Hi everyone,

Before this Youtube channel, I never had the opportunity to delve into a single topic for months at a time OR get first hand experience by visiting places. There's things I'm learning now that I didn't fully grasp when I was an architect. So I am so grateful for that. I have a newsletter, where I share some of my findings.. You can sign up here: https://www.damilee.com/pages/newsletter

By the way, this video had a lot of abstract concepts.. and just in case it was lost through all the music and cinematography, I just want to put it down here.

Ok. What is a ghost?

It’s not just the buildings, it’s not just the people. I believe it's the arrangement of people in that specific space. It’s the social fabric - memories, relationships, a spirit that gets built over years and years of crossing the same corridor every day. The shop you stop by on your way to work. The neighbour you say hi to at the same time every morning. This arrangement gets passed down through the generations, one interaction at a time.

But buildings age, and land under buildings become more valuable. And we’re constantly dealing with a housing crisis. So of course, we want to rebuild or at least change the use into something more commercially viable and save the shell. But even if you save the shell, or rebuild the same shell perfectly, you could still lose the ghost. Even if you bring back the same tenants, over the timespan of construction, that social fabric is broken. On the other hand, there are instances where the ghost can survive even after losing every piece of its original material, as long as the arrangement is gets carried. I can talk about this in another video someday.

The thing that makes this challenging is that the ghost has no number. Units per hectare has a number. Value per square foot has a number. Neighbours who've known each other fifty years.. doesn't. So it never shows up in the spreadsheet. Which means nobody ever decides to destroy a community. It's just one old building that wasn't up to code. Or not maximizing on its potential value. But that's how a city turns into a shell.. one totally reasonable decision at a time.

Don told me that when his colleagues surveyed residents who'd already been relocated, who actually agreed to the relocation for better quality housing, most only understood what they'd lost AFTER they were gone. They'd never had the words to describe what they had.

This happens all the time. But maybe the first step comes from putting a word to these things and understanding the real value of things like heritage, community, identity.. these elusive things that’s hard to put to words... Because if we can’t talk about them, through natural forces of profit and efficiency, they will simply disappear over time.

Raf here, filmmaker of the channel. Thank you so much to our amazing CyBerPunK team: Pablo, Wisdom, Felipe, Lucas, Mehmet, David and Sindy

About Motoko, her eyes intentionally remained unblinking many times, as the director’s intention was to portray her as a “doll.”
Dami makes you notice how Hong Kong’s architecture gives Ghost in the Shell its haunting atmosphere. Absolutely fascinating, with stunning shots and editing, and a great opening shot with the plane. Great video, Dami!

The first 10 sec of this video with the plane flying over was an EXCELLENET shot.

I think that the reason why there's so little drive for preservation in HK is because, like you've mentioned based on your interviews & observations, 'efficiency & profit'. The people involved in such communities were stuffed into that single & very limited space largely by circumstances, driven again, by efficiency & profit.

Few if any among them see & appreciate how unique that resulting way of life they've carved out for themselves, & while they do like or at least sufficiently tolerate being in such a community, they ultimately feel little to no attachment to any of it. They're still driven by the very same effiency & profit mindset that drove them to build such of way of life in the first place, & they just want better, more comfortable lives for themselves & their future generations. In short, while they may see value & beauty in their current way of life, they in general don't see it as something worth preserving.

So, the question of whether people will regret seeing such architecture & community being torn down, in about 100 or 1000 years from now. Well, people being people, i dare say a lotta them would lament the loss & some bit of longing for simpler times, but will these people in the future, be willing to replace their current, supposedly more comfortable lives with those from a time where people struggled just to eke out a semi-decent living, for most of them, not a chance!

Turning an abstract idea into something tangible. That's the definition of Dami's channel. Storytelling and the essence of it.

Manufacturing in Hong Kong pre-1990 is so interesting. Some goods were branded as "Empire Made" for the UK market, as if to disguise their Asian origins.

I really liked the idea that the things that make a city feel alive are often the exact things that don’t make sense on a spreadsheet. Efficiency can improve a city, but if you optimize everything too much, eventually you start optimizing away the things that gave it an identity in the first place. The Ghost in the Shell comparison tied that together really well.

Atsuko Tanaka (Japanese voice actress for Major Motoko Kusanaji) passed away in Aug 2024. Always makes me sad when I think of Ghost in the Shell, was a big part of my childhood.

In 2009, I took an elective course at Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas called "Ciudades Imaginarias" — roughly, Cities in the Cultural Imagination. A big part of it was watching films and analyzing how cities function not just as settings, but almost as characters themselves — how architecture, history and urban space become essential parts of the story. Your videos often remind me of that course, and this one in particular brought it all back. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy your content so much.

@15:24 interestingly that building you walked through used to be housing provided to Royal Hong Kong police officers and their families. It's been retired as housing and turned into a kind of public space where young entrepreneurs can open shops or stalls. When I visited there were jewelry shops, food shops even breweries.

Hong Kong native and now living in Canada, this video really captures the place I used to call home. Well done!

24:20 A small nuance with Ghost in the Shell. The team Motoko is a part of, Section 9, has a mostly human member in the form of Togusa. His outside the box skills and human variations keeps the team from being too homogenised. Even Ghost in the Shell series sees the importance of intangible soft values.

7:12 that ignores the economic production side of the equation. When that family was running a butcher shop out of there they were buying local meat from a local farm they were carrying it up above they were selling it below and they were taking that money and spending it on other local shops. It's an economic feedback loop that was not replaced with something equivalent

I visited Hong Kong in the early 2010s, after reading about it, in all places, a Shadowrun sourcebook. I read up on it further, and was captivated. So when my friend invited me to Japan to be the best man at his wedding, I decided to take a detour beforehand, two weeks in Hong Kong. It was everything I had envisioned, and SO MUCH MORE. I stayed in Chung King Mansions, and just explored for those two weeks. It was amazing. I'd love to go back, but sadly I've developed claustrophobia, so I don't know that I could. :(

You did it again! Last year, I told you I introduced my friends ' elementary school daughter to your channel; well, she introduced her friends, and they lobe it!
You're helping to educate and prepare the generations that will be fixing the problems, and bettering the world.
Keep it up!

Another cool 90s anime that would be interesting to see explored is Evangelion with Tokyo-3's collapsable skyscrapers and the GeoFront. It's a city turned into a bunker.

To be honest, this channel is too good for Youtube. The production value is far beyond anything else on this platform.

14:22 Hong Kong Architecture influences Ridley Scotts Blade Runner which influences Norman Foster which influences Hong Kong Architecture.

An incredible anime based on a time in an incredible city.