To keep this post short, I would like to learn about Kowloon walled city since microstates and stuff that’s adjacent to them fascinates me, and I would like to request some trusted sources that are not libbed up, like maybe a PRC documentary translated to English, but literally anything not covered in libslop will do. Thank you in advance!
I know very little about Kowloon but the little I know makes me think its demolition was a tragic loss of a unique human habitat. It should have been preserved as a museum and studied.
Idk, seemed like any other terribly planned and poverty stricken cramped urban neighborhood from Chinese history. Keeping them around isn’t such a great look, the same way one wouldn’t want to “preserve” the slums and favelas elsewhere in the third world.
This is a gross misrepresentation of Kowloon. It wasn’t just a slum. It was a study on how people exist when the primary limit is ground space. It was a unique place formed under conditions that will likely not be expressed again.
It might not “look good” but neither do the pyramids when you consider that they were built with slave labor, for despotic monarchs who deluded themselves in believing they could rise from the dead.
If people only preserve aesthetically pleasing things history and art will only reflect a fraction of what it means to be alive.
The cost, logistics and safety of preserving Kowloon are valid concerns especially at the time it was demolished but that doesn’t diminish the value of what was lost.
I understand your point and I accept that there is a curiosity to understand how such a place would have worked, in the sense of such limited space human habitation.
But come on, you can’t compare it to the literal Pyramids, they are tombs, in the middle of the desert, not a sprawling block in the middle of a city that people actually needed to live in. The primary purpose matters.
For Kowloon, Were it possible at the time, perhaps exhaustive 3D scans of the building layouts and constructions before they demolished it could have been a valuable and interesting preservation of data to study later, but alas.
Thank you, this was very informative, and I’m glad I didn’t just read articles that uniformly painted Kowloon as a crime den with no nuance.
P.s. if you have info about similar political entities(?) feel free to share also.
It’s about the housing projects in Chicago rather than HK, but this is a great read regardless: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gang_Leader_for_a_Day
Thank you, I will give this book a read.
o7
There is this action movie set in Kowloon called “Twilight of the warriors”, might be interesting, it was directed by a director from Macao.
