Urban Exclaves
Kowloon Walled City
Fagstein has really upped the ante on his Montreal Geography Trivia. For the latest installment (the sixty-fifth!), he posted a map of the Montreal suburb of Côte St. Luc and asked why it has two exclaves, which pretty much stumped everyone, even those who knew about the exclaves. With the help of the Gazette’s archives, which were recently made available on Google News, he was able to chart the political wheeling-and-dealing that led to the two stray bits of CSL.
What might be more interesting than how they came into being is what kind of an impact they’ve had on the city. One of the exclaves encompasses a portion of Macdonald Avenue, right on the border of Montreal and Hampstead. I’d always wondered why Macdonald was lined by big apartment blocks while the streets around it were much lower-density. Now, thanks to Fagstein, I know it’s because CSL saw the exclave as an opportunity to reap the profits from high-density development without making a single one of its suburban citizens upset, because the only people who would object to a bunch of apartment towers sprouting in their backyard lived in Hampstead and Montreal.
I recently came across another urban exclave while I was wasting time on Google Street View. Thanks to a bunch of convoluted medieval treaties, large chunks of the Dutch town of Baarle-Hertog are technically part of Belgium. While this doesn’t mean much in practice, considering that both countries are part of the European Union, it does mean that there are plenty of border oddities, like buildings split between the two countries. To make matters more complicated, there are several Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves.
One exclave bests all the others, however: the Kowloon Walled City. For more than a century, it was a bit of China stranded in British-controlled Hong Kong, an abandoned military post that became the heart of the most incredible squatter settlement the world has ever seen. It’s useless to really describe it, since photos speak for themselves, and in any case there are much more detailed accounts of what the Walled City was like than I could possibly hope to give. (This thread on a discussion forum is a good place to start.) At its peak, the Walled City was home to 33,000 people and existed as a world unto itself, the best possible demonstration of a self-regulating sub-society that could ever exist.
Tags: Belgium, Hong Kong, Kowloon, Kowloon Walled City, Montreal, Political Jurisdiction, The Netherlands
