Luxagraf

I was revisiting some old luxagraf posts lately and came across one about The Top Ten Place Americans Can’t Visit. I poked fun at that list, but in rereading it I stumbled on another idea: Top Tourist Spots Nobody Can Visit Because They No Longer Exist. Or TTSNCVBTNLE for those of you with a Dave Eggers fetish.

Anyway, to kick things off I’m going to start with one of my favorites: The Kowloon Walled City. The Kowloon walled city was located just outside Hong Kong, China and had a long a distinguished career as a more or less lawless city replete with pirates, gangs, thieves, brothels, casinos, opium dens, cocaine parlors, organized crime bosses and more.

The city (or at least the walls) have come down twice: once in WWII when the Japanese destroyed it to build an airport and then later, after it was reborn, the British and the Chinese governments destroyed for good (so far anyway) in 1993.

The interesting thing about the massive, and for all intents and purposes, anarchic city is that there was reportedly a surprisingly low crime rate. Obviously without police and statistics it’s hard to verify that claim, but no one was ever forced to live there and yet 50,000 people did.

The sanitary conditions were, by most accounts, not good. And with a population density of 1,923,077 per square km, that’s not very surprising.

Another remarkable tidbit: The city had limited horizontal real estate — it was only .026 square km — so people built vertically. Eventually the buildings grew so tall that sunlight no longer reached the lower levels and the entire city had to be illuminated with fluorescent lights.

If you want to know more, check out the Wikipedia entry on the Kowloon Walled City.