99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-66- Kowloon Walled City

Episode Date: November 20, 2012

Kowloon Walled City was the densest place in the world, ever. By its peak in the 1990s, the 6.5 acre Kowloon Walled City was home to at least 33,000 people (with estimates of up to 50,000). That’s a population density … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 1898, China granted a 99-year lease to Great Britain for the areas across the harbor from the British-controlled island of Hong Kong. But SMAC in the middle of that territory, known as Kaolun, was an enclave that wasn't included in the lease. A place that would at least officially still be controlled by the Chinese. It was a large fort built decades earlier to put a check on British expansion, but it evolved into something very, very different. This was the first photo that I saw of it. Why don't you start describing it because it's a little... I haven't. Yeah, photo that I saw of it.

Why don't you start describing it? Because it's a little, I haven't. Yeah, taking it in yet. OK. The first analogy that that's brings into my mind is it looks a little bit like the, the Borg cube from Star Trek. Ha, ha, ha. It's a city block. And we're not looking at a neighborhood that's nestled in a city.

Like we're looking at a Borg cube that is in the middle of nowhere. There's skyscrapers behind it, but the demarcation between this neighborhood and everything else is staggering. That's my friend Nick Vanderkulk from the program Love and Radio showing me photos. He was the first person who told me about this place. It became known as Calune Walled City. And even though the walls eventually came down, its name was still appropriate. There was no mistaking the boundaries between it and the rest of Hong Kong. The edges became a wall of 13-story high-rises overlooking a comparatively sparse squatters

village. Buildings evolved organically, growing tendrils of bridges, pipes and wires that encroached on other buildings, until the city turned into a single, giant organism. Because it was in this legal nomads land, not under British jurisdiction, but pretty much ignored by the Chinese authorities, it became a magnet for the displaced in the marginal. Thousands of people moved there after war with Japan broke out of the thirties, and even more moved there after the Republic of China went communist. It attracted gangsters, drug addicts, sex workers, refugees, and it also drew a lot of average people from all over China who needed cheap rent and saw opportunity. Calune Wall City was at its height the densest place anywhere ever.

It had a population density of about 3.2 million people per square mile. In comparison, Manhattan has a population density of about 70,000 people per square mile. That means that Calune Wall City was about 46 times as dense as Manhattan. So let me put that another way. If Manhattan wanted to get anywhere close to that kind of density, every man, woman, and child living in Texas would have to move there. I came across it very much by accident. I came around one corner and saw this structure that looked really different than everything else around it. That's Greg Gerard of Togifer. He lived in Hong Kong in the 80s and 90s. And that's when I first came aware of the

Waltz city and started photographing there. Its density was immediately apparent. Buildings have been built up against each other without any space between them. Each homeowner or each person who rented would build a different kind of caged balcony that would stick out a meter or two from their apartment. It was a way of opening up the apartment and getting more space and air and light.

I went for a first walk into one of the alleys and was immediately struck by what's overhead. And that's this tangle of electrical wires and garbage that had been thrown from the upper floors. TV and tennis all over the place, credible noises from the various manufacturing, metalwork, small kind of foundries, cotton mills, kitchens, furnaces,

burning for barbecuing, pork or dock or whatever. Sensations underfoot as you go down some alleys, you know, into watery, squishy stuff. Watery, squishy stuff? Yeah, you know, stuff between buildings that you're walking on. I mean, I really don't even know what some of it was. All manner of sensory assault, really. Greg took a lot of photographs of the Walt City.

There's one, probably one of my favorites of his, of a temple. It's much shorter than the 13th story high rises around it. Over the temple is this huge metal grate that's there to keep trash off the roof. The lifestyle of living in the Walt City was to dispose of garbage by throwing it out your window. And so the temple built a big net above its roof and then it actually cussed beautiful shadow through all this trash. It allowed for a really interesting light to filter down through some of the bases in

the garbage almost like a tropical kind of canopy, except this one was made for refuge. That new voice you heard is Aaron Tan. Aaron is an architect from Hong Kong and wrote his master's thesis about the Waltz City. Any interview to a lot of people who lived there. The Waltz City was at his prime time during the 60s and 70s and there was also the same time where the great thinkers of architect like the Aki Grams, the Metabolos was talking about this kind of self-organizing structure, intelligent building thinking, all this thing are going on in the west, but not recognizing the

existence of the world city actually is doing that. So on the other hand, the world city in Hong Kong is growing by itself but without any architect working on it. So it's like the coexistence of two. One is very theoretical, one is something very real and they do not know the existence of each other until much later when in the late 80s, when Greg Gerard or in the early 90s, when we start to look at it and see that the amazing coexistence of this two thing during the same time. Because the walled city was virtually autonomous from both China and Britain, resistant of this two things during the same time. Because the walled city was virtually autonomous from both China and Britain, there wasn't a lot in the way of infrastructure.

There weren't any building codes obviously, and there wasn't any garbage collection either. Which is why people threw their trash at the window. The walled city gained a reputation as a sort of den of an equity. There were high levels of prostitution, gambling, organized crime, and for some reason there seems to be a lot of rampant unlicensed dentistry. But a kind of order did emerge. The triads who are sort of like the Chinese version of the mafia filled the power vacuum with its own rule of law. They made at least some attempts at hygiene.

Trot gangs could get the trot addicts to clean up the up the streets and residents organizations popped up to settle disputes between neighbors. There was industry too, needle factories, fishball factories, textiles. There were restaurants and because this annotation wasn't great, they would kill your meal in front of you to prove that they weren't serving the spoil of meat. A lot of the electricity was pirated, Someone would tap a cable into the grid and run it over and across the buildings, and then an official would shut it off, then somebody would tap the grid again, lay a new cable on top of the dead one, and then that would get shut off and so on and so on. Eventually there were just so many cables running over and across

all the buildings, but the alleyways below were almost in total darkness. You cannot rely on what you see because you get lost right away, you know, but based on smell, you could better. Maybe that's a little poke here, and then there's another cluster of actually doing sugar and sweet. So actually relying on your smell, you can actually navigate through the city better. It was said that if you knew actually navigate through the city better." It was said that if you knew your way around the city's elaborate maze of catwalks, you could walk from one side to the other, without ever touching the ground. In the 70s and 80s, when the end of the new territory's lease was on the horizon, Britain

and China began to figure out what it meant for the future of Hong Kong. And part of that negotiation included the question of what to do with the Wallet City. After three quarters of a century of ambiguity from both countries, they finally agreed on a long eviction process. And in 1993, four years before Britain handed over control of Hong Kong to China, Calune Wald City was demolished. But the story of the Wald City does not end with its destruction. I'm Brian Douglas and I design the first draft of the Calune Wald City level in Call of Duty Black Ops.

Call of Duty is our first person shooter video game series. Normally you get into like an army situation where maybe you're in the middle of the street or you're up on the second story or something. But it's not a very vertically dynamic world most of the time except visually we never usually get to get up to those tall points. In other words, in most games like this the scenery is just scenery. You can't interact with most of the visual world that exists off the ground. Usually they're just there to make the world feel fleshed out and real. But with Calooon we was actually like, well let's go up there. A call of duty black ops is just one of many games to recreate the city.

It lives on in a kind of virtual memorial, except with way more gunfire. This is kind of a level builder stream because it provides opportunities that we don't normally get. In our first sequence, you can see sort of the liberties that it allowed us to take because if I needed to just make something really sort of crooked and awkward, it was just all like carte blanche because it really fit into the nature of the city. The doorways weren't necessarily the right size, or the hallways were a little center and they bend in the middle. Some of the ceilings were a little taller, where wasn't really fully developed and where wires coming off of it.

You could just imagine what you will for it and it was probably suitable. I played the walled city level, actually that's the lie. I watched a friend of a friend play because I probably would have died in the first two minutes. But anyway, it's clear that Brian and the other designers put a lot of thought into each location. For instance, a particular room might have a half-eaten meal on the table. There are these signs of a moment in someone's life. But even though the world is full of bad guys trying to shoot you, you come across almost no one who's actually living there.

It's easy to lose sight of the fact that this was a real living, breathing neighborhood. When you discovered that they were going to be tearing down, I mean, what did you think about that? You sort of knew it as a real neighborhood, and not just this sort of fantastical den of iniquity. Yeah, you know, quite mixed feelings. I mean, the place was completely unbelievable, and it was just this fantastic phenomenon.

This is Greg Gerard again, the photographer. At the same time, that civic-minded part of you knows that this canton shouldn't continue. It was a fire hazard, a hell of a hazard. It's one of those things that it fell between the cracks and grew there into this beautiful monstrosity. Aaron, the architect has a similar ambivalence.

I do, for me, as from an architectural foil view, I was very sad to see it go, but when I interview with people 20 years later, I also get half-half kind of respond. As some say, all this place is smelly, it's bad, I'm glad that it's gone, so that now you see my new flat is much better. But there are some people have very good memory of the city. They miss the richness of the space inside, they miss the community inside, they miss the convenience inside that they can get things easily in the city.

So you do get this two kind of opinion, too. But for Aaron, there was a value in having it dismantled. As a graduate student, he got to observe the city getting taken apart piece by piece. For him, it was an autopsy, a way to see how the various pieces of the city all fit together. He was able to build an understanding about how cities function almost with their own will. And as an architect, Aaron learned to allow for this sort of organic self-determination into his projects. Tan now incorporates some lessons of Calune Walt City into his own work. Rather than planning everything to a T, he now looks for ways to allow the organic nature of a city

to organize itself. We are not saying that this is a wonderful place. We are not trying to say that we want to duplicate this model because its existence is so unique position in history. You cannot recreate it. But in the only hand when you look at it, it has a certain quality in its performance as an urbanism. It performed well in a very restricted constraint that with lack of water, without electricity, they know how to organize themselves, you know how to deal with it. The trash, like I said, on one hand, they might see their malt trash, but on the other hand, they know how to organize the people inside to remove them, and even a postman inside know how to deliver the letters. So it is a kind of good alternative model for us to evaluate our design strategy.

99% Invisible was produced this week by Nick Vanderkulk from the show's Love and Radio and Snap Judgment, with some help from Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. It's a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. Radeo Tapio from PRX