The Walled City of Kowloon: A massive dystopian arcology, straight out of cyberpunk

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It's been called the City of Darkness. Perhaps an unfair title given that there certainly must be some individuals today with happy memories of growing up there. It was many things to many people.

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A safe haven for Chinese mafiosos. An unregulated nest of small businesses catering to every conceivable human need and vice. But between its inception in 1898 and its demolition in 1994, to most of its residents, it was simply home.

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To this day, Kowloon remains one of the most fascinating examples of unregulated urban development and consolidation, anarchic ideals put into practice and the social dynamics inherent to life in a densely packed single structure. Originally a fort, razed to the ground by the Japanese military, unregulated building began in the early 70s and continued until it was a single contiguous urban hive.

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Those who frequent my blog will know I have something of a fascination with arcologies, and their nearest real world equivalents. Whittier, Alaska is one such modern day "indoor town" I've covered recently. But Kowloon absolutely dwarfs it, with an estimated peak population of 33,000 (though some estimates claimed as high as 50,000). That's insane population density, even by Hong Kong standards.

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The average apartment offered only 250 square feet of space. Alleys were between four and six feet wide, and a network of passageways above ground level permitted travel from one end of the city to the other without ever setting foot on pavement.

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Despite the austere and filthy conditions, citizens of Kowloon endured by banding together into a united community which overcame hardships by helping one another out. Various religious centers existed for meetings of Christians, Buddhists and Animists, among others. In this way, life was made tolerable and surely at times joyful by citizens taking an active interest in one anothers' wellbeing.

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In William Gibson's "Bridge" trilogy, Kowloon is explored as a virtual environment. Purely by coincidence, my first explorations of Kowloon were in a Second Life recreation of it, on old legacy VR equipment that was nevertheless pretty amazing to me back in the day.

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The enduring mystique of Kowloon has most recently translated into a Japanese arcade, Kawasaki Warehouse, which has been built to replicate the look and feel of a limited portion of the infamous walled city. To some extent a tasteless romanticisation of poverty, but also a testament to the public's enduring fascination with the historical oddity that is Kowloon.

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Simultaneously communal and anarchic. A contradiction in concrete, within which neighborly compassion coexists side by side with mob brutality. The full gamut of human experience, condensed into the space of a city block. No community quite like Kowloon existed before it, and perhaps there will never again be anything like it.

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