What if You Lived in the Most Crowded Place on Earth?

this video was made possible by Skillshare get unlimited access to over 25,000 classes for free for two months by signing up at sk l sh slash real life lor 26 the odds are that if you're watching this video you're probably doing it alone or in a pretty small group of friends you're probably watching this with a reasonable amount of privacy around you but what if you were suddenly teleported to the least private and the most crowded place in the world and were forced to live there what would your day-to-day life end up being like currently the most dense concentration of people you can find anywhere in the world is here in Mumbai in the Dharavi slums 700,000 people live here packed together into just 2 square kilometers which would be like shoving the entire population of Alaska down into just two city blocks life in Dharavi is harsh but it's not the most crowded settlement in human history and therefore it's not where you're getting teleported to as recently as 1993 the title of the most crowded place on earth belonged to a tiny sized settlement in Hong Kong known as the kowloon walled city with nicknames like the city of anarchy and the city of darkness you know that it's about to get pretty wild but before we get too crazy here you need to first understand this the population density in New York City is only ten thousand four hundred and thirty one people per square kilometer the density of people in Dharavi is more like two hundred and seventy seven thousand people per square kilometer over 26 times more dense than New York Kowloon walled city on the other hand was more like 1.9 million people per square kilometer 182 times as densely packed together than even New York the city occupied a space of only six and a half acres or roughly the same as four football fields but was home to as many as 50,000 people living there to put it in another way imagine that you live in a comfortable 1,200 square foot pole all by yourself but then you shove nine more people into that same poem with you further imagine that your home is merely one unit of a 14-story building and every other unit in that building is just as full as yours then imagine hundreds of those buildings all crammed together into just those four football fields of space in fact if every single person in the world lived as closely together to one another as the people did in the walled city the entire human species would be capable of living and working together in just Rhode Island but what would it actually be like for you to live in such a horrific ly crowded place the street level of the walled city was full of dentist and doctor offices without any official operating licenses so you'd always have to just take your chances with a random person who was claiming to be a dentist anytime that you wanted to get your teeth checked it could have been pretty good or it could have been some Rando off the street who decided two hours ago that he was now a dentist restaurants routinely offered dog meat as a tempting alternative to normal food all without any adherence to sanitation regulations dozens of alleyways on the ground inside the interior of the city connected each side and the living units deep in the dark interior that lacked any windows these alleys were only between three and six feet wide and you would have to carry an umbrella with you to shield yourself from the drippy water pipes and people throwing garbage out above you the alleys were almost permanently dark since the unbelievably dense slums above blocked out most of the sunlight the walled city was essentially the world's largest squatter camp without any official government services or even laws and had developed a nickname the city of anarchy as the population began to skyrocket from a few hundred up to tens of thousands both the British and the Chinese governments were reluctant to interfere with a weird situation and carried out a very hands-off approach with regards to the city this is how random people had claimed to be dentists chef's served dogs in their cafes and why nobody knew what to do with the garbage so they either threw it out of their windows or hauled it up to the roof to be abandoned forever since the official government rarely intervened and whatever happened inside the walled city became increasingly attractive to the people who society frowned upon like gangsters pimps drug dealers sex workers dog eaters refugees and apparently even some normal opiate maybe crazy people who simply saw an opportunity further up into the dark layers of the city you could easily find opium dens heroin stands that operated as freely as convenient stores and brothels that operated with impunity the city was a dangerous place for police or probably anybody really to enter so they only ever intervened with large groups and never alone so if you ran into trouble inside any call nine-one-one the chances are that you'd probably not get an answer on average each person paid 35 Hong Kong dollars for about five US dollars per month for their rent for a 40 square foot room of space which is about this size relative to an actual human for reference thousands of these little rooms existed side-by-side of each other stretching up to 14 stories high around 500 buildings were constructed inside of the city without a single licensed architect or engineer providing any kind of guidance whatsoever plumbing and sewage was almost non-existent while tiny metal fabrication shops made up a good percentage of the units between the ground and the fifth floors while the metal shops provided some form of employment and income they also added vastly to the horrible pollution problem found inside while the street-level inside of the city was always cast in darkness no matter the time of day or a year there was also a network of stairs and ramps that would enable you to traverse the city without ever having to set foot on the dark surface when zooming out to see the entire walled city you can notice a courtyard in the center which was the prime social gathering place and the only area on the street where the Sun could reach as mentioned previously the roof on the city was always covered in garbage and was the prime dumping spot for residents but it was also a pretty cool spot for you to go and check out the planes that were all just crashing into everything you see the walled city was located only half a mile away from Kai Tak Airport and planes landing there would routinely fly just over the city before landing which contributed to enormous noise pollution the camp was originally built out across the ancient walled cities borders on the street level but a space ran out on the ground and more people were coming in all the time that they began building structure after structure on top of those old ones the residents realized though that building higher than 14 stories could result in the airplanes that were landing over at Kai Tak to collide and kill all of them instead so yeah nobody ever built anything above that life inside was dark dirty cramped loud and often violent but a lot of people seemed to actually enjoy it since it kept attracting more and more people over the years your life inside would be guaranteed to be radically different from the life you know now because there isn't really any place on the earth that's quite like what the kowloon walled city was like unfortunately you no longer can visit unless you have a time machine because the city was finally demolished by the Hong Kong government in 1994 after it became just too awesome for them to handle all that we have left of the city today is a really lame park where it used to stand but we thankfully have a lot of amazing photographs that people took of it back when it used to exist like these that give you some kind of sense of what it used to be like however there is a pretty wacky arcade in Japan called the anata no warehouse in Kawasaki has created a faithful multi-level recreation of part of the walled city so that's probably your best chance of getting to experience what I just talked about in this video if you end up going there one of the first things that you'll probably want to do is take pictures and luckily there's a class on Skillshare for that professional photographer Dale McManus teaches this fantastic course which walks you through the process of taking professional quality photos on your iPhone for whatever you want to take pictures of this is just one of over 25,000 classes on Skillshare which each teach you something that you can use for your career your school or just for fun a few more that I would recommend are the productivity masterclass by Thomas Frank motion graphics from Kurtz Kazakh and storytelling 101 all of which you can download offline on the iOS or Android apps you can learn from any of these more than 25,000 classes into higher Lee for free for two whole months by signing up at SK LSH slash real life floor 26 and then it's only $10 per month afterwards you'll be directly supporting real life floor as well and as always thank you for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 9,854,607

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, kowloon walled city, kowloon, densely populated, densely populated cities, densely, populated, over populated, crowded, most crowded place in the world, most crowded cities, most crowded cities in the world, crowded city

Id: t6IOd7CXLho

Length: 9min 24sec (564 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019