Kowloon Walled City Research Articles

Transformation of Modern Urban Park Based on User’s Spatial Perceived Preferences: A Case Study of Kowloon Walled City Park in Hong Kong

Urban parks enhance residents’ quality of life and health by fostering a harmonious relationship between people and nature, so effective park design needs to prioritize ecological protection, sustainable landscapes, and practical spatial structures to achieve these benefits. This study takes the typical case of urban park renovation and reconstruction—Kowloon Walled City Park—as an example to conduct research and divides the interior of the park into four types of areas: contemporary built-up area; historical relic area; natural–folk custom area; and ecological conservation area. Based on 405 valid questionnaire data for respondents, this study conducts empirical research using a combination of the Semantic Differential (SD) method, Importance Performance Analysis (IPA) model, and unordered multivariate logit choice model, comprehensively describes and analyzes individual spatial perception and preferences, and further discusses the potential factors affecting individual perception preferences. The results show that there are differences in many characteristics between different areas in Kowloon Walled City Park. At the same time, people generally prefer park areas that integrate modern and traditional elements, natural and cultural environments, and pay attention to the balance between naturalness and sociality in park design. These results provide useful information for planners, developers, and others, as well as data for designing urban park construction with higher practical value and natural benefits.

The Paradox of Kowloon Walled City: Architectural Anomaly and Social Microcosm

Kowloon Walled City (KWC), formerly the world’s most densely populated place, is an example of urban density and self-organization in opposition to current urban developments, such as NEOM’s The Line, which illustrates the future of envisioned sustainable living. The main research question addressed in this study is: How can principles of self-organization and resilience from densely populated historical urban areas be applied to enhance the sustainability and livability of future planned urban developments? This study investigates the critical components of urban livability and governance amid severe densities by examining the underlying factors that lead to KWC’s unique sort of urban equilibrium and comparing them to the ideas that motivated the creation of The Line. This multidisciplinary research employs qualitative analysis to focus on architectural styles, community interactions, and governance systems. This approach allows for an in-depth examination of the parallels and dissimilarities between natural city evolution and future city planning. Key findings reveal that KWC’s functioning stems from its complex social fabric and adaptable informal governance, providing valuable lessons in resilience and community-driven urban development. The results suggest that the flexibility and community-driven efforts of KWC are essential for ensuring long-term viability, and these aspects may be integrated into contemporary projects such as The Line. The outcomes highlight the potential of combining KWC’s social cohesiveness with The Line’s technology developments to create urban environments that are both robust and sustainable. The results are supported by evidence obtained from historical analysis, which showcases the practical uses of integrating organic and planned urban development concepts.

The Densest City in The World and How It Would Work in Today’s Economy

The Kowloon Walled City was a unique, densely populated enclave in Hong Kong known. It was originally a Chinese military fort and evolved into a city where the buildings were packed so tightly that they grew into each other. Despite its chaotic conditions , the city fostered a resilient, tightly knit community. In the 1980s, the Hong Kong government decided to demolish the city , completing the process in 1993, and transforming the site into Kowloon Walled City Park. The city’s legacy endures as a compelling study of urban density, resilience and community dynamics in an unregulated environment. If this unique city still existed, how would it survive in today’s economy? What would be the changes? What about the positive and negative aspects? Would there be any positive aspects?

“Ring up for an appointment”: Empirical & oral evidence of commercial & other freedoms in the heyday of the City

Informed by economic concepts of product competition, this paper uses publicly available and accurate business information on establishment names and addresses obtained from the Yellow Pages of the contemporary Hong Kong telephone book and census socio-economic data backed by oral testimonies, to dispel the myth that the “Kowloon Walled City” was an incarcerated ghetto. The use of this imagery in the title for this City as a built up, politically sensitive zone levelled to the ground to make way for a public Chinese garden shortly before Hong Kong was returned to China, is treated as a form of ‘product differentiation’ in the academic research marketplace. As a contribution to planning theory, the paper uses the City as a show case of how academic branding, through descriptors, creates images of places and offers a countervailing image. Technically, it demonstrates the immense archival value of telephone directories and business chronicles apart from census data as sources of socially significant data for urban studies and informed re-interpretation of subjective imageries of an urban place.

Thinking of Kowloon Walled City Living Style: Research about Youth Living in Modern City Reflections

Thinking of Kowloon Walled City Living Style: Research about Youth Living in Modern City Reflections

Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City

Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since its demolition, taking on unstable and sometimes contradictory forms when reimagined through virtual architecture. At stake in these acts of memory are the historical discourses surrounding everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, its uncertain political and cultural status, and ongoing postcolonial debates concerning Hong Kong identity. I analyze Kowloon's Gate, Shenmue II, and Mr Pumpkin 2: Walls of Kowloon to uncover the contestation of the city's histories through the types of spaces Michel Foucault described as heterotopic: at once real and unreal, and existent and non-existent. This analysis reveals the fluid nature of cultural memory and historical discourse in videogame spaces, as well as how virtual spatiality and the past can be used together to understand and define the present.

Early Experience of Land Readjustment in Hong Kong: Case Study of the Kowloon Walled City

Since the early 2010s, sub-divided flats have been proliferating in Hong Kong—one of the world’s most compact and expensive cities to live in. The growth of informal housing in the city has long been attributed to the shortage of housing supply. Apart from developing new land for housing, one possible approach to deal with the land supply constraint is to speed up the redevelopment of old buildings in the city centre in order to maximise the land use potential. Yet, this approach brings about many socio-economic issues that drive up the transaction costs for its implementation. To get around the hurdles of urban redevelopment, a land management technique called land readjustment (LR) has been recommended, but its use has never been institutionalised in the city. Using declassified archival documents and maps, this article argues that LR was already implemented—albeit informally—in Hong Kong during the 1960s–70s within the Kowloon Walled City. With the historical experience of the City of Darkness, the aim of this article is to shed light on the in situ resettlement of original site residents—very much at the heart of land readjustment—as a means to bring down the transaction costs of deep urban redevelopment.

From Garrisoned District to Chinese Town: Land and Boundaries at the Kowloon Walled City, 1898-1912

The Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong became a named entity around 1810 and was demolished in 1994, but its architecture had long been unclassified. Not until the years just prior to its demolition did this dense slum of informal multi-story buildings receive sustained attention from architects and architectural historians. However, the architectural nature of the six-acre area predated its late-20th-century state. After its founding as a Qing military outpost, it underwent various structural additions and renovations, including an imperial Chinese administrative complex known as a yamen [衙門] and an outer wall, after which the Walled City was named. Against the grain of scholarship that has focused on the Walled City’s postwar, informal architecture, this article considers the site’s early years, arguing that the Walled City’s yamen and outer wall played a crucial role in the region’s land management practices. These two architectural structures make legible the Walled City’s evolution from a Qing administrative zone to a crowded slum. The Convention of 1898 ushered in a British-led land surveying effort throughout the New Territories region of Hong Kong, followed by the creation of an intricate bureaucracy for managing land lots. This clash of empires saw the use of two forms of land knowledge, Qing land deeds and British cadastral land surveys. In between these systems existed the Walled City, its inhabitation falling outside the British conception of land division but its historical contours very much shaped by the architectural boundaries that gave it its name.

From Cyberpunk to Cramped Dweller: The Peculiar History of Hong Kong ‘Heterotopias’

75.6% of land comprising Hong Kong remains undeveloped according to the special administrative region’s planning department. In turn, Hong Kong’s constricted real estate, now estimated to be the world’s costliest, has created eye-popping living arrangements historically and contemporarily. Denizens’ colorful reputation and imagination for flouting city ordinances, zoning laws, and spatial management stand emblematic of tenacious self-sufficiency and a free-spirited brand of runaway capitalist initiative. Why is this conspicuous trademark of Hong Kong’s societal fabric very much alive in the 21st Century? Why does this matter in a rapidly urbanizing world witnessing the ascension of mega-urban centers alongside ever-widening socioeconomic chasms? This paper intends to illuminate the peculiar origins and longevity of the Kowloon Walled City, an urban monolith of notoriety and autonomy that blossomed in a semi-legal grey zone unencumbered under British protectorate rule for nearly a century. Parallels will connect the linear trajectory between Kowloon’s hardnosed living to today’s comparable Chungking Mansions and the hundreds of thousands of cage homes appearing in all corners of the city. This paper aims to answer why these residential paradoxes continue to function with efficiency and relevancy, posing solutions for indigent housing while exacerbating the stigma of social and economic ostracism.

Monsters within Hong Kong’s “cesspool of iniquity”: Kowloon Walled City and Temutma (1998)

ABSTRACT In recent decades, there has been increased critical interest in postcolonial Gothic literature, as well as in political tensions in Hong Kong. This article investigates Hong Kong as a Gothic locale, and how the anxieties surrounding Hong Kong’s 1997 turnover of sovereignty can be studied through literary-critical investigation of the Gothic genre. It argues that there is an inherent Gothicity to the now demolished Kowloon Walled City because of its situation at the interface of Sino-British relations. The article takes as its case study Rebecca Bradley and Stewart Sloan’s Temutma (1998), a Gothic novel whose representation of Kowloon Walled City explores concerns about Hong Kong’s uncertain future in the lead-up to the 1997 turnover. The eponymous monster antagonist of the novel is read as a culturally ambiguous manifestation and personification of the fears of social upheaval leading up to the turnover and Hong Kong’s contractual reunification with China.

The Carceral City: Confinement and Order in Hong Kong’s Forbidden Enclave

Abstract Once feted, Hong Kong has recently become a centre of civil unrest. In this paper, we situate these emergent politics through a case study of corruption and everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, a mainland Chinese enclave in British Hong Kong, which developed notoriety as a freestanding grey economy. Drawing from oral testimonies of police officers, triad members and local residents, we excavate the lived experience of confinement within this contested space. These accounts reconstruct the Walled City as a ‘quasi-carceral’ site of enclosure, a zone of colonial exceptionalism and a hybrid cultural space. Through this case study, we historicize current debates in carceral geography, humanize recent interventions in urban scholarship and analyse the shifting politics at the frontier of Chinese expansionism.

An empirical Coasian study on the socio-economic profiles of two politically sensitive informal settlements: Kowloon Walled City and Rennie’s Mill

Informed by the “corollary of Coase Theorem” (Lai and Hung, 2008; Lai et al., 2007), for a better understanding of the self-help post-war development of two politically sensitive and vanished places in Hong Kong, the so-called “Kowloon Walled City” (Lai, 2016; Lai and Chua, 2017; Lau et al., 2018) and Rennie’s Mill (Lan, 2006), which have attracted academic interest but remained under-researched in terms of empirical scrutiny, this study:•Identify and compare their institutional arrangements by archival research;•identify and compare their development outcomes, as measured by census and other official data including mapping and photographic information, supplemented by published oral history of witnesses; and•establish and discuss the relationship between the differences in institutional arrangements and development outcomes in terms of a landlord-tenant analogy.

Quality of life in a “high-rise lawless slum”: A study of the “Kowloon Walled City”

Informed by the ‘quality of life’ model with specific reference to Chinese culture, this article uses reliable and publicly available information seldom used in historical or heritage study to identify the designs of flats and builders of the “Kowloon Walled City” (hereafter the City) and reliable oral testimonies to refute some myths about the quality of life within it. This settlement has been notoriously misrepresented by some as a city of darkness that was razed from the face of the Earth before 1997 to fulfill a pre-war dream of the colonial government. This article confirms the view that this extremely short-lived concrete jungle, mystified as a horrifying, disorderly-built, and unplanned territory, was a product of un-organised small builders that had been hitherto unreported. The layout and designs of the housing units were different from that prescribed by the Buildings Ordinance, but were, in fact, developed within a consciously planned boundary that was a result of international politics. Although the City’s overall built environment was poor due to a lack of natural light penetration, the designs of its individual flats were comparable, if not better than, typical units in contemporary public rental housing blocks, many of which had to be demolished less than 20 years after their construction due to structural defects. This article uses the ‘quality of life’ model, which has hitherto been limited to medical and social, rather than historical or anthropological, studies, to evaluate how design and housing satisfaction affected City residents’ quality of life.

Transpacific Cyberpunk: Transgeneric Interactions between Prose, Cinema, and Manga

This paper attempts to meditate upon the transpacific imagination of cyberpunk by reconstructing its literary and cultural heritage. Since the publication of William Gibson’s multiple award winning first novel, Neuromancer (1984), the concept of cyberpunk has been globally popularized and disseminated not only in the field of literature but also in culture. However, we should not forget that cyberpunk is derived not only from the cutting edge of technology but also from “Lo Tek” sensibility cultivated in the Gibsonian picturesque ruins or dark cities such as a major extraterritorial zone in Hong Kong “Kowloon Walled City” nicknamed as “a den of iniquity”, “The Casba of the East”, and “a hotbed of crime”, which was destroyed in 1993, but whose images captured by Ryuji Miyamoto inspired Gibson to come up with the spectacle of the destroyed San Francisco Bay Bridge to be stormed by ex-hippies and former homeless. From this perspective, this chapter focuses on the works ranging from Katsuhiro Otomo’s directed anime Akira (1988), Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1998)) in the 1990s through Project Itoh’s post-cyberpunk masterpiece Genocidal Organ (2007).

Self Build and Change: Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong

Despite its dystopian appearance, the now‐demolished Kowloon Walled City is fondly remembered by some former residents. Over the half century from 1946, it grew without input from architects or planners, from a squatter camp inside an abandoned military fort to the most densely populated place on earth. The 14‐storey amalgam of interlinking buildings housed over 35,000 people, along with factories, shops, schools and all other normal urban provisions. It has much to teach us about bottom‐up, community‐driven development – as former Hong Kong‐based architect Ian Lambot explains.

Rational development under uncertain de facto jurisdictional boundaries

This interdisciplinary study, drawing on knowledge in institutional economics, history, and cartography, uses evidence based on government files up to 1975 and disclosed since 2003, aerial photographs from 1945 to 1975, and NGO publications evidence to show that developers used metes and bounds, namely the original walls of the main fort as modified by public roads, and the surveyed alignment of a stream, to delimit their building lines under uncertain jurisdictional limits of the boundaries of the Kowloon (Walled) City in spite of certitude of the alignments of its walls. In this light, the paper discusses the proposition that to both the Chinese and colonial governments, “Kowloon City”, consistently referred to as the “Kowloon Walled City” (KWC) in post-war official Hong Kong government files and recent English language academic literature, had a great sign value in terms of Peirce’s theory, as it pointed towards something more than a disused solitary fort. This value cannot be dismissed when articulating present heritage management for the KWC as a public Chinese garden.

The history of planning for Kowloon City

ABSTRACTThis short paper identifies from archival and published materials plans for a place called Kowloon City which had an Imperial Chinese military purpose and is now a public park (officially called ‘Kowloon Walled City Park’) after a long period of dispute over its jurisdiction. These plans were mostly produced by the colonial Hong Kong government that made the first planned attempt to clear the place of Chinese residents for a public garden in the 1930s, but this garden could only be built after the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration. They testified to the fact that the City has always been planned.

The second life of Kowloon Walled City: Crime, media and cultural memory.

Kowloon Walled City (hereafter KWC or Walled City), Hong Kong has been described as ‘one of history’s great anomalies’. The territory remained under Chinese rule throughout the period of British colonialism, with neither jurisdiction wishing to take active responsibility for its administration. In the postwar period, the area became notorious for vice, drugs and unsanitary living conditions, yet also attracted the attention of artists, photographers and writers, who viewed it as an instance of anarchic urbanism. Despite its demolition in 1993, KWC has continued to capture the imaginations of successive generations across Asia. Drawing on data from an oral and visual history project on the enclave, alongside images, interviews and observations regarding the ‘second life’ of KWC, this article will trace the unique flow of meanings and reimaginings that KWC has inspired. The article will locate the peculiar collisions of crime and consumerism prompted by KWC within the broader contexts in which they are embedded, seeking out a new interdisciplinary perspective that attends to the internecine spaces of crime, media and culture in contemporary Asian societies.

Sustainable urbanism: towards a framework for quality and optimal density?

The question of density is closely connected to urbanization and how our cities may evolve in the future. Density and compactness are two closely related but different criteria, both relevant for sustainable urban development and the transformation of cities; however, their relationship is not always well understood. While a high degree of compactness is desirable, too much density can be detrimental to liveability, health and urban well-being. The purpose of this article is to report first on an extreme case of hyper-density: the Kowloon Walled City (demolished in 1993), where 50,000 residents led a grim life in one of the most densely populated precincts in the world with intolerable sanitary conditions. While the Walled City was a truly mixed-use and extremely compact precinct, it was neither a ‘liveable neighbourhood’ nor sustainable. The article then explores some more recent cases of optimized quality density in developments in Singapore, Sydney and Vancouver. This article sets out to answer the question: Since density is key to sustainable urbanism, what are the drivers and different planning approaches in relation to establishing an optimal density? And what is the ideal density model for tomorrow’s sustainable cities? Some of the critical thinking around the high-density cases is replicable and could translate to other cities to inform new approaches to quality density. Medium to high-density living is acceptable to residents as long as these developments also provide at the same time an increase in quality green spaces close by. The article explores which density types could help us to create highly liveable, economically vibrant, mixed-use and resilient neighbourhoods of the future. It concludes that every development requires a careful optimization process adapted to the conditions of each site.

Un-forgetting walls by lines on maps: A case study on property rights, cadastral mapping, and the landscape of the Kowloon Walled City

This paper demonstrates that the framing of post-war Kowloon Walled City through photos has been dominated by the maps commonly used to represent this Chinese enclave in colonial Hong Kong as a place. Inspired by and extending Wylie’s (2009) argument that emptiness and presence are equally important, this paper uses basic GIS techniques and hitherto unpublished archival materials to help (a) argues that the colonial government’s mindset of clearly defining the spatial boundary of the city, which is a subtle admission of an officially and diplomatically denied otherness in ownership, created the city as a quasi-cadastral unit; and (b) explains how this shaped the framing of the landscape of the city by promoting investment and trade in high-rise housing development units. The government did not destroy its walls. When these were physically destroyed, it did not ignore the walls’ original alignments but treated the city as a planning unit, as if they still existed.