News Desk
PUERTO GELANG, Malaysia — On the southern tip of Malaysia, towers of glass and steel rise from reclaimed land, their outlines shimmering against the tropical sky. Forest City was meant to be a utopia: a USD 80 billion mega-project designed by China’s Country Garden, promising eco-friendly living, waterparks, golf courses, and homes for 700,000 residents.
Today, fewer than 10,000 people live here. Streets are quiet, shops shuttered, and the hum of traffic never arrived. “It feels like living in a movie set,” said one resident, gesturing toward empty boulevards lined with palm trees. “Everything is here — except the people.”
Forest City is not an anomaly. Across China, dozens of “ghost cities” stand as monuments to speculative ambition and the hazards of rapid urbanization.
- Ordos, Inner Mongolia (Kangbashi District): Planned for a million residents, it boasts grand cultural centres and wide boulevards. Yet only a fraction of its apartments are occupied.
- Yujiapu, Tianjin: Marketed as “China’s Wall Street,” complete with replicas of Manhattan landmarks. Skyscrapers rise, but offices remain empty.
- Chenggong, Yunnan: Designed as the new administrative capital for Kunming, but its vast housing blocks remain largely vacant.
- Nanhui New City, Shanghai: Built for 800,000, but only about 100,000 live there. Futuristic planning meets sparse reality.
- Lanzhou New Area, Gansu: A western development hub envisioned for millions, but demand never matched supply.
“These cities are not failures of architecture,” said Li Zhang, an urban studies scholar at Beijing University. “They are failures of planning — built on the assumption that people would come simply because the buildings existed.”
For Beijing, these projects were not just real estate ventures but economic stimulus. After the 2008 financial crisis, infrastructure spending became a tool to sustain growth. Property, meanwhile, became the favoured investment vehicle for China’s middle class. Developers built, local governments approved, and banks lent — often with little regard for whether people would come.
But demographics are shifting. China’s population is aging, rural migration has slowed, and speculative bubbles have burst. The result: cities built for tomorrow that remain empty today.
“Urbanization was treated as a guarantee,” said Minxin Pei, a political scientist. “But the guarantee expired when the population curve bent downward.”
Forest City was meant to be different — a showcase of Chinese development abroad, tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. Yet its fate mirrors that of Ordos and Yujiapu. When Beijing tightened capital controls in 2017, Chinese buyers vanished. Without them, the dream of a bustling metropolis collapsed into a landscape of empty towers.
The phenomenon of empty cities is not unique to China. History offers parallels:
- Detroit, United States: Once the beating heart of the automobile industry, its population fell from 1.8 million in 1950 to under 700,000 today, leaving vast neighbourhoods abandoned.
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates: In the wake of the 2008 crash, half-finished skyscrapers dotted the desert skyline, reminders of speculative excess.
- Spanish Housing Bubble (2000s): Entire developments stood empty after the financial crisis, their villas and apartments unsold.
“Ghost cities are the ruins of modern capitalism,” said Saskia Sassen, a sociologist. “They are not ancient ruins, but contemporary ones — built too fast, too ambitiously, and without the lifeblood of community.”
They reveal the tension between ambition and reality, between the desire to project modernity and the limits of human settlement. They are reminders that cities are not just concrete and steel — they are people, and without them, even the grandest skyline is a ghost.
As one Forest City resident put it: “We live in a city that was built for the future. But the future never came.”
