Un-forgetting Walls by Lines on Maps: a Case Study on Property Rights, Cadastral Mapping, and the Landscape of the Kowloon Walled City

Abstract

This paper demonstrates that the framing of post-war Kowloon Walled City through photos has been dominated by the maps commonly used to represent this Chinese enclave in colonial Hong Kong as a place. Inspired by and extending Wylie’s (2009) argument that emptiness and presence are equally important, this paper uses basic GIS techniques and hitherto unpublished archival materials to help (a) argues that the colonial government’s mindset of clearly defining the spatial boundary of the city, which is a subtle admission of an officially and diplomatically denied otherness in ownership, created the city as a quasi-cadastral unit; and (b) explains how this shaped the framing of the landscape of the city by promoting investment and trade in high-rise housing development units. The government did not destroy its walls. When these were physically destroyed, it did not ignore the walls’ original alignments but treated the city as a planning unit, as if they still existed.