Healthcare Access in Kowloon Walled City

Kowloon Walled City was a former high-density urban enclave in Kowloon City, Hong Kong. It grew rapidly after the Second World War and was demolished in the early 1990s. The site was later redeveloped into Kowloon Walled City Park, but its history still raises questions about how people accessed care in a space that operated differently from the formal city around it. Informal dentistry developed during the Walled City’s postwar growth and final decades before demolition. Dental care there was shaped by geography: where the Walled City was located, how it was governed, and how people adapted to limited space. The area was connected enough to the wider city for patients to reach, but different enough from the formal city to allow unregistered dental clinics to grow.