Abandoned amusement park in New Orleans Image: Keoni Cabral
“Revolution” premiered last night on NBC, hoping to coast into viewers’ hearts on a wave of Hunger Games hysteria. The show is set in a world where all electricity disappeared 15 years ago. [Even one of the characters comments that this pivotal plot point defies all laws of physics…so we’ll just roll with it for now.] It follows a heroic band of misfits trying to protect the one ring a shiny USB drive from armed horsemen.
The swordfights are cool, but the scenery is much more interesting. This is an archaeologist’s fantasy, a civilization abandoned abruptly in the wake of sudden, cataclysmic change: People in a hurry leave behind the most interesting artifacts. Looking at the remnants of our present lives through a future lens is one of the most entertaining parts of the show. iPads and iPods are useless paperweights, and cars become flowerbeds. The landscape changes, too. Wrigley Field is an overgrown ruin, and suburbs have turned into medieval towns.
It all looks very dystopian, but there are places that resemble the show’s landscape in the world today.
Visually, the producers of “Revolution” probably took their cues from New Orleans. The Big Easy took a huge population hit after Hurricane Katrina, and seven years later, the city’s abandoned schools and theme parks have found an echo on the small screen.
The town of Pripyat near Chernobyl is a classic. 25 years ago, the disaster forced almost everyone out, and it has been partially reclaimed by a radioactive wilderness.
More recently, the earthquake in Christchurch created a zone of abandoned suburbs, which is slowly being retaken by wildlife.
On the other end of the deserted spectrum from the semi-abandoned New Zealand suburbs is the deserted mining town of Kolmanskop, Namibia.
Kolmanskop Image: Michiel van Balen
Abandoned just 40 years after it was established, the dunes creeped into the nearby houses, overwhelming them in floods of sand and dust.
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It’s been called the City of Darkness. Perhaps an unfair title given that there certainly must be some individuals today with happy memories of growing up there. It was many things to many people. A safe haven for Chinese mafiosos. An unregulated nest of small businesses catering to every conceivable human need and vice. But between its inception in 1898 and its demolition in 1994, to most of its residents, it was simply home. To this day, Kowloon remains one of the most fascinating examples of unregulated urban development and consolidation, anarchic ideals put into practice and the social dynamics inherent to life in a densely packed single structure. Originally a fort, razed to the ground by the Japanese military, unregulated building began in the early 70s and continued until it was a single contiguous urban hive. Those who frequent my blog will know I have something of a fascination with arcologies and their nearest real-world equivalents. Whittier, Alaska is one such modern-day “indoor town” I’ve covered recently. But Kowloon absolutely dwarfs it, with an estimated peak population of 33,000 [though some estimates claimed as high as 50,000]. That’s insane population density, even by Hong Kong standards. The average apartment offered only 250 square feet of space. Alleys were between four and six feet wide, and a network of passageways above the ground level permitted to travel from one end of the city to the other without ever setting foot on the pavement. Despite the austere and filthy conditions, citizens of Kowloon endured by banding together into a united community which overcame hardships by helping one another out. Various religious centers existed for meetings of Christians, Buddhists, and Animists, among others. In this way, life was made tolerable and surely at times joyful by citizens taking an active interest in each other’s wellbeing. In William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, Kowloon is explored as a virtual environment. Purely by coincidence, my first explorations of Kowloon were in a Second Life recreation of it, on old legacy VR equipment that was nevertheless pretty amazing to me back in the day. The enduring mystique of Kowloon has most recently translated into a Japanese arcade, Kawasaki Warehouse, which has been built to replicate the look and feel of a limited portion of the infamous walled city. To some extent a tasteless romanticisation of poverty, but also a testament to the public’s enduring fascination with the historical oddity that is Kowloon. Simultaneously communal and anarchic. A contradiction in concrete, within which neighborly compassion coexists side by side with mob brutality. The full gamut of human experience, condensed into the space of a city block. No community quite like Kowloon existed before it, and perhaps there will never again be anything like it.
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Kowloon Walled City was a crazy social experiment, except there were no scientists in charge; the test subjects were. On the site of a dismantled Chinese fortress in Hong Kong, refugee squatters began building makeshift homes in the 1940s. What started out as 2,000 refugees in huts gradually grew into 50,000 people crammed into ramshackle, unregulated skyscrapers leaning on each other for support. [It's reported that no architects or engineers were involved in building the structures, which went up to 14 stories, but were somehow erected by the community that lived there.] And amazingly, it all formed a cohesive—and largely contiguous—structure, resembling a castle or fortress. KWC had water and electricity siphoned from wells and the rest of the city, but was an unregulated mess of ad-hoc infrastructure largely unsupported by government. Police were afraid to venture inside [though unbelievably, postman were reportedly forced to deliver mail there!]. It was filled with criminals, drug dealers and prostitutes, as well as honest families, schoolchildren and one-man manufacturing shops. The following illustration shows what a slice of it might look like: Tiny, cramped spaces did double duty, with units that were classrooms during the day transformed into strip clubs at night. There were restaurants and gambling dens, hair salons and convenience stores, unlicensed doctors and dentists. So close were the buildings that sunlight was hard to come by on street level; thus fluorescents were hung outdoors at ground level for illumination. Rooftops, meanwhile, became social spaces. The government finally shut it down in the 1990s and razed it. But in the years during and since, Kowloon Walled City has captured the imaginations of everyone from architects to sci-fi authors to set designers to artists. Speaking of artists, photographer Greg Girard, who documented KWC in the 1980s, probably has the best photo essay on it [shot both inside and outside] right here. We also wanted to show you the fantastic KWC-inspired work done by a handful of illustrators: If you have a project from last year that you’re proud of then take a few minutes to send it in to the 2022 Core77 Design Awards. We have 18 categories of practice, and for this year we have a special Sustainability Prize for any projects that have a beneficial environmental impact. Check out designawards.core77.com for details and schedules.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.