[ By WebUrbanist in Global & Travel & Places. ]
These hidden shanty towns, often invisible from the streets below, sprawl like surrealist suburbs across the roofs of one of the most densely-populated and expensive cities in the world.
The book Portraits From Above meticulously documents a series of such informal micro-villages in Hong Kong with photographs, detailed diagrams and stories of life inside these illicit rooftop communities.
While the dwellings are unconventional in shape, the book’s drawings are almost deceptively refined, capturing the chaos in clean black-on-white architectural lines.
Ad hoc architecture at its strangest, these structures are not governed by building codes or compliance issues. Found materials from sheet metal and scrap wood to discarded plastic and broken brick shape home walls and the narrow halls between homes.
Naturally, one downside of such unplanned habitats are the series of power and waste management issues that go with the territory.
Despite living on the fringes – or perhaps because their shared connection – there are strong social ties between rooftop dwellers, and they were welcoming to the authors of this book, Stefan Canham and Rufina Wu, who sought to learn more about how people live in such offbeat accommodations. In many ways, too, these mini-cities are like smaller expressions of larger-scale phenomenon like the nearby but now-demolished Kowloon Walled City.
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[ By WebUrbanist in Global & Travel & Places. ]
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