January 8th, 2011
Earlier this week, the urban issues magazine Next American City tweeted a link to an illustrated cross-section of the Kowloon Walled City, the world’s greatest informal settlement. It gives you a good idea of just how intense the level of human activity within the city was: one room a factory, the next a bedroom, the next a restaurant, all of it linked by an unplanned panoply of staircases, bridges and alleyways.
It has been nearly 18 years since the last piece of the Walled City was torn down by the Hong Kong government. Interest in the city has only magnified since then; there are books, documentaries, websites and discussion forum threads about its architecture, how it came to be and what it was like living inside. (This forum thread in particular is worth looking at — with 330 posts since 2004, it’s as complete a repository of information as you’ll find online.)
By the time it met its demise, the Walled City was an interconnected group of buildings, some up to 16 stories in height, that was home to 33,000 people. It covered an area of just 6.5 acres, making it the most densely-populated place on earth. Long notorious for its brothels and drug dens, it was also home to unlicenced dental clinics, small factories, restaurants and hundreds of ordinary working-class families, most of them recent migrants from mainland China. The entire city was built by hand, without a master plan: a shantytown in highrise form.
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January 2nd, 2011
Queen’s Road West, Sheung Wan, 9:49pm
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January 2nd, 2011
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It was an early spring morning when Jonathan Midgley met the Bowen Road dog poisoner.
“I was going to fly to Singapore later that day on business and I took my dogs for a walk,” he said recently. “I had a white Maltese named Ralph and a reddy-brown village dog, a stray, named Ruth. I went around a bend, called the dogs. They didn’t come. Then I saw them near a man with a cheap supermarket bag in his hand, putting food on the ground.”
Midgley, a criminal defence lawyer, confronted the man and peered inside the plastic bag. There were chicken scraps inside, which the man claimed he was using to feed birds. “I kept him talking but the dogs seemed fine and eventually I let him go,” said Midgley.
After the man vanished from sight, however, Ruth began to tremble and vomit. Midgley put her in the back of his car and rushed her to a vet. She survived, but only after having her stomach pumped, receiving an intravenous drip and spending three days in the clinic.
That was in 1995. Nearly 16 years later, more than 72 dogs have been poisoned around Bowen Road, a quiet, thickly-forested lane running along the slope below Hong Kong’s exclusive Victoria Peak. The man or woman responsible is still on the loose. At least two dogs have been poisoned in December and tainted meat has been found along Bowen Road on several occasions since November.
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January 1st, 2011
San Telmo, Buenos Aires
De’anmenwai Dajie, Beijing
