Belarius

Illustration by Hitomi Terasawa (寺澤 一美), from Kowloon City: An Illustrated Guide (大図解九龍城) (1997), by the Kowloon City Exploration Team, supervised by Hiroaki Kani (可児 弘明).

Learning about the strange and extraordinary story of Kowloon Walled City feels like it was a rite of passage for my particular flavor of Internet nerd during the late oughts. It lurks in various footnotes as a trivia item, but these fail to convey its truly staggering scope. At its height, its roughly 35,000 inhabitants lived in what is almost certainly the most densely populated living arrangement that human beings have ever experienced in all our history, with about 1.3 human beings per square meter of a surveyor's map. That's over 115 times as dense as habitation in present-day New York City. That's about 29 times as dense as Manila, the world's most densely populated city at the time of this writing.

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During the late stages of evicting its residents in the early 90s, a Japanese research team was allowed unprecedented access to its mostly-empty structure, in order to document as much as they could before the structure was demolished. Their work was compiled in a 1997 book, cited above, which remains a major source of information about the enclave. Its most famous element is a fold-out architectural cross-section, reconstructed through a combination of urban exploration, surveyor work, cultural anthropology, and creative license. It depicts how it's possible to fit 13 people into every 10 square meters on a map. You've likely seen a partial scan of this panorama online, and if you're anything like me, you've been frustrated that you couldn't zoom further into the image to see the details.

So, I present to you my offering to open the month of July, because this month, There Is Only One City. It took some doing, but I got my hands on a physical copy of the book, non-destructively imaged the panels from its panorama, and did my best to stitch the whole thing together. It's not perfect, but I'm pretty confident that it's the highest-resolution version of the panorama now available on the Internet, rendered in enough detail to actually convey the miniature lives of its silhouetted inhabitants. As much of a staple as Kowloon Walled City has become, whether as a cultural reference and cyberpunk touchstone, we would do well to remember that each of its many thousands of inhabitants was no mere atmospheric extra, but was the main character of their own story, living a very real life and for the most part only passing through this unique community. Examining this image in detail does better justice to the lives they lived, I think, than zooming out so far that they become visual noise.

Even in this scrolling wallpaper, the panorama's captions are only barely legible. As such, please take a chance to enjoy the full image, which is available at four times the above resolution, by clicking here. Zoom in, scroll around, take it all in. And know that even seeing this image at this scale is still the barest cross-section, the most fleeting glimpse, of its subject now lost to time and the lives illustrated therein.

EDIT! @Espiox has pointed out that an unannotated version of the 1997 panorama has been reproduced in City Of Darkness Revisited (2014), which can currently be purchased from co-author Greg Girard's website. This makes the image substantially more accessible than I had realized, particularly since copies of the book are (as of the time of this writing) back in stock.

Herein lies the central challenge of depicting cities in art: They are altogether too much. The human mind cannot contain a whole city, it can only grab hold of the most cursory, superficial sketch: A skyline, a few landmark buildings, a tourist's itinerary. Even a lifetime resident of a major city will never meet almost everyone they live alongside of. Despite this, cities feel like a digestible unit. Stand in the right place (or rent a helicopter) and it feels like you can see most or all of a city at once. And when something is visible, there will be artists who try to interpret it.

Let's see what they come up with.