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.
Kilamba — formally the Kilamba Kiaxi / Nova Cidade de Kilamba development — is a brand-new satellite city built on the dusty plains roughly 30 km outside Angola’s capital, Luanda. Constructed by the Chinese state-linked conglomerate CITIC and financed largely through oil-backed loans, its first phase comprised hundreds of pastel-colored apartment blocks, along with schools and retail space, designed to house something on the order of half a million people. It was the flagship of a post-civil-war reconstruction drive meant to ease Luanda’s severe housing shortage and to project an image of modern, oil-fueled progress.
When the first phase was largely completed around 2011-2012, however, Kilamba became internationally famous for the opposite reason: it was almost entirely empty. Reporting at the time described a vast, immaculate city with virtually no residents — by one widely cited figure, only around 220 of the first roughly 2,800 apartments offered for sale had found buyers a year after sales began. The reason was simple and brutal arithmetic: the units were priced far beyond what the overwhelming majority of Angolans could ever afford, in a country where most people lived on a few dollars a day and where the new flats were aimed at a tiny, salaried middle class that barely existed. The city had been built as a deliverable, not as a response to effective demand.
Faced with a showcase project standing dark, the Angolan government changed the economics rather than the buildings. From around 2013 it cut prices sharply and arranged subsidized, longer-term mortgage financing, deliberately lowering the threshold so that public-sector workers and middle-income families could move in. The intervention worked where the original pricing had failed: residents arrived steadily, schools and shops came to life, and the empty boulevards filled.
By 2023 Kilamba had reached near-full occupancy, with a population reported above 130,000 and rising, and it is now frequently cited as one of Africa’s more successful new-city experiments — a near-inversion of its early reputation. Its trajectory is a clear lesson that construction alone does not create a city: affordability, financing, and a realistic match to local incomes are what turn empty blocks into homes.
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.
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.