In spring last year I came across a book in a charity shop that caught my eye. The title of was ‘Crack in the Wall’, a book about the work of Jackie Pullinger, a Christian missionary who went to Hong Kong with little money and nowhere to stay- just with the desire to spread the Christian message. Although I found her story inspiring, it was the setting that took my interest- the Kowloon Walled City, an urban slum in the centre of Hong Kong. It was unlike anywhere I had seen before and quite different from other urban slums such as Dharavi in Mumbai – for starters it appeared to have grown upwards rather than outwards.
The Walled City existed as a military base from 1197 when Hong Kong was part of China, and in 1847 the wall from which the Walled City gained its name was built. In 1898, after the Opium War, when the New Territories were leased to Britain for 99 years, it was decided that China would maintain jurisdiction of the Kowloon Walled City until the British Colonial administration had been established. In reality, this did not happen and China maintained jurisdiction of the area. The issue of jurisdiction was the underlying cause of all of the problems in the Walled City – mainly because the British administration was unable to enforce Hong Kong law there since it was technically Chinese territory and the Chinese did not implement Chinese law either. So, with regards to why the Walled City grew upwards instead of outwards, if it were to grow outwards it would have gone into British territory and therefore would have become subject to Hong Kong law and housing regulation.
As I read more of the book I discovered that the Walled City had been demolished in 1993 – but in some ways this just added allure. It made me wonder what had happened to the 33,000 people who lived there, and this lead to my research question: ‘What were the consequences of the demolition of the Kowloon Walled City’. Unfortunately, there are very few books on the subject of the Kowloon Walled City, so I decided that the best option would be to travel to Hong Kong and find much of the information myself.
When asked in an email to describe his perceptions of the Kowloon Walled City, Nick Danziger (the photojournalist who took the photographs published in ‘Crack in the Wall’) summed up the key issues very well.
This is what he said:
‘It is cliché to say, but it is hard to imagine. My overriding impression was: how could so many people live in such a tiny area? It was cramped, humid and dangerous from a health and safety point of viewpoint with open sewage and electrical wires everywhere. There was also the ever present danger of people looking to either protect their own rackets or territory and others looking to pounce on any opportunity to prey on the unwary or most unfortunate inhabitants of the Walled City.’
A key reason why the Walled City was not demolished until 1993 was that the clearance was a politically sensitive issue. The British government had been pushing for its demolition prior to 1987, but the action had always been blocked by the Chinese government and any attempt to demolish the Kowloon Walled City would be likely to cause serious confrontation with detrimental consequences for Sino-British relations – it simply wasn’t worth it.
At this point my research got trickier as colonial records, that I had been using to gain the information, are only released 30 years after they were written meaning that I had no information about what had changed prior to 1987 to allow the demolition to happen.
To find this out, I arranged a meeting with Sir David Akers-Jones who was acting governor of Hong Kong between 1986-1987 and subsequently Chairman of the Hong Kong Housing Authority between 1987 and 1992 – he was the ideal person to speak to as not only was he a key player in the decision to clear the Walled City, but he was also involved in process of clearance and demolition. The meeting was to be over lunch at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel – his choice, not mine - and it immediately became apparent that he was not your average 80-something year old and had clearly had an extraordinary life.
The meeting provided a lot of information that I could not have found elsewhere. As I mentioned earlier, the Chinese government had previously blocked attempts to demolish the Kowloon Walled City; however in 1984, with the signing of the Sino British Joint Declaration which stated that Hong Kong would be returned to China in 1997, the issues surrounding the status of the Kowloon Walled City changed. China no longer needed to maintain territory in Hong Kong and in fact it was in mutual interest of the British and Chinese to resolve the problems of the Kowloon Walled City once and for all. So in terms of political consequences of the demolition, there were none at all; if anything, it could have improved relations between the two countries by promoting further cooperation.
A top-down approach was taken towards the demolition process. This is an approach whereby decisions and actions are undertaken by those in authority with little input from other stakeholders. In fact, prior to the announcement in 1987, only a handful of people knew about the decision to demolish the Kowloon Walled City. Employees of the Hong Kong Housing Authority were only informed on the day of the announcement, after which they immediately had to undertake a census survey of all households living in the Walled City.
The lack of involvement of the residents may evoke negative images of people being forced out of their homes and bulldozers turning up unexpectedly to knock down all of the buildings, but this was not the case and actually the approach appeared to be successful. Clearly I could not take Akers-Jones’ word for it so it was time for another meeting. The meeting was with two representatives from the Kowloon Walled City Kai Fong – the resident’s welfare association. Neither could speak English so I dragged along a couple of my new friends to ask the questions. I recorded the entire interview on a Dictaphone and I must thank my friend Nancy for spending several hours translating the interview when I got back to the UK.
One of the residents described the day of the announcement:
‘They did it very well. If they hadn’t surrounded the place, there would’ve been a lot of people coming in and claiming they’d been living there all along. 1 household would have turned into 20/30 households so in that sense it was successful. We could only move out and nothing could move in, not even mattresses. I was having a perm when people were coming in saying that they have surrounded the place.’
Also, from another meeting with Ian Lambot, who interviewed hundreds of residents before writing his book ‘City of Darkness’, I found out that most of the residents that he spoke to never expected to stay in the Walled City forever. Therefore when given the opportunity to leave, improving their standard of living, most of the residents were reasonably supportive. This combined with information from other sources had led me to conclude that in this case, the top-down approach was very successful and in many ways it challenged my prejudices against this approach to redevelopment.
To be Continued…
Imogen 13W
Imogen 13W
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