The City of Darkness
It’s amazing how many different ways we, as a human race, live.
There are those of us in the jungle, atop mountains, in cities, and way out on the open plains. There are those who live in Alert, Canada, the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world 1300 miles away from Iqaluit - the next largest city, which itself had a population of less than 8,000 in 2016. The average temperature for July in Alert is just 7 degrees Celsius. This is a stark contrast from the 24 degrees on average that locals in Miyake-jima, Japan face - and where they are required to wear a gas mask at all times due to poisonous gases from high-frequency volcanic activity. Miyake-jima, however, is likely more culturally homogenous than Auroville, India, an internationally-endorsed social experiment in Tamil Nadu where 50,000 people from around the world seek to live in intentional harmony with both nature and one another. Auroville isn’t far away from North Sentinel Island, where the local tribe still lives with Stone Age technology and violently kills anyone who attempts to visit.
One human settlement, however, did find itself growing so far out of control that the local government ordered its complete destruction.
Streets inside of the Kowloon Walled City often did not receive sunlight at any time of day, earning it the nickname of City of Darkness. Source: Architectural Review
The former site of Kowloon’s Walled City, also known as the City of Darkness, lies just a thirty minutes’ drive from the hospital where I was born. Originally settled as a military fort by China, it quickly became home to enormous numbers of as-yet unprocessed refugees fleeing the violence of the Chinese Civil War and political persecution. Unable to maintain operations in a territory surrounded by foreign powers, Chinese lack of use for the fort led to it falling into disrepair - and worse.
The amount of illegal settlements, crime, and anarchy quickly led to Kowloon becoming known as “Hak Nam”, Cantonese for “City of Darkness”. This was a result of its almost unthinkably dense population - the densest on Earth, with 50,000 people in 0.025 square kilometers - meaning that neither the British nor Chinese could enforce laws within. For comparison, this rate is, at the Walled City’s peak, 119 times denser than New York City is today. Opium dens, brothels, and even unlicensed dentists operated within the Walled City in the 1950s and 1960s.
And yet, paradoxically, some public services continued. Atlas Obscura has written a fascinating article about the Walled City’s only postman, responsible for delivering mail to an area less than 300 square meters in size but with “350 buildings, almost all between 10 and 14 stories high, occupied by 8,500 premises, 10,700 households, and more than 33,000 residents.”. In the face of being unable to receive most public systems, however, the community largely looked after one another - even if it meant doing so without official regulation.
Naturally, the local government found itself with a need to address the lawless situation. With much of the real power laying in the hands of organised crime syndicates, the city government launched a wave of anti-corruption campaigns in the 1970s that tackled them directly. From there, efforts to begin its demolition began in 1987, and were completed in 1993. The timing is no accident - with the handover of Hong Kong back to China taking place in 1997, government pushback against the settlement did not take place.
Passengers flying into the now-closed Kai Tak airport claim they could see into the flats of Walled City residents from their seats. Source: Billy-Clarke.com
Today, the site on which the City of Darkness stood is about as stark of a contrast as it could be: a green park now sits adjacent to Tung Tau Tsuen Road. Its legacy, however, lives on in a number of pop culture references, casinos, and documentarians seeking inspiration for anarchy and hedonism by drawing upon the Walled City’s status as a territory claimed by two countries, but neglected by both.
TAI Score: Degree 0. Kowloon Walled City’s demolition in the early 1990’s may not have eradicated the threat of Chinese organised crime, but the lack of a disorganised, anarchic settlement in Hong Kong will have certainly contributed to the city’s overall safety. In fact, Hong Kong routinely ranks as one of the world’s top twenty safest cities, and one of Asia’s top ten, in 2024. There is no modern threat from the Walled City or its legacy that decision makers or business leaders need to be aware of - rather, many have capitalised on the risks that it used to hold decades ago.
