Pirate subdivided apartments in Hong Kong

These photos were taken by me when I went for a visit to these apartments in March 2007.

The conditions in these apartment are better than those in the caged housing, but you can see that it is not really that satisfactory. In these settlements, one apartment with one bathroom and a kitchen is ususally shared by about 10 families. These families, with an average of 3 - 4 people, live in rooms smaller than 10 sq m. Most of these rooms do not have any windows and air conditioning devices. The living conditions are very poor. A lot of the inhabitants are immigrants from mainland China. Some of them could even be illegal immigrants. They came here not to find job, but to get the Hong Kong citizenship. It is very strange because a lot of these immigrants actually live a much better live back in mainland China. Without the citizenship, they cannot actually work in Hong Kong. Therefore I believe the shift in population is more related to the political interest of people.

After reading Mike Davis' , I couldn;t help but ask myself if these could also be called slums, or are they merely low-income housing.

The facade of these buildings would look something like this:

You can see the density of the building and also the additional (illegal) structures that were added in the facade of the building. In fact there was a time that people live illegally at the rooftop houses. I think Davis also mentioned this type of housing in HK somewhere in his book.