Society: A city of organized chaos.

Remembering the city of Kowloon

Picture a colossal empire of little houses stacked
on top of each other. Visualize them connected by
staircases snaking under dangling wires, through corridors
so dark even police were rumored to be afraid of them.
Now picture 33,000 people living there, within the space of
one city block. That was Kowloon Walled City, once
considered the densest settlement on earth.
"A huge monstrosity of buildings"
Before it was demolished twenty years ago, photographer
Greg Girard spent years with collaborator Ian Lambot
documenting this unique Hong Kong phenomenon, and
remembers being amazed when he first saw it.
"It was a huge monstrosity of buildings," recalls
Girard. "It didn't look like anything else."
After all, the Walled City was a kind of historical
accident. A former Qing dynasty fortress, it never
fully came under the regulation of the British
colonial government in Hong Kong. As a result,
its residents were free to build their dwellings as
they wished, ignoring safety codes.
"Quite often houses were built by building onto the next
building, punching out walls to use their staircases," said
Girard. "A lot of them didn't have access to air or open
space, because they were enclosed in the center of the
structure."
Deep within the building's darkness, a variety of small
businesses flourished.
"The places that stuck out were the meat factories," says
Girard. "There were pig carcasses laying splayed out on the
floor; they'd burn the hair off with a blowtorch, it was all
pretty open and of course there were no health laws
governing the place."
But despite the City's wild appearance, the photographer
found that the people inside lived just like people anywhere
else.
"People were doing very ordinary things," he says. "It's just
that all these ordinary things were happening in an
extraordinary place."
An ingenious community
The complexity of the Walled City also fascinated local
architect Aaron Tan, now the director of Hong Kong firm
Research Architecture Design . A graduate student then, he
wrote his thesis on the Walled City as it was being torn
down.
"I was fascinated -- it was like a piece of
machinery that worked very well. The demolition
was like taking the machine apart -- the first
time you could see what was inside.
"It was a really humbling process for me as a
designer -- when we met this Walled City, we
started to see that people could be more
intelligent than us, the designers -- that they could think of
ways to solve problems that are outside the traditional
academic world."
Tan was especially impressed by Kowloon Walled City's
water system. To support its dense population, residents
dug extra wells and built thousands of pipes that twisted
through the building. But since pumping water to the City's
roof tanks required plenty of power, the people would take
turns conserving electricity so that water could be shared
successfully.
"It revealed the community inside -- that no matter the
challenges, they would find some intelligent way to solve it,"
says Tan.
Despite the ingenuity of the Walled City, by 1994 it was
completely torn down by the city government, which was
eager to replace the chaotic and unregulated community
with a public park.
"Seeing the Walled City fall into disuse was sort of
melancholic," says Girard. "Every city realizes too late to
start caring about their architectural heritage -- it's a
mistake that gets repeated everywhere. By the time you
start caring about it, it's too late to save it."
Today, visitors to the site of the old Walled City will find a
placid garden with swaying trees and cloudy ponds. In the
park there is a small museum in honor of Kowloon Walled
City. But when you look to the sky and imagine the colossus
of Hong Kong life that once stood, it's easy to see that
something significant has been lost.
CNN Travel: Why we love the Kowloon City neighborhood
The City is not dead
Even today, the City's legacy lives on. A walled
neighborhood called the Narrows in the 2005 film "Batman
Begins" was based on Kowloon Walled City. The City is
even a level in the video game "Call of Duty: Black Ops."
Because of the continued interest, Greg Girard is
working with his fellow Kowloon Walled City
photographer Ian Lambot to finish a new book of
their stunning photographs, entitled " City of
Darkness: Revisited. " (Click here to visit the
book''s crowd-funding campaign).
"You don't want to romanticize a slum, you
know. Because it was that. But it was much
more than that. The Walled City was a kind of
architectural touchstone in terms of what a city can be --
unplanned, self-generated, unregulated. It was vital and
vibrant and every part of it was being used."
Tan believes the spirit of the Walled City continues to pulse
through the heart of Hong Kong itself.
"Go to The Peak and look down upon this amazing
collection of buildings coming together -- it's almost like a
blown up version of the Walled City, right? Each building is
related to the next building. New programs evolve because
of the connections."
This organic chaos, he says, has been an inspiration for his
own work.
"Many architects and urban planners like control," he says.
"But people like to get lost in the city. In my design
process, I always consciously try to allow accidents, to allow
others to participate, to surprise me."