Firstly, to make a critical Marxist position clear: it is undeniably a defining feature of the contemporary commodity form and the popular bourgeois ideology and epistemological framework to systematically break and fragment the totality of urban experiences into disconnected and ‘unhistorical’ or even ‘ahistorical’ pieces. Therefore, the Kowloon Walled City (1898-1994) was not a cyberpunk aesthetic, nor was it a dystopian playground. It was a material consequence of imperialism, uneven development and state abandonment under capitalism. Yet, today, that is what the site has become in its posthumous existence. Kowloon emerged from a colonial contradiction: a Chinese enclave caught inside British Hong Kong, legally ambiguous and politically neglected. In that vacuum, thousands of working-class people built a life, not because they were “free,” but because they were excluded. Informal labour sustained the space: food production, small workshops, unlicensed medical practices, repair economies – survival under conditions of dispossession. When the site was demolished in 1994, conveniently ahead of the 1997 handover, over 30,000 residents were displaced in the name of “order.” The enclave was subsequently labelled a “blackspot.” Capital and the state collaborated to erase the embarrassment, and in its place now sits a pleasant garden park. But I want to identify an important dialectical twist: destruction didn’t end the site’s productivity. It simply shifted it into the cultural sphere, and cinema and gaming resurrected it. Films like Johnny Mak’s Long Arm of the Law (1984) turned the Walled City into a mythic crime labyrinth. Franchises like Kowloon's Gate (1997, 2017) reanimated it as a spiritual imbalance to be corrected. Stray (2022) converted its particularities into a posthuman neon playground of robots and affective melancholy. The labouring poor conveniently vanished; a manufactured atmosphere remained.

This is why I aim to push back against a purely hauntological, post-modern reading of sites of dispossession: slums, favelas, unregulated urban housing, and so on. Derrida’s conception of ghosts is undeniably aesthetically seductive. However, capitalism doesn’t need ghosts, nor are ‘ghosts’ concrete or materially relevant to the urgency of class analysis. In the VR game Welcome to Kowloon (2023), players descend into grime, puzzle through decay, and experience alienation as horror. What we are, in turn, witnessing is the fetishism of statelessness, i.e., a community forced into legal ambiguity becomes, in retrospect, a projection of idealist anarchic freedom or exotic ruin. The commodity form strips away labour and preserves texture: Pipes drip dirty water… Neon lights flicker… But the relations of production are ignored. Even more troubling is how Kowloon circulates globally as shorthand for “Asian dystopia,” feeding into Western anxieties about density, disorder and the so-called failure of collectivism while quietly obscuring the role of colonial capitalism in reproducing the very conditions being aestheticised. Therefore, I attest that the digital ‘afterlife’ reveals something crucial about our present. Capital can metabolise even its own failures, turning sites of abandonment into immersive commodities. If the Walled City and other similarly dysfunctional, ‘dystopian’ environments haunts us, it is not because it was spectral, but because we continue to refuse to confront the material antagonisms that built it, and instead elect to wander its ruins as (pacified) consumers.

Kowloon Walled City as de jure retrospective: digitising and mythologising statelessness by Majorca Bateman-Coe (The University of Minnesota, USA) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 33

Majorca Bateman-Coe is in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society at The University of Minnesota, USA

urbanism digitisation posthuman gaming spatial reconstruction