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.
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.