What happens when you build a city for a million people and almost nobody shows up?
Forest City, Malaysia, is one of the most jaw-dropping real estate experiments of the 21st century: a $100 billion metropolis rising out of the sea, gleaming and immaculate and almost empty.
In this video, the Yes Theory team spent 50 hours exploring this surreal place, and what they found is unlike anything you’ve seen before. Designed and built by Chinese developer Country Garden, Forest City was envisioned as a thriving home for one million residents. Instead, its wide boulevards, luxury villas, and towering apartment blocks sit eerily silent — maintained in pristine condition by the developer, yet largely unoccupied.
Walking through the city feels like stepping onto a Hollywood set. Security guards patrol the spotless streets. Elevators open to empty hallways. Lobbies are furnished and lit, but no one walks through them. The scale of it all makes the emptiness even more disorienting. This is an entire city that simply never came to life.
So what went wrong? A perfect storm of bad timing and bad luck. The Chinese government introduced strict restrictions on foreign property investment, cutting off the primary buyer base on which the project had been built. Country Garden then sank into a catastrophic debt crisis. And just as things were already unraveling, the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, halting development and making any recovery nearly impossible.
But Forest City isn’t entirely without life. The team encountered a handful of residents who have carved out a quiet existence in this ghost metropolis. Among them is Alan, a retiree who moved here precisely because of the silence. There’s also the Network School, an experimental community using Forest City’s special economic zone status to prototype a new kind of society, drawn to the city’s unique legal freedoms and blank-slate environment.
The overall vibe? Unsettling, fascinating, and strangely beautiful. Forest City is a monument to ambition gone sideways — a reminder that even with billions of dollars and the best architects money can buy, you can’t simply will a community into existence.
Watch the full video to see the city through the Yes Theory team’s eyes:
