Kowloon Walled City is gone, but it haunts us because it represents a third option. Not the planned metropolis. Not the suburban sprawl. But the —a place that grew like coral, solving problems in real-time without permits or politicians.

Would you like to add any information, read more on Kowloon Walled City or any follow-up?

Forget the name. By the 1980s, Kowloon Walled City wasn’t a military fort. It was a 6.4-acre plot in Hong Kong where in roughly 300 interconnected high-rises.