"Remembering Hong Kong's Kowloon Walled City, The Lawless Outpost that Was Once the Most Densely-Populated Place on Earth"

There is some truth to the argument that population density is one of the reasons New York is experiencing such a disaster with Covid-19 and as we saw in April 1's "Corona, Queens Is NYC's Epicenter Of Coronavirus Outbreak" the neighborhood of Corona was at that time the epicenter of the epicenter.

And it is true that Corona's population density is quite high at something like 80,000 per square mile. But it is also true that the comorbidities will get you too. The Hispanic-majority and black population that makes up Corona is more susceptible to obesity and diabetes than the population of the adjoining Asian-majority neighborhood of Flushing (density 54,000 per square mile), see link below* for other differences but for now we'll leave that as our jumping-off point to Flashbak, April 23, 2020:

Remembering Kowloon Walled City, The Lawless Outpost that Was Once the Most Densely-Populated Place on Earth

In 1987, an administrative decision to demolish the city was made, undergoing a multiphase process to its completion in 1993.

A staple of dystopian sci-fi and space opera, the lawless city—teeming with refugees, runaways, smugglers, and all sorts of industrious types going about their business—has many real-life analogues. There are the anarchist pirate collectives of legend: Libertatia, most notably, a 17th-century Madagascar colony led by Captain Mission and featuring centrally in William S. Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night and Ghost of Chance. Such places were said to be built on proto-communist principles. Fiercely anti-slavery, anti-monarchy, and anti-markets, the pirate colony “looks backward to the medieval commune and forward to the withering away of the state,” wrote A.L. Morton in The English Utopia.

Perhaps at the other end of the libertarian spectrum, there is Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, torn down in the early ‘90s but for almost forty years a thriving experiment in unregulated, stateless free markets. In his mid-nineties Bridge Trilogy, William Gibson looked back to the just-demolished Kowloon Walled City—reconstructed in a virtual simulation—to see the future. It was “an outlaw place,” he writes in Idoru. “And more and more people crowded in; they built it up, higher. No rules, just building, just people living. Police wouldn’t go there. Drugs and whores and gambling. But people living too. Factories, restaurants. A city. No laws.”

Kowloon Walled City “began as a Chinese military outpost,” writes Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan at Gizmodo, “and emerged as a kind of no-man’s-land when England leased Hong Kong in 1898. The Japanese razed the site during World War II, and after the surrender, it became a magnet for refugees when neither England nor China wanted to deal with the burgeoning, ungoverned community.” From a steady stream of inhabitants pouring in during the late 1940s and 50s, a squatter village grew into a thriving 6.4-acre city with 33,000 residents,** the most densely populated area in the world.

Having nowhere else to go, residents, built up, points out Atlas Obscura, in an excerpt from James Crawford’s Fallen Glory: The Lives and Deaths of History’s Greatest Buldings, constructing 350 towers, “almost all between 10 and 14 stories high,” the upper limit determined by the nearby airport.

The city’s many tall, narrow tower blocks were packed tight against each other—so tight as to make the whole place seem like one massive structure: part architecture, part organism. There was little uniformity of shape, height, or building material. Cast-iron balconies lurched against brick annexes and concrete walls. Wiring and cables covered every surface: running vertically from ground level up to forests of rooftop television aerials, or stretching horizontally like innumerable rolls of dark twine that seemed almost to bind the buildings together. Entering the city meant leaving daylight behind. There were hundreds of alleyways, most just a few feet wide. Some routes cut below buildings, while other tunnels were formed by the accumulation of refuse tossed out of windows and onto wire netting strung between tower blocks. Thousands of metal and plastic water pipes ran along walls and ceilings, most of them leaking and corroded. As protection against the relentless drips that fell in the alleyways, a hat was standard issue for the city’s postman. Many residents chose to use umbrellas.

Triad-run opium dens, drug markets, and brothels thrived, but so too did dentists and butchers and a factory that made rubber plungers, founded and operated by just two men....

....MUCH MORE
*Early Precautions Draw a Life-and-Death Divide Between Flushing and Corona

**In comparison to 33,000 people in 6.4 acres for Kowloon Walled City, Corona's 57,658 are spread across a rather spacious 462 acres giving it a density of 124.6 inhabitants per acre.
For further comparison, Manhattan's Yorkville neighborhood on the Upper East Side comes in at 244.2 per acre, 156,300/square mile.

https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/census2010/t_pl_p5_nta.pdf