In the cinematic world of Pete Travis’ dystopian cyberpunk film DREDD (2012), the Peach Trees megablock housing project is more than a setting — it’s a concrete colossus that functions simultaneously as a city-state, a tomb, a prison, and a vertical battlefield. The Peach Trees setting is not unique.
Across film, games, comics, and real-world architecture, cities often function not as passive settings but as active antagonists, shaping behavior, enforcing class divisions, and intensifying systemic violence. From the suffocating corridors of Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, a former military compound, to the neon sprawls of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and the stratified ruins of Hironobu Sakaguchi’s Final Fantasy video games series, these environments don’t just reflect the worlds they house; they control them. DREDD may unfold within a single building, but that building is a microcosm of how power, poverty, and architecture intertwine to brutal effect.
Once one of the densest and most anarchic human settlements on Earth, Kowloon Walled City was a lawless enclave of interconnected buildings, makeshift rooms, and narrow, dimly lit corridors. Over 30,000 people lived within a few city blocks, with minimal infrastructure and no clear legal oversight. Despite the chaos, it operated with a strange internal order, much like DREDD’s Peach Trees, where the Ma-Ma clan rules with brutal efficiency in the absence of state control.
The City as Character: Dystopian Urban Landscapes in Cinema
Peach Trees isn’t just influenced by Kowloon Walled City — it also echoes other dystopian cities that act as characters in their own right. From the glittering decay of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), to the shifting dreamscapes of Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998), to the neon-lit sprawl of Ghost in the Shell’s (Rupert Sanders, 2017) Hong Kong and Blade Runner’s Tokyo–LA hybrid, these films depict cities not merely as backdrops, but as living systems: oppressive, seductive, unknowable. They sprawl endlessly or compress vertically, swallowing their inhabitants into labyrinths of class stratification, surveillance, or spiritual dislocation.
DREDD, with its brutalist concrete and stratified floors, belongs to this lineage. This story is not just about the cop, Judge Dredd (Karl Urban); it’s about the building. Peach Trees is a total environment: a ghetto in the sky where light barely filters through, stairwells are war zones, and every floor is a microclimate of fear. The building serves as both a setting and an antagonist, shaping the story’s tone and action.
Chungking Mansions: The Real-World Labyrinth
Closer to the present and more grounded in reality than Kowloon’s vanished walls or DREDD’s fictional fortress, Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong offers a sprawling urban microcosm that evokes many of the same themes. Unlike Kowloon Walled City’s collapse under its own density, Chungking Mansions thrives as a chaotic, multicultural hub — part hostel, part bazaar, part shadow economy.
The building is a jumble of currency exchange stalls, cheap eateries, souvenir shops, drug dealers, and hawkers selling everything from counterfeit watches to electronics. Its many floors bustle with backpackers, migrant workers, traders, and locals, creating a volatile blend of cultures and economies.
Despite the grime and discomfort, Chungking Mansions is a vital artery in the city’s global network, a place where informal commerce and human desperation coexist. It’s a vertical city within a city: a sprawling nightmare that, like Peach Trees, blurs the lines between home, market, and battleground. Its open central atrium offers a rare break of light and space amidst the claustrophobia, unlike Kowloon’s pitch-black corridors, but it also functions as a social theater where life unfolds amid tension and uneasy coexistence.
Vertical Living and Class Stratification
The fictional Peach Trees isn’t just architecture — it’s a social diagram. Those who live within its structure are not the elite. They’re the forgotten, criminalized, and impoverished. Peach Trees, like many of DREDD‘s Mega-City One’s towers, is a vertical slum disguised as a self-contained ecosystem. Everything is stacked — people, services, power — and at the top sits Ma-Ma (Lena Headey), the gang matriarch who controls everything that moves within Peach Trees.
DREDD‘s vertical hierarchy mirrors the class divisions of Chungking Mansions. There, rooms may go for as low as $10–20 a night, but at a cost: cramped spaces barely large enough to stretch your legs, dim corridors, the occasional cockroach, and the unending hum of overpopulation. It is not for the comfort-seeker. It is for the backpacker, the migrant worker, the vendor, the hustler — the desperate.
Comfort is a luxury in places like Chungking Mansions. Air conditioning rattles. Sheets are damp. The walls are often so thin that neighbors’ arguments — or snores—become lullabies. This isn’t a hotel. It’s survival housing.
In both Chungking Mansions and Peach Trees, the design reflects the economic truth. There is no aesthetic flourish, only the drive to compress as many lives as possible into as little space as possible. Residents adapt, but they do not thrive. Just like the fictional citizens of Mega-City One, the real people living in Chungking Mansions are policed, surveilled, and forgotten all at once.
RoboCop and the Architecture of Collapse
Few films convey systemic urban decay as sharply as Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987). Early in the film, Peter Weller’s Officer Murphy — still fully human — joins a high-speed pursuit through a hollowed-out Detroit, tracking Clarence Boddicker’s (Kurtwood Smith) gang through industrial ruins. The chase is gritty, chaotic, and ends in Murphy’s brutal execution — echoing DREDD’s early pursuit scene on motorcycle, where law enforcement feels simultaneously hyper-empowered and powerless.
Both sequences showcase not only criminal violence but also infrastructural entropy. The cities themselves are hostile; their geography enables collapse. In RoboCop, Murphy’s death leads to rebirth as a cybernetic enforcer, a privatized instrument of law for a city abandoned by civic protection. Like Judge Dredd, he enforces order with lethal precision. However, where Judge Dredd remains a fixed symbol of state authority, RoboCop’s arc is one of slow, painful reclamation of selfhood in a system that suppresses it.
The physical city in RoboCop mirrors the stratification of DREDD’s Peach Trees. Corporate towers — like OCP’s headquarters in RoboCop — loom high above, while the ground-level is left to gang rule and infrastructural neglect. These places aren’t just cities in decline. They are dystopias in motion, decaying from the inside out.
Authority in the Crowd: Firetrucks, Judges, and the Passive Spectator
In DREDD, the Judges are the agents of swift, absolute justice — meant to bring control. Inside Peach Trees, where crime operates as a parallel authority, even a Judge is swallowed by the building. The tower is a body, and Ma-Ma is its nervous system. Dredd isn’t a savior — he’s a foreign agent, a virus.
This dynamic mirrors the uneasy balance of control in places like Chungking Mansions. Firetrucks or police may arrive not because order prevails, but because emergencies force action. When something happens, no one intervenes. They watch. Because there’s nowhere to go. Too many people. Too few exits. Movement itself is constrained.
Chungking Mansions especially feels like a fire hazard. Twisting staircases go on seemingly forever. Elevators crawl between countless stops. Even police are bound by the building’s scale and slowness. Authority exists here, but it is outpaced by architecture. It doesn’t matter who you are. The building sets the terms.
Hostile Buildings on Screen: High-Rise, Shivers, The Raid, and More
The tradition of hostile buildings — self-contained vertical ecosystems that descend into chaos — stretches far beyond DREDD and Kowloon Walled City. In Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise (2015), the tower’s sleek architecture becomes a crucible for class warfare. The wealthy reside in glass-walled luxury at the top while the poor rot below. The building becomes a literal hierarchy of power and decay.
David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975) uses a similar high-rise as a sealed-off lab for infection and breakdown. A parasitic disease spreads floor by floor, turning its residents into primal, sex-driven aggressors, a metaphor for society unraveling inside a modernist box.
The brutal floor-by-floor combat of Gareth Evans’ The Raid (2011) parallels DREDD’s vertical warfare. A police unit assaults a criminal stronghold in a towering Jakarta apartment block. Each level becomes deadlier; every floor, a fight.
Even disaster films like The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin, 1974) and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) transform skyscrapers into battlegrounds and death traps. In Joe Dante’s Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), a sleek corporate skyscraper becomes a carnival of absurdity; a modernist satire of design, automation, and chaos.
Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s anime Wicked City (1987) takes the dystopian city to supernatural extremes. Its version of Tokyo — split between the human world and the demon dimension — becomes a place where the city itself is alive, mutating, deceiving. It’s sex, horror, and noir rendered through architecture.
DREDD, Peach Trees, and the Architecture of Oppression
At the heart of this conversation stands DREDD’s Peach Trees — a brutal megastructure that transcends its physical form to become a character in itself. It doesn’t just contain conflict; it generates it. This building doesn’t house lives; it swallows them.
DREDD distills the vertical nightmare into a single day of violence, hierarchy, and survival. Its stacked floors become layers of fear. Its walls, boundaries of power. Its absence of light reflects the absence of hope.
By turning architecture into antagonist, DREDD shows how space can control behavior, crush autonomy, and reflect systemic collapse. Peach Trees isn’t a location. It’s a weapon.
So the legacy of urban dystopias endures, because it mirrors the world we increasingly occupy. In these concrete tombs and neon labyrinths, survival is navigation, and control is never neutral. Whether climbing up or spiraling down, the architecture always wins.