Kowloon walled city was demolished in 1993 after a lengthy eviction process. The settlement was insanely populated due to large scale migration of Chinese during world war 2 and occupation of Hong kong by British.
Most of the settlement was built haphazardly by the settlers themselves. As it was not governed by any authority, crime flourished along with illegal trading. The population was an incredible 3.25 million people per square mile!!
In comparison, the world’s most densely populated city Dhaka, Bangladesh has a population density of 115,000 people per square mile.
The second largest slum of Asia, Dharavi has a density of 717,780 people per square mile.
The world’s most populated country, China envisaged high growth in migration to urban cities and thus put in motion construction of metro cities in isolated pockets equipped with modern infrastructure, tall skyscrapers, parks, hospitals, supermarkets and everything else.
There are around 50 such cities that were created to provide better living conditions but unfortunately they have turned into nothing but ghost towns where people hardly live and huge roads have literally nobody on it and you can literally jog in the middle lane with your iPod.
The city of Ordos with state of the art infrastructure but no residents or Tianducheng which has a european style baroque architecture and Eiffel tower replica but mostly inhabited.
This demonstrate a stark contrast in the times we are living. Some people spend their life living in an area of less then 5 square meters, some people don’t have any housing at all and some cities which span couple of kilometres in area don’t have people to stay.
Most of these buildings are lying vacant for about a decade. We all have a limited life time and depriving anyone of a decent life is the biggest injustice to the concept of life. If these apartments would had been given to homeless people, they would have spent 10 years of happy and fulfilling life by now.
journey called life 