Forest City is a vast, Chinese-developed urban project built on four artificial islands of reclaimed land in the Johor Strait, in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor, just across the water from Singapore. Launched in 2015 by the Chinese developer Country Garden in partnership with a Johor state-linked entity, it was marketed as a futuristic ‘smart’ and ‘green’ city — vertical gardens climbing residential towers, cars routed underground, and a planned population of roughly 700,000 people. Headline figures described a total planned investment on the order of $100 billion over decades, making it one of the most ambitious private city-building ventures in the world.
The project’s fatal vulnerability was hidden in its sales model: it was aimed overwhelmingly at mainland Chinese buyers looking for property near Singapore, rather than at the local Malaysian market. In 2017 Beijing tightened capital controls on overseas property purchases, abruptly choking off the flow of the very buyers Forest City had been built for. The COVID-19 pandemic then sealed borders just as the project needed momentum, and Country Garden’s own deepening debt crisis — part of the broader Chinese property downturn — left the developer fighting for survival rather than completing a city.
The result was a striking emptiness. Glossy towers, shopping arcades, and a beach promenade stood largely unused, with only a small fraction of the intended population in residence — around 9,000 people were reported living there around 2023, roughly a tenth of even the first-phase target, with later estimates rising toward 15,000-20,000 by 2025-2026. International coverage dubbed it a ‘ghost city,’ its manicured but quiet streets a monument to a single-market bet that went wrong.
Malaysia has since tried to repurpose the project rather than let it stagnate. In 2024 the government announced plans to turn Forest City into a Special Financial Zone, dangling tax incentives — including a notably low corporate tax rate for qualifying firms and breaks for skilled workers — to attract businesses and give the half-empty city an economic reason to exist beyond foreign residential speculation. Whether that pivot succeeds remains open, but Forest City already stands as a leading modern example of how dependence on one country’s buyers and one policy regime can strand an entire city.
Seseña is a small municipality in the province of Toledo, about 35 km south of Madrid, that became one of the most quoted symbols of Spain’s housing bubble. On the town’s edge, the promoter Francisco Hernando — universally known by his nickname ‘El Pocero,’ the well-digger, a reference to his rise from rural poverty and manual labor — laid out an entirely new neighborhood called El Quiñón. The plan was audacious in its bluntness: rank after rank of near-identical mid-rise apartment blocks, planned for on the order of 13,500 dwellings, dropped onto former agricultural land with the expectation that Madrid’s overheated property market would simply spill south and fill them.
For a few years the bet looked like genius. Spain’s mid-2000s boom ran on cheap mortgages, a construction frenzy, and a near-universal belief that home prices could only rise. Hernando became a tabloid figure — a self-made magnate with a private jet and a taste for spectacle — and El Quiñón was sold as affordable homeownership for ordinary Madrileños priced out of the capital. Then the 2008 crash arrived almost exactly as the first blocks were completing. Credit froze, demand evaporated, and the development became a national emblem of overbuilding: long terracotta-and-yellow façades fronting empty streets, with only a few thousand units occupied, no finished metro, sparse schools and shops, and at one point reports of the developer feuding with the local water utility.
What makes Seseña instructive is what happened next. Unlike a remote prestige tower, El Quiñón sat within commuting distance of a genuine, growing metropolis. As the worst of the crisis passed and as Madrid’s own housing became steadily more expensive and scarce through the 2010s, the deeply discounted Seseña apartments slowly found buyers and renters. Bus links and basic services improved, families moved in, and the once-derelict blocks acquired the unglamorous ordinariness of a real commuter suburb.
By the mid-2020s the recovery was striking. The municipality of Seseña reported on the order of 30,900 registered residents by 2025, transformed by Madrid’s acute housing shortage into a place where supply that had once been a punchline became a relief valve. Seseña remains a cautionary tale about building far ahead of demand and services — but also a rare case where time, proximity, and falling prices eventually absorbed the glut rather than leaving it to rot.
In the hills of Bolu Province in northwestern Turkey, near the historic town of Mudurnu, the Sarot Group — a venture of the Istanbul construction entrepreneurs the Yerdelen brothers — began raising one of the strangest landscapes in modern real estate: hundreds of nearly identical miniature French-style châteaux, each three storeys high with steep grey turrets and tidy balconies, marching in dense, repetitive rows across a valley fed by natural thermal springs. Marketed under the name Burj Al Babas, the gated estate was conceived as a luxury second-home community complete with a planned spa and leisure facilities, aimed largely at affluent Gulf buyers seeking a cool, green Turkish retreat.
The project’s economics rested on cloning at scale. By replicating a single château design across a planned 732 villas — priced roughly between $370,000 and $530,000 each — the developer aimed to deliver an instantly recognizable ‘fairy-tale’ enclave quickly and cheaply, with a total investment cited around $200 million. Early sales were brisk, with roughly half the units reportedly presold, many to buyers in Kuwait. Around 587 villas were built before the model collapsed. The result, photographed and shared around the world, was uncanny: street after street of identical pointed-roof palaces, none of them occupied, looking less like a neighborhood than a film set glitching across a hillside.
The collapse came as Turkey’s currency crisis struck in 2018, when the lira plunged in value, construction costs climbed and the financing math fell apart while demand from the Gulf — the narrow buyer pool the project had staked everything on — softened. The developer sought concordat protection from its creditors in 2018, and a court declared the company bankrupt that November; a year later, in 2019, the bankruptcy was reversed after roughly half the debt was discharged and permission was granted to resume work. But construction never meaningfully restarted, and the rows of half-finished châteaux stood empty.
In the years since, Burj Al Babas has become a global shorthand for stalled luxury speculation. Its very design — the mass repetition meant to make it efficient — made it almost impossible to salvage, and its legal afterlife has been tangled: a 2022 ruling reportedly found the group ‘comfortably in credit,’ while a fraud trial later targeted Sarot executives over sales that allegedly continued even after bankruptcy protection. In 2024 the matter reached the highest levels, with Kuwait’s emir raising aggrieved buyers’ complaints with Turkey’s president and the Yerdelen and Sarot companies placed under a Turkish state fund. Through it all the eerie, uniform ghost estate has gained no meaningful occupancy.
When the New South China Mall opened in 2005 in the manufacturing city of Dongguan, in China’s Pearl River Delta, it claimed a superlative few shopping centers ever attempt — the largest mall on Earth by gross leasable area. Spread across a total area of roughly 892,000 square meters, with almost 660,000 square meters of leasable space and room for as many as 2,350 retail units, it dwarfed almost every comparable development in the world. Its developer wrapped the colossus in spectacle: seven zones themed on global cities and regions — Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Venice, Egypt, the Caribbean and California — together with a 25-meter replica Arc de Triomphe, a copy of St. Mark’s bell tower, a 2.1-kilometer canal plied by gondolas, and an amusement park with a roller coaster. The bet was that Dongguan, one of the densest concentrations of factories on the planet, would supply a torrent of shoppers to match the scale.
The torrent never came. Within a few years of opening the mall had become the global emblem of the ‘dead mall’ — by 2008 more than 99% of its stores reportedly sat empty, and journalists and documentary crews filmed echoing corridors, shuttered storefronts and idle fairground rides. The problem was not the building’s grandeur but its placement and its market: it had been raised on former farmland on the urban fringe, poorly connected to the city center and to mass transit, and although it had been pitched at affluent shoppers from nearby Guangzhou and Shenzhen, its actual surroundings were dominated by low-wage migrant factory workers who lacked both the disposable income and the leisure habits the project’s economics assumed.
The mall’s fortunes turned only after a change of ownership and direction. Control passed to the Founder Group, a division of Peking University, and a long process of renovation and rebranding — accelerating around 2015 and again from 2019 — repositioned the complex away from high-end retail toward family entertainment, food, services and experience-driven attractions. CNN reported in 2015 that large sections were filling with shops, restaurants and entertainment venues, and by 2020 China Times put occupancy at around 91%, with management projecting close to 98% the following year. The transformation made the New South China Mall one of the most-cited examples of a ‘dead mall’ that came back to life.
Yet the revival is partial rather than total. Footage and reporting from 2024 continued to show large vacant areas, particularly on upper floors, even as ground-level retail thrived — a gap that has led some observers to question management’s headline occupancy figures. The mall today functions as a busy, if uneven, regional destination: a working monument to both the perils of building far ahead of demand and the possibility, under the right operator and the right macroeconomic tailwinds, of eventually filling even the world’s most famous empty mall.
Goldin Finance 117, also known as the China 117 Tower, is a supertall skyscraper in Tianjin’s Xiqing District, rising to 597 meters with 128 storeys above ground — 117 of them designated for offices, a hotel, and commercial use, which gives the building its name. Designed by Hong Kong’s P&T Group and developed by the Hong Kong-listed Goldin group and its founder Pan Sutong, it broke ground in 2008–2009 as the soaring centerpiece of a new business and equestrian-themed district called Goldin Metropolitan.
The tower reached its full structural height — topping out — in September 2015, its slender, tapering ‘walking stick’ form capped by a multi-story diamond-shaped crown intended to house an atrium with a swimming pool and an observation deck. But beyond the frame, the building stalled. Its developer hit severe financial trouble in the wake of the June 2015 Chinese stock-market crash, and the costly work of cladding, fitting out the offices and hotel, and bringing the tower into service simply stopped, leaving one of the world’s tallest buildings standing unfinished and unoccupied.
For roughly a decade the 117 Tower became a global icon of arrested ambition — a fully formed supertall silhouette with no tenants and no opening date, dominating the Tianjin plain, and eventually certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s tallest unoccupied building. China’s later national curbs on supertall construction, including a 2021 ban on new buildings above 500 meters, further clouded any path to finishing or repurposing such an outsized structure.
The story turned in 2025, when a permit was reissued — to P&T Group and BGI Engineering Consultants — to finish the building, with a reported contract value of about 569 million yuan (roughly $78 million) and completion targeted for 2027. After nearly ten years as the world’s tallest unoccupied building, Goldin Finance 117 moved from emblem of stalled excess toward a possible, long-delayed completion.
Yujiapu is a purpose-built financial district in the Binhai New Area of Tianjin, a port city southeast of Beijing, explicitly modeled on Lower Manhattan and Rockefeller Center. Conceived in the late 2000s as the centerpiece of a wider Binhai growth push, it was meant to rise from a bend in the Hai River into a dense cluster of dozens of office towers that would rival the world’s great financial centers and anchor a new economic engine for northern China.
The district was financed largely through local-government borrowing and state-linked developers, and built far ahead of any demonstrated demand from banks, brokerages, and trading firms. As China’s growth cooled and the costs of the broader Binhai build-out mounted, Yujiapu became a national symbol of overbuilding and local-government debt: by the mid-2010s many of its towers stood unfinished or finished-but-empty, their glass facades fronting wide, lightly used boulevards.
Unlike the spontaneous agglomeration of a real financial hub, Yujiapu was decreed top-down — supply was poured in first, in the hope that tenants would follow. A high-speed rail link, the Yujiapu railway station connecting to Beijing, and gradual completion of more towers brought partial life over time, but occupancy crept up slowly and never approached the dense, round-the-clock financial-center vision that justified the spending.
Into the 2020s Yujiapu has some completed and tenanted towers and functions as a real, if underused, business district, helped by incentives, relocations, and its rail connection. Yet it remains conspicuously short of its envisioned status as a Manhattan-on-the-Hai, a standing reminder that a skyline can be built but a financial economy cannot simply be copied.
Tianducheng is a residential development on the rural edge of Hangzhou, in Xingqiao Subdistrict of Linping District in Zhejiang province, built as a deliberate replica of Paris — complete with a roughly 108-meter scale model of the Eiffel Tower, Haussmann-style apartment blocks, formal French gardens, and fountains modeled on those at Versailles. Conceived by the Zhejiang Guangsha real-estate group during China’s mid-2000s property boom, it opened from around 2007 and was meant to sell European prestige to a fast-growing urban middle class.
For several years the project became one of the world’s most photographed ‘ghost towns.’ Though early plans envisioned roughly 10,000 initial residents, around 2013 foreign journalists and photographers documented near-empty boulevards, dark apartment windows, and a population estimated at only about 2,000 people scattered across an estate built to accommodate well over 100,000. The juxtaposition of a 108-meter Eiffel Tower rising over deserted French-style plazas turned Tianducheng into a global shorthand for China’s overbuilding — a copy of the City of Light with almost no one home.
Unlike many empty Chinese developments, Tianducheng’s story did not end there. As Hangzhou’s metropolitan area expanded outward, prices eased from their aspirational early levels and surrounding infrastructure filled in, residents gradually moved into the previously dark blocks. By around 2017 reporting described a far livelier suburb of roughly 30,000 people, with shops, schoolchildren, dog-walkers, and wedding photographers crowding the same squares that had once stood empty.
Today Tianducheng is generally no longer described as a ghost town but as an ordinary — if unusually themed — middle-class commuter suburb that doubles as a tourist curiosity. Its arc is often cited as a counterpoint to the assumption that every Chinese ‘ghost city’ is a permanent failure: given enough time, falling prices, transit, and the relentless growth of the host metropolis, even a kitschy faux-Paris can eventually be absorbed into a real city.
Kangbashi is a district of Ordos, a prefecture-level city in Inner Mongolia, China, built largely from scratch on the back of a coal-mining boom. Conceived as a gleaming new urban core away from the older Ordos settlement, it was laid out with broad avenues, monumental plazas, museums, theaters, and ranks of high-rise apartment blocks — infrastructure originally sized for around a million people. When international media descended around 2009 and 2010, however, they found the wide streets and apartment towers almost deserted, with only roughly 30,000 residents rattling around a city built for far more.
Those images made Kangbashi the world’s most famous ‘ghost city,’ a global shorthand for China’s habit of building urban districts far ahead of the people meant to fill them. Photographs of empty eight-lane boulevards, vacant plazas, and dark apartment windows circulated widely, and the district became the standard illustration in reporting on Chinese overbuilding and real-estate speculation. Vacancy was severe and persistent: years after completion, large shares of its newly built homes still stood empty.
Yet Kangbashi did not stay a ghost city. Over the following decade its population climbed steadily, reaching roughly 127,000 by the end of 2023 — still far below the original million-person ambition, but a transformation from the eerie emptiness of its early years. The slow filling was driven not by organic market demand alone but by deliberate policy: authorities relocated prestigious schools and government offices into the district, pulling families and workers in their wake.
Kangbashi today is a partly populated administrative and education hub rather than a true ghost town — a place that is genuinely lived-in but still oversized relative to its plans. It stands as the leading case study in how a Chinese ‘ghost city’ can gradually acquire residents, while also illustrating the real costs of the empty years in between: capital tied up, apartments dark, and infrastructure idling long before the population caught up.
The Sathorn Unique Tower is a 49-story, roughly 185-meter residential skyscraper standing abandoned in central Bangkok, near the Chao Phraya River and the Saphan Taksin area. Designed as a luxury condominium development during Thailand’s late-1980s and early-1990s property boom, it was left roughly 80% complete when financing evaporated in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It has stood ever since as a weathered concrete skeleton — its upper floors open to the sky, its unfinished balconies and bare columns visible for miles.
The building has become one of the most notorious abandoned skyscrapers in the world and is widely known as Bangkok’s ‘Ghost Tower.’ For years it drew urban explorers, photographers, and thrill-seekers who climbed its dark, exposed stairwells to reach the rooftop views over the city. Its eerie reputation was reinforced by accidents and by the discovery of a body inside the derelict structure in 2014, which deepened the local belief that the tower is haunted.
Unlike a building stalled in a remote location, the Ghost Tower sits in the middle of a dense, valuable urban district, which makes its decades of emptiness all the more striking. It is a near-finished high-rise — complete with its structural frame, floor plates, and much of its facade openings — that was never legally occupied and never generated a single resident.
The tower’s continued existence reflects a tangle of bankruptcy, ownership disputes, and the sheer cost of either finishing or demolishing such a large structure. Decades after the crash that stranded it, the Sathorn Unique remains neither completed nor torn down: an unfinished monument to a credit boom that ended abruptly, secured against trespassers but otherwise left to weather in place.