Artist Hitomi Terasawa drew a meticulous cross-sectioned rendering of Hong Kong's infamous Kowloon Walled City before it was razed in 1994. Now we have rare scans revealing the inner workings of the labyrinth-like metropolis.
www.thisiscolossal.com/2024/07/kowl...
(Also you may know this but re: your alt text, this probably depicts a senior center where older people are doing qigong or tai chi. The red dot is a marker for an annotation outside the frame.)
Kowloon Walled City is one of those things I find myself reading about every few years.
Although it was a crime ridden, unsanitary, fire hazard of a hellhole, it's still fascinating that this ultra compressed chunk of urban culture existed. It feels both alien and relatable at the same time.
Brings back memories of flying back to the UK as a child from Japan on Cathay Pacific, with a stopover in Hong Kong. Flying so close to the apartments of Kowloon City left such a deep impression of me that to this day I sometimes have dreams of being in a plane which lands on a road in a city.
That's so wonderful!
So much intricate detail everywhere!
And it's great to see it as a snapshot of life, instead of "just" a cross-section of empty architecture.
