Informal Architecture and Urbanism

With more than half the world’s population living in urban areas which accounts for just under 3% of the world’s land mass, today’s cities face an ever evolving urban crisis. Hong Kong, renowned for its high density
urbanism, was culminated by its now demolished Kowloon Walled City. With living conditions similar to the notorious Walled City, today’s subdivided apartments, locally called ‘butchered flats’, are homes to some 200,000 people, accommodating families in crowded environments, which in some instances, are barely 10 square metres.
The culture of congestion with its spatial and programmatic juxtapositions of the Walled City have continued to manifest today in the city’s composite building typology such as Chungking Mansions and Mirador Mansion situated in Kowloon. With kungfu schools alongside travellers guesthouses, garment factories next to restaurants, private dwellings near social clubs, all occurring along a common corridor above ground, these buildings exhibit certain unexpected orders within apparent disorder. Here, seemingly opposing activities co-exist with legal, illegal, or even extralegal operations, with intricate business networks of various suppliers or retailers in the podium serving the ‘shop-houses’ within the tower above. This produces a sense of a dense ‘city within a building’, whereby the outside pervades the inside, the city enters into domesticity, public blurs with the private, collective contest with the individual, and informalities become formalized.
This paper seeks to re-examine Hong Kong’s composite building typology and its underlying informally-formal urban orders by mapping such unexpected ecologies to reveal the messy vitality of their invisible socio-economic networks within interiorized urban conglomerations. By interrogating these buildings in this manner we can further understand their potential to impact the way we perceive the city, as well as how they can productively foster these unexpected yet everyday practices.