is their right!" statements by people on the outside that want to visit a human zoo. I suspect no one that was living there would choose to go back if it still existed. My friends from there certainly don't. They might have a few fond memories but so do war veterans.
- rkozik1989 2y agoThat's actually not true at all. According to interviews a lot of people actually miss it. I believe it was a German documentary that I first heard it in. I'm kind of obsessed with this place and even created a game around the premise of a walled city.
- tasuki 2y agoFrom another comment, said documentary: https://youtu.be/S-rj8m7Ssow https://youtu.be/S-rj8m7Ssow
- 15155 2y agoStray?
- Macha 2y agoCertainly I've heard the same from a coworker reporting on her grandmother's perspective (her grandmother lived there in the 60s/70s). At the same time, the grandmother did leave when she could, long before the final demolition, despite her later views on that time.
- Loughla 2y agoMetro but set in Kowloon would be shockingly good to play.
- brazzy 2y agoSome people actually refused to move out and had to be evicted. People form emotional attachment to their home, even if the living conditions are bad.
- steveoscaro 2y agoAnyone remotely interested in Hong Kong should read the novel Tai-Pan. That’s some great historical fiction. No idea which parts are accurate, but it’s a fun read.
- dewey 2y agoI finished the sequel of that book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House_(novel)) this year, can also highly recommend it. The TV show looks cheap...but it actually aged really well and it has Pierce Brosnan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_House_(miniseries)). Can recommend it as well!
- FireBeyond 2y agoFX made what I thought was a pretty good adaptation of Shōgun. Am hoping they might turn their eyes to the rest of the "series", too.
- finnh 2y agoThe recent Shōgun series was surprisingly good, I really enjoyed it. Clavell famously has no idea how to end a book - they pretty much _all_ have a deus ex machina in the form of a natural disaster - but they are excellent & fun reads of the days & weeks leading up to it. ayeeya, cow chillo
- FireBeyond 2y agoHah, yes! I just realized this! (Well, Whirlwind uses a revolution). I'd never connected that between all the books.
- pimeys 2y agoI've watched the FX adaptation and the original from 1980, and I have to say I like the original a bit more. Neither one of them cannot match the book, which I rank in the same level with Lord of the Rings: thick books you cannot stop reading. The television adaptations are passable, but a bit disappointing if you are a fan of the book.
- MisterTea 2y agoNice book on Kowloon with plenty of pictures: https://archive.org/details/city-of-darkness-life-in-kowloon-walled-city-1993/page/89/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/city-of-darkness-life-in-kowloon...
- dewey 2y agoI can understand why people are getting angry at the Internet Archive if they are offering one click downloads of books you can still buy on the (independent) artists website: https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/order-book/ https://cityofdarkness.co.uk/order-book/ Saying that as a donor to the Internet Archive as I support their "public web archiving" goal. This misleading "opensource" collection is full of software, books that are neither open source nor out of copyright: https://archive.org/details/opensource https://archive.org/details/opensource and their reporting tool doesn't even include "copyright infringement" as a reason.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago"This is the cleaned up version of the original scan, both found in TPB" you ain't kidding!
- Lio 2y agoSorry, just to repeat, Kowloon != Kowloon Walled City. Kowloon itself is home to 2 million people and is a much larger geographical area. Walled City was strictly an enclave area around an old Chinese fort within Kowloon proper. A comparison might be referring to Washington Square Park, Manhattan, New York City as simply "Manhattan". 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City
- fedeb95 2y agoLooks like that component that somehow works and nobody dares touch it.
- initramfs 2y agofascinating. It represents every failed public housing project in the U.S. as well, like the one in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi#Filming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koyaanisqatsi#Filming and in NYC
- kibwen 2y agoI don't see much similarity. The KWC was an anarchic self-assembling place; that's about as libertarian as it gets.
- SoftTalker 2y agoUnbelievable that the place wasn't consumed by fire at some point.
- MisterTea 2y agoIt burnt down in its early days when it was a shack town, before the cluster of multistory buildings were erected.
- snakeyjake 2y agoI wish the people romanticizing or fetishizing Kowloon Walled City could have been forced to live there. They remind me of the urban planners of the 50s and 60s who designed dense barren concrete monstrosities for the proles to live in as part of various urban renewal projects, from the comfort of their suburban garden estates.
- mrbungie 2y agoAre people really romanticizing it out there? I find it really draws my attention in a morbid sense associated to looking at what was a very alien way of living, but I would hate to live in those conditions.
- _yb2s 2y agoPeople aren't romanticizing it in a positive way, they are mostly fascinated by the bleakness of it- and shocked that something they thought was relegated to fiction actually existed in real life. Much of HN grew up as nerdy kids on cyberpunk SciFi like Blade Runner, Johnny Mnemonic, and the Matrix and this looks exactly like that, which is no coincidence, because that aesthetic was largely based on Kowloon Walled City itself, unknowingly to the people consuming it. The cyberpunk author William Gibson was aware of and inspired by Kowloon Walled City. Cyberpunk is characterized by "high tech low life" - it is seen as awful and dehumanizing, something people might want to read a book or watch a movie about, but not live themselves. In hindsight, the whole Cyberpunk aesthetic being based on real world inhumane living conditions that actually already existed might be inappropriate by modern standards. It is making an amusing fantasy or spectacle out of other peoples suffering- however Gibson, etc. were using this setting mostly because they had a negative view about the impacts of technology on humanity, and were writing fiction to express and warn people about these concerns.
- WarOnPrivacy 2y ago> I wish the people romanticizing or fetishizing Kowloon Walled City could have been forced to live there. In 1987, I would have found KWC a step up from my homelessness. > They remind me of the urban planners of the 50s and 60s who designed dense barren concrete monstrosities US 2021: People were forced out of long-term rentals and found there was nowhere to go. People with money in the bank became homeless. Concrete monstrosities would have improved their poor options. Before eliminating an awful thing, we might want to eliminate the need for it.
- zqfm 2y agoKWC is a pretty fascinating place, but all I've ever seen about it is from people on the outside looking in. Are there any accounts from the people who lived there?
- dimator 2y agoA few interviews in this video https://youtu.be/g1wSj9X2igA?feature=shared https://youtu.be/g1wSj9X2igA?feature=shared
- mark_h 2y agoThere's this Reddit AMA from a while back: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13muo9/i_grew_up_in_the_cyberpunkesque_dystopia_called/ https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13muo9/i_grew_up_in_t...
- MoreMoore 2y agoIt's really too bad this isn't around today. We'd have so many videos about every nook and cranny of this place, so many videos exploring the lives of the people who live there. But now all I can find are a handful of documentaries, the same interview with some residents and the same recycled 1 minute clips everywhere.
- CyberDildonics 2y agoI think this title might be just a little on the pretentious side.
- Loughla 2y agoI never understood why it's called a walled city. It doesn't have walls protecting it.
- bentpins 2y agoBefore it was a settlement it was a military base. It did have walls protecting until 1940, where under WW2 Japanese occupation they were demolished. The name stuck even after. The south gate of the wall remains as part of Kowloon Walled City Park You can see an illustration of the wall in the infographic here http://archive.today/2omPT http://archive.today/2omPT
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- PaulHoule 2y ago"the communist reforms from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s" is a little generous; for better and for worse the article seems very aligned to the politics of the current leadership of the "New China"
- akdor1154 2y agoNot entirely - Tiananmen Square is mentioned along with its outcome. I'd assume the author is aiming for objectivity.
- chriscjcj 2y agohttps://youtu.be/S-rj8m7Ssow https://youtu.be/S-rj8m7Ssow This is one of the better documentaries out there about Kowloon. It's in German but you can turn on English subtitles. They got a camera inside and you get a decent taste of what life was like there.
- wuming2 2y agohttps://thehkhub.com/historic-kowloon-walled-city-recreated-at-hong-kong-international-airport/ https://thehkhub.com/historic-kowloon-walled-city-recreated-... Was very neat.
- ksec 2y agoSomewhat related there is a recent Hong Kong movie based on Kowloon Walled City [1] that is old fashion Hong Kong Kung Fu with background sets in Kowloon Walled City in 80s. Unfortunately most of the Neon and Sign Post are mostly gone in Hong Kong. I think people should go and visit Hong Kong to see the last bit of it before it became something else. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Warriors:_Walled_In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_of_the_Warriors:_Wall...
- cratermoon 2y agoSkip the text, take time to look closely at each photograph. Linger and observe each for some time.
- mrtimo 2y agoIn the aerial view image (the 3rd image on the page) you can see the walled city next to a park in the foreground). The park is still there today (and now the remnants of the walled city are absorbed into the park). Here is an aerial view that has a similar orientation [1]. The park is a cycling park, which explains the curvy paths. [1] - https://www.google.com/maps/search/kowloon+walled+city/@22.329547,114.1893713,236a,35y,39.46t/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTIxMS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/search/kowloon+walled+city/@22.3...
- wkat4242 2y agoI really wish the walled city would have been preserved somehow. I never got a chance to see it but it has had so much influence on pop culture. It was one of the big influences of cyberpunk for example. It could have been an open air museum.