A $100 billion Chinese ghost city in Malaysia was planned to house 700,000 people, but with so few tenants, developers tried to turn it into a tourist hub, but failed.
Today, the megadevelopment serves as the set for several reality TV shows and documentaries.
The deserted town, just across Singapore’s western border, was used to film episodes for season two of the Netflix reality show “The Mall,” which premiered last week.
In this competitive reality TV show, 12 contestants complete challenges while one secretly sabotages the others. They compete to increase their prize money and discover who the traitor is.
The show’s second season will consist of 10 episodes and was shot entirely in Malaysia, including in Forest City, Kuala Lumpur and Tioman Island. According to local media, filming began in July 2023 and lasted for six weeks.
Contestants from a range of professional backgrounds will be taking on challenges including treasure hunting, free diving and abseiling off a 38-storey building in Forest City.
In a season three episode, show host and former NPR journalist Ari Shapiro introduced Forest City as “the perfect place for someone with the money to build a luxury vacation home. And it sits empty for most of the year.”
The city was also featured in a recent show.
South Korea’s KBS filmed an episode of the travel reality show “Battle Trip,” Germany’s ProSieben TV shot a short documentary about Forest City, and the Austrian documentary “Hungry: Tipping the Scales” was also filmed there.
Announced in 2006, the luxury public housing complex was to include apartments, a water park, and a hotel, with developers spending $100 million on the entire project.
But eight years after construction began, only a few thousand people live there, turning the project into a ghost town and a major liability for developer China’s Country Garden, which is facing major financial problems elsewhere.
As of last year, only about 15 percent of the planned properties had been completed, and most of the completed apartments appear to have never been lived in.
Netflix and Forest City did not respond to requests for comment.
