Two years ago, I spent a lot of time exploring the rooftop squatter villages that spread across the city like mushrooms on a tree stump. There’s an eerie feeling that comes over you as you walk through these settlements. Weeds poke through cracks in concrete walls; birds chirp and cicadas whir in the hot summer sun. It’s as though you’re in an isolated country village, except when you look down, water pipes run along the path in front of you, and when you look to the side, you see a forest of highrises. The nearest street is ten stories below.
Inspired by this very feeling, a young German filmmaker named Marco Sparmberg has created Squattertown, a new mini-series based on a dystopian vision of Hong Kong. In this parallel universe, the wealth gap has grown so large, a vast underclass is forced to live in a ramshackle, parallel city that exists above the heads of the affluent. Threatened by this sprawling rooftop shantytown, the wealthy from below send up a thug to terrorize the leader of the roof society.
It’s what Sparmberg calls a “Dim Sum Western,” a new genre that draws from the genre-redefining syncretism of two hallmark film movements: the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s and the Hong Kong New Wave of the 1980s.
The scenario is fantasy, but like any good allegory, it’s not too far removed from reality.
“I was trying to tackle the issue of property developers trying to push out people by any means, especially those people in rooftop housing,” said Sparmberg when I met him on the roof of the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre. Last fall, he spent two months scouting rooftops that would be good for shooting. He found most of them on buildings slated for redevelopment by property developers and the Urban Renewal Authority.
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.
Wandering down narrow lanes, past rows of makeshift houses, I could be standing in a squatter’s village in the New Territories. Potted plants sigh in the heavy heat of summer. Door gods peel from wooden entranceways. It is quiet. But I’m not in a village — I’m ten stories above a narrow street in Tai Kok Tsui, on the roof of a large block of flats built in the 1970s.
About thirty families live on the roof. Most are immigrants from the mainland or South Asia; others are longtime roof-dwellers who’ve decided they’d rather live here than in a faraway public housing estate. People have been living on Hong Kong’s roofs for decades; rooftop villages like this are a remnant of the massive tide of mainland refugees that swept over Hong Kong in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Rooftop shacks have been bought, rented and sold ever since, in an illegal black market that is tacitly accepted by the government. There are no statistics on how many people live on rooftops, but one community worker told me the number could be in the tens of thousands.
One of the Tai Kok Tsui roof’s residents is a 23-year-old university student named Sam Fong. I was first introduced to him by a social worker who is helping relocate families off of the roof, which will be demolished for a new housing development in the near future. He moved here with his family from Guangzhou a few years ago. Unlike many roof-dwellers, he’s quite philosophical about his surroundings. The rooftop is a village in more ways than its appearance: everyone knows each other and people keep their doors open. Every fall, Fong’s family hosts a Mid-Autumn feast in a small open space in front of their house.
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.
“Around 6am, the squealing of copulating rats—signalling a night-long verminous orgy on the rooftops of Dharavi, a slum in Mumbai—gives way to the more cheerful sound of chirruping sparrows. Through a small window in Shashikant (“Shashi”) Kawale’s rickety shack, daylight seeps. It reveals a curly black head outside. Further inspection shows that this is attached to a man’s sleeping body, on a slim metal ledge, 12 feet above the ground.”
It’s not the most flattering description, but the Economist’s December 19th story on Dharavi is actually a remarkably sensitive portrait of Asia’s largest slum, revealing a particularly complex social and economic space that is now threatened by redevelopment.
One million people live in Dharavi, which is somewhat incredible when you realize that it covers just one square mile. Although conditions are rough, life in the slum has improved remarkably over the past several decades. Part of the reason for that is that it has become an important economic centre, containing an estimated 15,000 single-room factories and functioning as the centre of Mumbai’s jewellery, textile and recycling industries. All of the trash thrown away in Mumbai passes through the workshops of Dhavari, where it is sorted and sold. For the slum’s residents, the line between home and work is blurred, since many living spaces also double as workshops; every inch of Dharavi is put to great use.
Government planners don’t approve of slums like this; they never have. For at least a decade, Mumbai’s officials have been trying to get rid of Dharavi. What they overlook, however, is the innovation and entrepreneurialism it produces. Dharavi is packed with an almost unimaginable number of people, but it’s also full of small businesses that were built by the most marginalized members of Indian society. Most are poor migrants from the countryside. For them, living in a slum, where living conditions are squalid but opportunities are immense, is the best way to improve their lot.
urban blog of the day: favelissues, discussing favelas (and other types of informal settlements) worldwide http://t.co/5dQ9I6Xyabout 3 hours agofrom web
why does it now take decades to build subways in developed world cities, while china builds several a year? a summary http://t.co/VpgYJJ1Vabout 10 hours agofrom web
