Under the Ambitious Forest City Blueprint Lies a Stark Reality
Under the Ambitious Forest City Blueprint Lies a Stark Reality
Yuyang Zhang is a postgraduate student specialising in smart and sustainable cities at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Passionate about data analysis, smart cities, and media communication, Yuyang aims to drive societal progress through technology and innovation.
Forest City Project - Johor, Malaysia
Environmental destruction, financial risks, and a growing debate about the true cost of progress. As the world strives to balance development with sustainability, Forest City serves as a powerful reminder of the fine line between ambition and potential overreach.
This is a story of grand dreams, unintended consequences, and the urgent need to rethink how we build for the future.
The Forest City project is a comprehensive green smart new city project that integrates high-end industries and infrastructure. Since the project started in late 2013, Forest City has established the initial scale of the new city and has brought great promotion effects to the economic and social development of Johor, Malaysia.
In September 2015, Forest City received an environmental assessment report from the Malaysian Ministry of Environment and met all 81 requirements in the environmental assessment report. In the subsequent development process, Forest City placed a water quality environmental monitoring system in the surrounding waters to monitor environmental changes 24 hours a day to ensure that the water quality meets the environmental assessment requirements.
In addition, Forest City’s green design and architectural concepts have been widely recognised by all walks of life and have won various world-class awards, including Global Human Settlements Planning and Design Award by UN-HABITAT. Chinese investment is concentrated in a number of upscale gated mega-developments spread across Iskandar Malaysia constructed by either private or state Chinese companies. Forest City is by far the most expensive of Iskandar Malaysia’s 60 current projects.
Biodiversity and natural areas
In terms of Biodiversity, Forest City has collaborated with Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) on seagrass conservation and signed a contract worth more than RM2.5 million. Furthermore, Forest City also funded the local environmental protection organization Kelab Alami.
With the assistance of Forest City, Kelab Alami has carried out several environmental protection projects, including residents’ environmental awareness-raising activities and seaweed conservation activities. Also, Forest City has built a wetland park on Island 1, covering an area of 31,000 square meters.
Implementing building Information Modeling (BIM) plays a key role in improving design quality, creating sustainable buildings and facilities, and managing assets (FM/AM) at Forest City Development.
By creating virtual 3D building models, BIM can detect design flaws in original 2D drawings that could lead to on-site rework, thus avoiding waste and additional costs. City-level AI applications are everywhere here.
Based on AI technology, buildings can recognize faces, license plates, fingerprints, and more. AI city applications help create security protection to ensure the community’s safety.
In addition, Forest City has its designated intelligent robot, SenSen, for urban management and public services, providing residents with intelligent experiences such as consultation, guidance, entertainment interaction, etc.
Forest City was billed as,
“a dream paradise for all mankind.”
But in reality, it was aimed squarely at the domestic Chinese market, offering aspirational people the chance to own a second home abroad. Its selling prices were out of reach for most ordinary Malaysians.
A sales slump between 2020 and 2022, exacerbated by Malaysia’s political crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, led to the project being described as a “ghost town” in 2022. The use of the land has also been criticised for causing extensive destruction of nearby wildlife habitats.
Forest City is a classic case of ambition versus reality in the face of China’s real estate crisis. Local factors may have contributed to the current situation, but it proves that building tens of thousands of apartments in the middle of nowhere is not enough to convince people to live there.
Source Links
Kelab Alami Mukim Tanjung Kupang, Johor. (n.d.). Kelab Alami Mukim Tanjung Kupang, Johor. [online] Available at: https://kelabalami.weebly.com/
Marsh, N. (2023). Forest City: Inside Malaysia’s Chinese-built ‘ghost city’. www.bbc.com. [online] 4 Dec. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67610677
Moser, S. (2017). Forest City, Malaysia, and Chinese expansionism. Urban Geography, 39(6), pp.935–943. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2017.1405691
Moser, S. and Avery, E. (2021). The multi-scalar politics of urban greening in Forest City, Malaysia. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 60, p.127068. doi:
