#(not) kowloon

[sorrysomethingwentwrong]

Kowloon City: An Illustrated Guide,

At its height in the 1990s, Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong housed about 50,000 people. Its population is unremarkable for small cities, but what set Kowloon apart from others of its size was its density. Spanning only 2.6 hectares, the tiny enclave contained 1,255,000 people per square kilometer, making it the densest city in the world.

Kowloon was built as a small military fort around the turn of the 20th century. When the Chinese and English governments abandoned it after World War II, the area attracted refugees and people in search of affordable housing. With no single architect, the urban center continued to grow as people stacked buildings on top of one another and tucked new structures in between existing ones to accommodate the growing population without expanding beyond the original fort’s border.

With only a small pocket of community space at the center, Kowloon quickly morphed into a labyrinth of shops, services, and apartments connected by narrow stairs and passageways through the buildings. Rather than navigate the city through alleys and streets, residents traversed the structures using slim corridors that always seemed to morph, an experience that caused many to refer to Kowloon as “a living organism.”

The city devolved into a slum with crime and poor living conditions and was razed in 1994. Before demolition, though, a team of Japanese researchers meticulously documented the architectural marvel, which had become a sort of cyberpunk icon that even inspired a gritty arcade as tribute.

Courtesy: Hitomi Terasawa

[c-rowlesdraws]

Oh sick this photography book I ordered came with free snacks

[nestedneons]

By Peter Trapasso

Music on

[centrally-unplanned]

Though actually, cute thing: there are "standard" photos of the Kowloon Walled City that are always passed around, and they tend to be the most modern ones due to quality & availability reasons:

But these are from a unique period in its history, namely the end of its history - right before it was demolished. However, it wasn't the only thing to go; its removal was part of a much wider project to level and redevelop the entire area of the Kowloon City District. It just happened to be the last part to go due to its size and legal complexity. That "island of concrete in a desert" look is essentially a fiction:

It was really the heart of a dense urban ecology of low-income development that had emerged over 30+ years in the postwar era.

And you can see how integrated it was with its surroundings, the "walls" were after all purely a legal concept:

The common photos imo are also popular because they heighten the dystopian aspects of the city, making it appear like a tumor infecting the area. Once you see it in its proper context its place as an organic part of the city is much more clear.

[boringa55binch]

Roundtable Meeting

[digitalcyborgquestblog]

[celestialmoonbeam63blog]

[6technotrendsetterstribe82blog]

[ayanarts-01]

Day 5 - Favorite Arc

(yeah you all knew this was coming, didn’t you)

My actual answer is either the Spring and Ragnarok arcs, but the Tenraisai arc is pretty much my favorite in the post-loop for all the development that the Chinese team gets after all that we learned in Summer. (and. yknow. one-sided fengfuu)

and of course, credits to the original text

[humanoidhistory]

"Kowloon Walled City—Caged Balconies," 1990, photo by Ian Lambot.

(M+)

[phonographica]

Kowloon - Coasting (2024)

[obsessedbyneon]

Infographic flyer of Kowloon Walled City 1898 - 1993 and now.

[zeravmeta]

honestly this is an absurdly hilarious panel from every angle

obviously feng is obsessed with becoming the strongest so he will go to whatever lengths he has to even if they are frankly ridiculous but also feng is literally calling fuuko a deadbeat who walked out on him while he cooked and cleaned and raised the kids its so fucking funny

[nestedneons]

By Peter Trapasso

[centrally-unplanned]

In some local DC urbanism news, Georgetown University is doing a remodel of one of its dorms, Henle, so it can be bigger and fit more students. Yay! But of course, that means the existing dorm will be out of commission for a bit, so the students need to live elsewhere. Which means they will rent apartments, basements, townhouses, whatever, in the local area, maybe even spur a little construction, for a few years and then things return to normal.

Hahahaha fuck no This Is America - the local resident housing committee had 100% veto power over the multi-billion dollar institution's ability to remodel its own dormitories, so they were only able to get approval by banning all juniors (the dorm's typical residents) from living in a 'neighborhood zone':

"Students cannot live inside this border" which, hilariously, includes the entirety of the university campus itself. Just amazing that this map exists, printed on an official website. Students will have to live outside the zone and commute to campus, and the university runs its own dedicated bus service to some key apartment hotspots since public transport isn't reliable or expansive enough. The number of affected students, will, of course, outnumber the entire local population of neighborhood property owners. Because democracy!

In unrelated news, NIMBYism Delenda Est.

[kply-industries]

Planes over Kowloon