Got into a heated discussion with a coworker over this. My stance is it was probably for the best it was demolished. The entire thing was a massive fire and disease hazard. Massive amounts of crime and unlicensed businesses too. Despite its reputation for a kind of tight knit anarchist type community, most of the stuff I've read seems to suggest triads and the HK police were largely running the place.
I hate forceful eviction as much as the next person here. What else could have been done? There was some compensation given to the residents, but I know some residents complained it wasn't enough.
My coworker's stance is the place should have remained as it was, without any sort of intervention whatsoever, despite being so hazardous.
How do y'all feel?
I'm all for high density but it was too dense to be safe with good living conditions
A city like that could be cool if it was able to build more vertically, had safer planning, and had basic services like waste disposal
it was anarchist in so much as there was no government, this did not mean the place was directly democratically run by the people there. many people lacked basic living standards, there were huge gang problems, and it was really not a great place to live. if it wasn't torn down, it eventually would have collapsed
forcible evictions are bad but fires resulting in mass death are worse
And evictions can be easily rendered trivial if you move people to new housing. The damage from eviction is mainly from the cost and not having a place to live afterwards. That all can be addressed pretty easily.
I wouldn't say trivial, moving can be very disruptive, especially if it's forced and even more so if your place of work is also being destroyed (as was the case for many people living and working there). Still, it was just a matter of when, not if, that place was going to go up in flames and killed thousands of people. Think the Oakland Ghost Ship warehouse fire times a thousand.
It makes me so angry all those people died. The fire inspectors were all over that warehouse and they knew what was going on and it was unsafe. But nooo...if the government shut the place down that's faaaaaascism. There would have been a riot in Oakland, because that's how they roll there. And so dozens of people died in a fire.
And who got the blame? The government fire inspectors, for not shutting it down and allowing an obviously unsafe building to continue hosting crowds of people. So, so angry.
Yes but they should have built high rises right next door and let everyone move there for free with no / very low rent
China does this when they seize peasants land for development. Each peasant gets an apartment in the new building.
Hell yeah, they do a pretty good job housing and training displaced (generally with full consent) people. Their poverty alleviation has similar policies for transitioning poor rural communities to dense urban housing and urban jobs, with subsidized or free housing, generally new construction, depending on people's situations.
Idk it was pretty punk that it existed, I'd rather just keep imagining it a certain way than face reality
Yeah, like it kinda seems like a cyberpunk writer managed to lathe of heaven something into existence. It’s a cool setting for stories not a cool place to actually live. Residents were done dirty m, but they wouldn’t have been living there if they hadn’t been done dirty by capitalism first though.
They should have kept it up as a relic or historical artifact. It's small enough that it isn't going to get in the way really and it's definitely something that could have been studied.
They should have moved everyone living there to a better built area and left it up kinda like what China is doing with the old dangerous towns in the rural areas (build better housing and maintain the old town as a heritage site and allow the locals to do tourism and historical stuff with it)
I mean, if you keep a building like that where it's such a safety hazard, someone will get lost and hurt while doing tourism. You'd have to significantly improve the structure to make it safe enough even for that.
I’m kinda ambivalent about the safety of tourists (despite the fact I would have been one if I could afford it and it was turned into a tourist site). Maybe just keep a really rickety VIP section priced only so rich fucks could go there and feel special as they step into a puddle of water next to some exposed wiring that’s somehow still live.
You’d have to improve it to stop it falling apart and ceasing to be am attraction either way though.
Then do that, with people moved out it's way easier to go in and reenforce sections of the building. The most important parts would be the layout and additions made by the tenants themselves.
It would have caught fire eventually I'm sure, something as stupid as a lost vape or iPod battery going bad and catching fire in the mess somewhere. Idk if you could ever bring that place up to code.
A solitary building still stood at the center of Kowloon, the one structure to have survived throughout its whole turbulent history—the office of the Mandarin.
Ooh, I want to see what it looks like.
All of the buildings were 14 stories high because it was under the approach of a nearby airport.
Holy JavaScript. That atlas obscura page has like 15 JavaScript trackers running on it.
Do I have to run NoScript to keep myself safe from those or does uBlock Origin (which I use) offer some protection?
Recommend running noscript and just toggling them until the site has necessary functionality.
U block just blocks trackers and html elements
It's useful for "dynamic" news sites beause it just miles anything that moves
the office of the Mandarin.
Little known fact but one of the reasons for the collapse of the Qing dynasty was the absurd amount of money spent on building office facilities for citrus fruit.
Some thoughts
- Only the most baby-brained libs would call a tiny area, totally dependent on the surrounding capitalist economy and run by gangs anarchist. Child prostitution and opium dens are ancap shit.
- Conditions there were dangerous and unsanitary. The residents deserved better.
- In spite of this many residents remember the place fondly. The absence of government created a community and spared the residents of much oppression. This doesn't mean the Kowloon walled city was a good place, it means the other options available to the residents were even worse.
- A government concerned with the well-being of its citizens ought to do something about a place like the Kowloon walled city. However it should be done in cooperation with the citizens and their democratic organs.
- The right thing to do would have been to let the citizens form assemblies and let those assemblies be in charge of renovating the existing area as well as of the construction of new developments to house those citizens.
- Renovation and construction should be funded as part of a larger programme to re-prioritise resources towards ensuring quality housing for all and away from the frivolous luxuries and bullshit work of the bourgeoisie.
Most democratic? When? Certainly not under the British.
They just strapped a voting system onto the colony before they left as a "fuck you" to China, and a dare to knock it down.
China: "Challenge accepted."
Not most democratic, most "free".
"Free" of course being whatever bullshit definition the Cato institute and Heritage Foundation define it to be. Usually just the freedom of billionaires to evade taxes and fuck the poor.
My coworker’s stance is the place should have remained as it was, without any sort of intervention whatsoever, despite being so hazardous.
That is so libertarian it hurts. Have you considered punching your co-worker?
His reasoning is the people chose to live there as it was, so they'd prefer it staying as it was. This is far from his worst stance. He also has a positive view of Ted Kaczynski.
Just because the most disadvantaged people in a society choose to live somewhere (out of limited options), does not mean that they don't want to see that area improved, or to be given the opportunity to live in better conditions elsewhere.
Does your coworker also believe that people living in shanty towns for the unhomed would all turn down a free apartment if they were offered one?
Some would, sure. But all of them?
He's told me being homeless or being poor is a right people should have. He would probably saying offering free homes disrupts a person's choice to remain poor and shouldn't be done. He's... Odd. I would call him a libertarian, but he's also outright talked about wanting a dictator.
Isn't the obvious answer to that concern the fact that a person who wishes to be poor and unhomed can simply turn down the free housing?
Or is he using "choose to be poor" in the ghoul sense of certain people choosing to be poor because they don't choose to bootstrap?
He doesn't mean anything coherent and has some weird obsession with balance. He would say free housing disrupts the choice because he believes being poor or rich is an aesthetic lifestyle choice and both contain their own pros and cons, so offering free housing to the poor would disrupt their choice in that it would put too many pros on the poor side. It would make one choice far easier to make, meaning some arbitrary balance has been disturbed. He's quite strange.
he believes being poor or rich is an aesthetic lifestyle choice and both contain their own pros and cons
So he's a moron
Is there data out there about how the former KWC residents feel about it? From an outsider's perspective it definitely seems like living in any given place in Hong Kong is probably better than the conditions they were living under, but the only people who would know for sure are those who lived it.
The only ethical way to handle the situation would have been for some kind of organization to emerge among the KWC residents that could negotiate the relocation as a political unit, because without that the only other thing that can end up happening is an external government comes in and dictates terms to them, which is precisely what the HK government did.
some kind of organization to emerge among the KWC residents that could negotiate the relocation as a political unit
The triad gangsters ran the place.
