when we first started
looking into the Kowloon Walled City, also known as the densest city
in the world, we thought for a place that's essentially a slum full of crime, drugs with subhuman living conditions. There sure is a lot of romanticization
about this place In Japan, they even built a giant arcade
that mimics parts of Kowloon. And I get it. The city looks like it came straight
out of a dystopian sci fi novel. It's a giant megastructure part
architecture, part living organism, and it's actually something architects
have been dreaming about for years. One continuous structure
where you could access all the necessities of daily life
but evolves and grows with time. But there's also stories after stories
from people who's lived there or visited there that claim
to have fond memories of this place, describing it as an energetic, industrious patchwork of chaos
with a strange, compelling beauty. Beauty? How could this possibly be beautiful? So Kowloon walled City. Was there something more to this
than just chaos? A portion of this video sponsored by Milanote I just want to give you a sense
of how dense it was. Here's the density of L.A.,
New York, Hong Kong and Kowloon. and it almost tripled in population
in just a few decades. So how did this even happen? Kowloon Walled City was a city within Hong Kong
that was technically a part of China. over its lifespan from a small Chinese
military force to this. It was used as a political pawn
in the conflict between China and Britain, where both parties were more interested
in exerting power than actually governing
this piece of land. In the end, the tension became unsolvable, so both parties
decided to take a hands off approach. It was left alone and without
any government control or police presence. It just grew and grew
almost like a living organism. Buildings were built cheaply and quickly to accommodate
the huge influx of migrants. a massive number of Chinese refugees
flooded here after World War Two as it was known as the only Chinese enclave that
the Hong Kong government couldn't touch. But after that, it included anyone
and everyone from gangs, criminals to doctors to entrepreneurs, people
trying to escape poverty or people trying to capitalize
on this unregulated haven crime naturally flourished there
with gangs, drugs, brothels. If you had an industrial business,
you could ignore the fire codes, the labor codes or safety codes So you could produce
goods at a fraction of the cost. you could also sell things
that were banned anywhere else, like dog meat with unbeatable prices. Industry kind of thrived here
and lots of things made in Kowloon. Wall City made their way back to China,
Hong Kong, and sometimes even overseas. they were known especially
for their fish balls and dumplings. The more we learned about the city, there was this idea
that kept popping up the rhizome. But it's kind of a complicated concept,
so I'll hand it over to Cindy, our researcher in Hong Kong native. All right. Let's try again to explain. We have our Italian filmmaker The first rule of the rhizome is that it's multiple multiplicity
without a structure. Let me explain. So in a traditional city,
you have your city grid and they get populated with buildings,
with functions that are determined by your planning department. you have your circulation at the base
and that's how you get from here to here. But in Kowloon, buildings will get built, leaving
these small gaps for air and light. But very quickly
they get filled in with stairways, which sometimes connect it to three
or four buildings. The city of Kowloon had around
350 buildings, but eventually the all merge into this one
giant megastructure. The rooftops would connect,
forming one giant rooftop, and even the residential units
were connected to each other. And since not all the units
had electricity or other resources, it allowed them to share things
like power out of a single source It especially allow businesses
to expand strategically and organically. Let's look here, for example. This is a strip club,
but the real money was in gambling. So they connected these buildings
to lure people in with the strip club
and eventually bring them down here so new buildings could attach
and be integrated to existing structures. And with every new building,
new circulation paths and collection points are formed which evolve and expand
with the growth of the city and at the intersection
of these connections or stairs or alleys, nodes would organically merge. Here we see a small convenience store
that serves the people living on the upper story
so they don't have to go all the way down. The city only had a few roads but created
some semblance of order over here. And here we have the commercial areas
because of their direct connection to the outside. It was full of shops,
clinics and factories that naturally gathered on the ground
level. Chinese doctors and dentists
who couldn't afford to get relicensed in Hong Kong, set up shop here
and offer services for bargain prices, which attracted customers
from outside the city. residential units sat on the levels above,
and this created some of the most attractive
units in the city thanks to the daylight. street was called
Kwong Ming Street, directly translating into light and bright. because it would be lit up at night
as drug addicts would gather here. Both of these areas had lots of factories
because you could get vehicle access here and water access here. So food factories
naturally gathered in this area. but most of the residents actually moved
through the hundreds of alleys and secret paths
which all twisted and turned and stepped up and down
and cut through multiple buildings. so unlike a typical city where you have one point of connection,
you had multiple points of connection vertically and horizontally
between multiple spaces. In fact, it would be impossible to map
the entire network of the city using conventional mapping methods. If you've been following this channel,
you probably know that we use M.A. to organize all of our research
from the early brainstorming session all the way to the final draft
of the research. Just having a visual board clarifies
so many things and it allows us to make connections
that we didn't really see before. some of our team is remote,
so being able to share and edit the boards real time during our meetings
makes our collaboration very seamless. It's kind of replaced PDFs for us. My friends and I even started
planning our trip to Japan on M.A. because you can easily drop in your map, which saves a lot of hassle
when you're planning with more people. It's completely free with no time limits,
so you can sign up using the link in the description. So if you can't map it,
and without traditional landmarks or views,
how do they navigate a city like this? Kowloon Generic Romance set in Kowloon Walled City. Living here means
you need to create your own unique mental map that's tailored
to your personal experiences or routines. it's interesting
because Deleuze and Guattari also argue that a map should never be
a static representation because that fixes your thinking about a certain place. When your idea of a thing is fluid
and evolving, you can be much more creative
in how you use that thing. So in that sense,
the city becomes not just a backdrop, but an active participant
in shaping the memories and identities of the residents. but unlike a rhizome, the Kowloon Walled City has a boundary, a very abrupt boundary. So Kowloon Walled City
started as a military fort with an actual wall around it,
and And that's where the name came from. They built this fort after Britain
occupied Hong Kong as a way to create a visible Chinese military presence
near the new British colony. But during World War Two, Japan had taken over swaths of China,
including Hong Kong. And when they needed building materials
to expand the nearby airport, They took the walls of Kowloon Wall City. And when Chinese refugees
flooded to Hong Kong after the war, They instinctively gravitated
towards the Wall City. And even without the physical wall,
the new buildings were built almost the same exact footprint
of the original walls, forcing it to expand upwards and inwards. It's probably also one of the conditions that forced it
to become such an interconnected city, but also what made it deteriorate
so quickly over time. This was the only place in the city
where you could see the sky and get some fresh air. And also the social heart
of the community. in fact, even though they didn't
have a government, the residents self-organized to fix problems
as they came up to deal with crime. They formed groups of volunteers
to escort single women. And when the Hong Kong government
released plans to demolish the city, they organized the Kowloon City
Anti Demolition Committee that fought against the plan for years. even the five Triad gangs organize garbage
cleaning teams and help settle disputes
between businesses. The courtyard was built around a yard
in the office building from the Military Forge,
built back in 1845. The building went through multiple
hands from the Christian Evangelist Commission, where they held schools
to the all people center. But it was preserved and the courtyard
as a whole became so essential to the community that the community restricted
any new construction in this area. And I think the preservation of this
courtyard is kind of fascinating. It speaks to our need for content,
unity and stability, even in a ever evolving chaos
like Kowloon Walled City. It speaks to our natural tendency
to gravitate around any kind of link to the past and how these physical anchors
can become the bedrock of a community. the common
buildings or all the remains of the city. Now, in 1994,
Carolyn Wall City was finally demolished. And what was once
a chaotic, pulsating hive of human life has been replaced
with a peaceful Chinese garden. I'm sure it was necessary, but
I can't help but feel a kind of emptiness. This raw, gritty, energetic,
urban anomaly has been sanitized, erased from this world existing
only in the minds of those who live there. But quickly,
it's fading into distant memories, into hazy dreams, or even nightmares. But there is also a belief
that the essence of the place, its soul,
can transcend a physical dimension. So maybe the spirit of Kowloon Wall City still lingers on. There were some really fantastic books
that we were friends for this research. Some were analytical, some were kind of fictional,
and some were very R rated. R. In case you're interested in any of these,
I will leave the links in the description. We also did a lot of research for this video, a lot of which
we had to translate from Chinese. So if you're interested in our research
booklet, we will also leave that in the description. We also have a newsletter
and a Discord server. If you want to stay updated
with what we're doing What do you guys think about this
crazy city? Let us know in the comments. and I'll see you guys in the next video.
