Cold and Clear

Hong Kong’s Squatter Settlements

If any kind of urban form defines the Hong Kong experience, it’s the skyscraper. Just look out from any window: there are thousands of them. But what preceded those high-rises, and even gave birth to them, were the vast shantytowns built throughout the twentieth century by refugees from mainland China. In the decades following the Japanese invasion of China and the Chinese civil war, informal settlements home to tens of thousands of people sprawled outwards from the edges of urban Hong Kong and Kowloon. In the mid-1950s, huge fires destroyed shantytowns in Tai Hang Tung and Shek Kip Mei, leaving up to 60,000 homeless. In response, the Hong Kong government began providing public housing for squatters, gradually clearing away squatter settlements throughout the city.

But squatters remained an entrenched part of the Hong Kong landscape for decades after the fire, partly because the government could not keep pace with the flow of new refugees from the mainland. In the above video, shot in 1964 around Diamond Hill and Shek Kip Mei, you can see squatter settlements of the most primitive sort, with wooden shacks built on steep hills criss-crossed by muddy, unpaved paths. Landslides—which were a danger even to the established urban areas of Hong Kong, let alone flimsy shanties—killed hundreds of squatters in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Squatters didn’t just live in crude hillside villages, though: they also made homes on rooftops and in the Kowloon Walled City, which was perhaps the most impressive informal settlement in human history.

Hong Kong’s squatter population reached its peak in the 1980s, but squatter clearance and the construction of new housing estates has left few traces of the old shantytowns. Between 1984 and 1992 alone, more than 62,000 squatters were cleared, with tens of thousands more relocated in the 1990s. Still, according to a survey in 2005, more than 10,000 squatters remain throughout Hong Kong, many of them in marginal areas of the territory, like on Lantau Island or in the New Territories. Most are there by choice, choosing to stay in the shacks they have inhabited for decades over a flat in public housing.

Last month, I stumbled across what seemed to be the remnants of an old squatter settlement on the edge of Shek Wu Hui, a busy neighbourhood in the northern New Territories. Several shacks are clustered along a narrow lane next to a parking lot. Their walls and roofs are made from sheets of corrugated metal and many seem built with scavenged doors, windows and other fixtures. From the outside, it seems as though whoever lives in these shacks would have to deal with unspeakable squalour, but the air conditioners betray the fact that things might not be quite as they appear. Residents here often leave their doors open and, while passing by one shack, I peered inside to observe something completely unexpected: polished parquet floors, a TV and at least one piece of IKEA furniture.

The Last Squatters

Remnants of an old squatter settlement.

Shek Wu Hui, Sheung Shui, New Territories

More

Hong Kong New Year

Last year’s New Year’s Eve celebrations. Photo by sunday driver

New Year’s Eve has always been a bit underwhelming for me, never quite living up to the big-screen romance of fireworks exploding above jubilant crowds. Maybe that’s because, until now, the warmest place I’ve spent New Year was Vancouver, where it was a relatively balmy 5 degrees — virtually tropical compared to the -15 I was used to in Montreal and Calgary. Being in Hong Kong finally gave me a chance to get out, watch some fireworks and celebrate in public like I felt I should do.

So last night, some friends and I headed to what I thought would be a little-known spot on the North Point waterfront, a small cul-de-sac near the water surrounded by graffiti-covered walls. There’s a perfect view of Victoria Harbour and the Central skyline. Unfortunately, nothing in Hong Kong is ever as obscure as it seems, and at ten minutes to midnight this out-of-the-way spot was thronged with people from the surrounding neighbourhood, each of whom, I’m guessing, had gone there thinking that nobody else would know about it.

Luckily, there was a poorly-secured construction site nearby, and the construction office had an outdoor platform that gave us a completely unobstructed view of the harbour. We were sandwiched between a photographer with a serious camera mounted on a big tripod and a bunch of flash-happy families. Thirty seconds before midnight, a giant digital countdown appeared on the front of 2IFC and languid streams of fireworks began streaming out of the tops of Hong Kong’s tallest buildings. At midnight, the streams became geysers. It was strangely and amusingly phallic.

The show lasted only five minutes—nothing compared to the 20-minute Chinese New Year extravaganza that will take place later this month—but people cheered so excitedly we could hear them from across the harbour. Later, I sat at the back of a double-decker tram as we rode away from North Point, through the crowds streaming home from the countdown at Times Square. We stopped at a red light and the tram behind us pulled up close, only a couple of feet from me. A man sitting at the front rolled down his window and looked at me.

“Happy new year,” he said, smiling.