The Kowloon Walled City was a densely populated enclave within the boundaries of the British colony of Hong Kong. Chinese in jurisdiction but de facto controlled by the British, the city became home to refugees and squatters who built modular units one on top of another following the Second World War. By the late 1980s, the Kowloon Walled City was made up of around 350 buildings, almost all between 10 and 14 storeys high, occupied by 8,500 premises, 10,700 households, and more than 33,000 residents. The city’s dark alleyways, controlled by triad gangs for much of the 1970s, were home to drug abuse, gambling, prostitution and a thriving black market. Unlicensed doctors and dentists operated without threat of prosecution. Opium dens were so common even the rats were said to have become addicted. The police would rarely enter the city, and only in large groups. Shaken by the vibrations of planes landing at nearby Kai Tak Airport, the “city of darkness” was served by only eight municipal water pipes and self-built wells; sunlight rarely reached the lower levels of the city where fluorescent lights lit the alleyways between buildings. On the higher levels, balconies were caged in to maximise the use of space. The city was demolished over the course of a year from 1993 to 1994; the space it once occupied is now a park, perhaps symbolic of our changing understanding of public space. Still, the memory of the Kowloon Walled City, once dubbed “the world’s wickedest city”, remains: as a science-fictive temporary autonomous zone, a modern pirate city, a window at once into our past and our scary, messy future.Thomas Roueché