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Article
Urban Studies
2024, Vol. 61(8) 1545–1562
ÓUrban Studies Journal Limited 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/00420980231211814
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Analysing a private city being built
from scratch through a social and
environmental justice framework:
A research agenda
Sarah Moser
McGill University, Canada
Nufar Avni
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Abstract
A growing body of scholarship examines new cities being built from scratch that are developed
and governed by the private sector. While this scholarship explores discourse and rhetoric, eco-
nomic objectives, and some social and environmental impacts of new private cities, scholars to
date have not taken a social or environmental justice approach to analysing new city projects. In
this article we examine Forest City, a private city project being built on artificial islands off the
coast of Malaysia by one of China’s largest property development companies, and its unique gov-
ernance and claims to being ‘eco’, despite the significant environmental damage it has caused.
Intended as a lush and exclusive gated enclave for Chinese nationals, Forest City is a productive
case study through which to consider the consequences of a private city using the frameworks of
social and environmental justice. We suggest more critical research that engages with social and
environmental justice is needed on the many emerging projects branded as eco-cities of the
future, a troubling claim that signals a growing normalisation of mega-scale privatisation and loose
or absent regulations regarding social inclusivity and environmental protection.
Keywords
environmental justice, Forest City, Malaysia, new cities, privatised urbanisation, social justice
Corresponding author:
Sarah Moser, Department of Geography, McGill University,
Burnside Hall, 805 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC
H3A 0B9, Canada.
Email: sarah.moser@mcgill.ca
Received February 2023; accepted October 2023
Introduction
Over the past decade, there has been a global
proliferation of new cities and urban mega-
developments built from scratch that have
heavy private sector involvement, and are
intended as privately built and privately gov-
erned entities, politically and geographically
separate from existing settlements. Such
urban mega-developments can be charac-
terised as entrepreneurial (Harvey, 1989),
highly speculative (Goldman, 2011) and ‘fast’
(Datta and Shaban, 2017), and they are pro-
liferating in Asia (Keeton, 2011; Moser,
2020), the Middle East (Cugurullo, 2018;
Jeffrey, 2021; Moser et al., 2015) and Africa
(Coˆte
´-Roy and Moser, 2019; Keeton and
Provoost, 2019), with several failed or fledgel-
ing projects in North America (Haggart and
Spicer, 2022; Rebentisch et al., 2020). Private
cities have features in common with gated
communities, particularly in who can buy
and access the space, the homogeneity of resi-
dents, social exclusions produced and how
city builders tailor their projects for a wealthy
clientele. However, there are some important
differences in their scale and economic ambi-
tion, as builders of private new cities are
entrepreneurs who aim to attract businesses
and spark economic growth rather than pri-
marily provide prestigious and securitised
housing (Moser and Coˆte
´-Roy, 2021).
In this article, we focus on Forest City, a
private, gated new city project in Malaysia
to highlight a gap in the literature on new
city projects, to think through issues of
social and environmental justice, and to pro-
vide a framework for future analyses of pri-
vate new city projects. Forest City is being
built on four artificial islands by one of
China’s largest property developers, with a
target population of 700,000. Strategically
located along one of the world’s busiest ship-
ping channels and just two kilometres off the
coast of Singapore, Forest City is the largest
and most expensive Chinese real estate
development outside of China. Announced
in 2013, land reclamation activities started in
2014, and today much of the first island is
complete, along with 65 condominium
“ (Forest City)” “ ”
“
”
1546 Urban Studies 61(8)
towers, over 200 luxury villas, a hotel, a pri-
vate international school and a commercial
area. Builders of Forest City have secured
unique concessions of sovereignty from
Malaysia, including the exclusive use of pri-
vate security rather than Malaysian police
and duty free status for the entire project,
and the initial concept of the project was an
elite racialised enclave for Chinese nationals
(Moser, 2018) that was not obligated to
abide by Malaysian racial quota require-
ments (Foo and Wong, 2014).
A small but growing body of scholarship
examines private new cities, focusing particu-
larly on their governance (Fa
¨lt, 2019; Korah,
2020; Murray, 2015), eco claims (Cugurullo,
2016; Datta, 2012), economic ambitions
(Moser et al., 2015) and how the rhetoric of
climate change adaptation both masks and
intensifies the marginalisation of poor resi-
dents living nearby (Ajibade, 2017). Only a
handful of papers have been published on
Forest City to date and focus on the ecologi-
cal damage and the politics of urban greening
in a speculative project (Koh et al., 2022;
Moser and Avery, 2021; Rahman, 2017a),
the geopolitical dimensions of a project con-
trolled by Chinese actors along a strategic
global trade route and next to Southeast
Asia’s strongest economy (Moser, 2018;
Strangio, 2020), and the ways in which the
project has been forced to compromise and
pivot in the face of lagging sales and local
resistance (Avery and Moser, 2023a). While
Forest City has stalled due to low investor
interest and the COVID-19 pandemic, mean-
ing its future is uncertain (Sani, 2022), given
the speed at which the project was launched
and the unique dynamic of it being a private
gated project built by and for Chinese
nationals in coastal Malaysia, and given the
proliferation of similar private luxury real
estate projects being built on artificial land in
Asia, the Gulf and sub-Saharan Africa, there
are significant issues relating to social and
environmental justice that require unpacking.
In this article we argue that attention
urgently needs to be paid to the myriad injus-
tices that result from gated, private city-scale
developments and recent scholarship on social
and environmental justice can serve as a use-
ful framework for analysing them. Forest
City is a particularly productive case study
through which to investigate social and envi-
ronmental injustices that have facilitated the
creation of the project, and those caused or
exacerbated by the project – both inside and
beyond the projects themselves – including an
intensification of social exclusions based on
ethnicity, religion and socio-economic class;
the foreignisation of space and resources; and
the impacts on Indigenous livelihoods and
nearby ecosystems.
Our research draws on official promo-
tional material, media coverage and criticism
about the project, and visits to Forest City
in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022 and 2023. Site vis-
its involved taking official tours of the Sales
Gallery, watching on-site promotional
videos, touring show flats, walking around
the project and interviewing potential inves-
tors, sales staff, management, and residents
of Forest City, as well as residents of nearby
villages.
Following this introduction, we provide
an overview of critical urban studies and
planning scholarship on social and environ-
mental justice and on the global prolifera-
tion of new city projects. Second, we provide
an overview of Forest City as an aspiring
elite enclave designed by and for Chinese
nationals in Malaysia. Third, we examine
Forest City’s absence of social and environ-
mental justice in how the project was con-
ceived by elites behind closed doors, its
controversial location atop the country’s
largest seagrass field, its private governance,
the social exclusions created or exacerbated,
and the impacts on Indigenous and Malay
livelihoods and local ecosystems. We end
with concluding thoughts about Forest City
as emblematic of an emerging type and scale
Moser and Avni 1547
of private urbanisation that utilises mined
sand to create artificial land, and call for
further research that adopts a social and
environmental justice framework to analyse
other such urban mega-developments.
Social and environmental justice
frameworks and new cities
scholarship
Over the past several decades, critical urban
theory scholars have emphasised social jus-
tice as a significant normative concept and a
criterion through which to evaluate urban
developments and processes (Fainstein, 2010;
Harvey, 1973; Lake, 2016). Environmental
justice has similarly been used to study the
unequal distribution of hazards and polluters
in urban space and demand more equitable
management of green amenities (Agyeman
et al., 2016; Bullard, 2000). A major strand
of the social and environmental justice scho-
larship has stressed the injustices that result
from the planning profession’s operation
under conditions of capitalist exploitation
and deeply entrenched neoliberalism.
However, this research overwhelmingly
focuses on established cities. We suggest that
a dual social and environmental justice lens
is critical to illuminate the diverse manifesta-
tions of dispossession stemming from growth
coalitions’ involvement in the planning and
construction of new cities, exemplified in this
paper through Forest City. These coalitions
tend to exhibit a complete disregard for the
social and ecological injustices that their
projects induce and sustain.
Social and environmental justice
approaches to understanding urban
development
The centrality of social justice to critical geo-
graphy and urban planning scholarship and
practice has been established over the past
several decades. Social justice has been
addressed from a variety of angles, including
distributive, procedural, indigenous, spatial
and legal, as well as integrative approaches
that bridge different justice components
(Avni and Fischler, 2020; Connolly and
Steil, 2009; Dadashpoor and Alvandipour,
2020). The right to the city (Lefebvre, 1996),
advocacy planning (Davidoff, 1965) and
equity planning (Krumholz and Forester,
1990) are only a few examples of influential
movements that have placed justice at the
forefront and called for equitable distribu-
tion of resources and greater representation
of marginalised groups in planning pro-
cesses. These approaches have emerged in
response to deep inequalities generated by
neoliberal capitalism and technocratic plan-
ning that prioritise the built over the human
environment (Brenner et al., 2011; Harvey,
1973). A social justice lens is essential to cri-
tically examine who benefits and who loses
from urban development, whose voices are
being heard or are absent from the planning
process, and whether planning advances the
interests of the ‘haves’ or the ‘haves-not’ and
why (Arnstein, 1969).
Environmental justice also centres around
notions of participation, access, and equity
regarding environmental issues (Patsias,
2023) and has been similarly explored from
distributional, procedural, legal and other
lenses (O’Neill, 2023). Although intimately
related, the two concepts – social and envi-
ronmental justice – are often discussed sepa-
rately in the literature (Avni and Fischler,
2020; Wessells, 2014). Environmental justice
was initially developed in geography, plan-
ning, and sustainability scholarship to
accentuate the disproportional proximity of
racialised minorities and poor communities
and their exposure to environmental hazards
and polluters, such as toxic waste (Bullard,
2000). At the same time, these communities’
access to natural resources and green ame-
nities such as parks and waterways, which
1548 Urban Studies 61(8)
are considered vital to health and wellbeing,
has been limited and unevenly distributed in
space (Rigolon, 2016). The environmental
justice frame has been beneficial not only in
identifying these disparities but also in mobi-
lising communities around them and
demanding change (Agyeman et al., 2016;
O’Neill, 2023). Over time, the justice agenda
has been broadened to include issues such as
food security, energy and climate change
(Anguelovski, 2013).
Social and environmental justice goals
have been challenged in the neoliberal, capi-
talist system within which planning has been
operating in the last few decades. Already in
the mid-1970s, Molotch’s (1976: 309)
‘growth machine’ thesis argued that cities
are driven by the interests of land-based
elites that seek to profit from the intensifica-
tion of an area’s land use; thus, ‘the political
and economic essence of virtually any given
locality...isgrowth’. The growth machine
is propelled by a coalition of powerful inter-
est groups, including real estate developers,
business elites, entrepreneurs and political
leaders who work in tandem to promote and
sustain urban development for their own
economic interests. This includes harnessing
the national government to create favour-
able conditions for economic success (Logan
and Molotch, 1976). This framework is use-
ful for analysing new cities, as we later
demonstrate.
Adopting an even more radical stance
that considers also the ‘users’ of space,
Harvey (1973, 2008) has consistently argued
that the right to the city is unattainable
under the capitalist system, where urban
development is meant to serve private prop-
erty owners by way of dispossessing the
poor and marginalised. One example of a
recent arena where justice principles might
be jeopardised to incentivise development is
smart cities (Datta, 2021; Yigitcanlar, 2021),
which, similar to new cities (Moser and
Coˆ te
´-Roy, 2021), are officially proclaimed
as a panacea to a host of social problems
brought forward by rapid urbanisation.
However, as critical scholars have shown,
the smart city is a speculative economic proj-
ect and a vehicle for property-led develop-
ment, ‘the latest attempt to use and
reconfigure the city as an accumulation
strategy’ (Kitchin et al., 2019: 5). The smart
city, thus, reproduces and even aggravates
social and environmental injustices (Kitchin
et al., 2019; MacKinnon et al., 2022;
Sengupta and Sengupta, 2022). The smart
city discourse is particularly relevant for pri-
vate new city projects; however, the tensions
between property-led-development and jus-
tice goals are ubiquitous.
‘Ecological’ initiatives such as greening
and climate-mitigation projects have also
been seen as part of the ‘growth machine’,
appropriating and even compromising natu-
ral resources to gain financial interests and
serve elite groups. A voluminous literature
on green or environmental gentrification has
highlighted how planners use green ame-
nities and infrastructure such as waterfronts,
bike paths and parks to tailor the urban
space to the preferences of more desirable
groups, at the expense of more marginalised
ones (Anguelovski et al., 2019; Moser and
Avery, 2021; Rigolon and Nemeth, 2018;
Wolch et al., 2014). The very concept of
environmental justice can be coopted by pol-
icymakers to justify projects with controver-
sial environmental outcomes, such as
desalination, claiming to serve the public
good while being promoted to benefit the
private sector (O’Neill, 2023). While the
prioritisation of growth considerations is
often deliberative, even when planners
intend to promote environmental justice and
equity, their actions sometimes lead to
unsustainable and unjust consequences
(Avni, 2019; Mandelbaum, 2021).
The seeming paradox between the positive
health and wellbeing attributes associated
with green amenities on the one hand, and
Moser and Avni 1549
how they are used to drive and perpetuate
inequalities on the other hand, is a subject of
burgeoning body of research. This scholar-
ship provides a productive framework for
analysing emerging private new city projects.
We now turn to discuss how social and envi-
ronmental justice relates to new cities.
Private new cities: Social exclusions,
environmental impacts
Over the past 15 years, there has been a
proliferation of new city projects announced
in around 45 countries, primarily in the
Global South and emerging economies.
While most of these are state initiatives or
complicated public–private partnerships,
some are entirely or primarily driven and
financed by private actors. The scale of these
private projects has tremendous and lasting
impacts on ecosystems and their governance,
and will have serious implications for both
residents and nearby communities living in
their shadows.
New cities dominated by the private sec-
tor are being built from scratch in Malaysia,
India, South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria,
Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and more.
These projects are largely designed, financed,
and governed by the private sector and are a
‘key format that allows for a high degree of
experimentation’, particularly in terms of
governance and urban planning (Moser and
Coˆ te
´-Roy, 2021: 5). Private sector-driven
new city projects are justified as a way to
overcome the perceived inefficiencies of
states and municipal governments, particu-
larly their lack of overall vision, resources,
capabilities and innovative and flexible
urban management (Fa
¨lt, 2019). Private
city-scale projects are launched purportedly
to fulfil a need for new forms of experimen-
tal governance and inability of governments
to conduct such experiments. The managed
retreat from government presence can per-
haps best be seen in charter cities, a
particular iteration of a private city driven
by libertarian ethos and emerging most pro-
minently in Honduras (Brustein, 2021;
Lynch, 2019).
As private for-profit ventures, these city-
scale developments are inherently entrepre-
neurial and prioritise profit over environ-
mental or social sustainability (Datta, 2012),
even promoting their social exclusivity to
potential buyers as an attractive feature
(Moser, 2020). In the case of Lavasa, a pri-
vate city project in India, the lack of trans-
parency, minimal legal enforcement and
weak regulation have meant that there is lit-
tle accountability to ensure the project lives
up to its environmental claims (Datta, 2012).
Private cities have a corporatised manage-
ment structure and are headed by a CEO
rather than an elected mayor and city coun-
cil, meaning that there is no possibility for
democratic governance (Moser, 2020).
Conventional lines between public and pri-
vate are further blurred when private new
city projects are built as corporations listed
on stock exchanges, an arrangement that
means that city managers are beholden pri-
marily to shareholders over residents (Moser
et al., 2015). The private governance struc-
tures of Waterfall City in South Africa
exemplify how public authorities have been
replaced with private management and con-
trol, in an urban environment that is pro-
moted as ‘smart’ and high tech, as well as
one that conforms to conservative Muslim
cultural norms, thus excluding non-Muslims
and more moderate Muslims (Murray,
2015). Socio-economic exclusions are appar-
ent in Eko Atlantic, a city extension of
Lagos, that prioritises elites and further mar-
ginalises the poor living in nearby flood-
prone communities (Ajibade, 2017). As an
elite enclave for wealthy Nigerians, Eko
Atlantic claims to address urgent flooding
that plagues Lagos through its ‘Great Wall
of Lagos’ seawall flood management scheme
(Adelekan, 2016). However, while the
1550 Urban Studies 61(8)
seawall and urban extension will benefit Eko
Atlantic and secure the project from the
effects of climate change, it will intensify the
vulnerability of nearby poor coastal areas, a
process characterised as ‘climate apartheid’
(Acey, 2019; Amakihe, 2017).
The body of scholarship on new private
cities is still in its infancy and much more
attention needs to be paid to the various ways
in which these speculative and entrepreneurial
projects exacerbate or create new social divi-
sions, and what new injustices are caused by
both their environmental impacts and unpre-
cedented speed of gaining approvals and
construction.
An absence of social and
environmental justice in Forest
City, Malaysia
Forest City’s fantastical and improbable
design and the outrageously undemocratic
way in which it was implemented demon-
strate a shocking lack of concern for laws
and consequences for breaking them, and
for the damage to land, water, and liveli-
hoods of Malaysians. Forest City reflects
the sharp increase over the past decade in
Southeast Asia in the financialisation of real
estate and the ‘foreignisation’ of urban space
(Fauveaud, 2020) that is shaped in large part
by the rise of China’s Belt and Road
Initiative. In many ways it represents a new
type and scale of private elite urban mega-
development with unprecedented social and
environmental impacts. As a collaboration
between one of China’s top property develo-
pers and the Sultan of Johor, Malaysia,
Forest City completely lacked public input
at every stage, a scenario that is common in
both public and private new city projects,
which are emerging overwhelmingly in
authoritarian or undemocratic contexts
globally over the past two decades (Moser
and Coˆ te
´-Roy, 2021; Watson, 2014). If we
hope to prevent more Forest City-type
projects, scholars need to demonstrate the
myriad social and environmental injustices
that plague them and which serve to sustain
and exacerbate socio-economic difference
and further entrench asymmetries of power.
Social injustices in the ‘model city
of the future’
The initial conceptualisation of Forest City
took place among elites behind closed doors,
skirting, or perhaps more accurately, ignor-
ing local laws, and proceeding at such a fast
pace that nearby residents and environmen-
tal groups were unable to mount an opposi-
tion of any significance (Avery and Moser,
2023a). As in other contexts of urban mega-
developments in other parts of the world,
speed is a key strategy to expedite construc-
tion processes and bypass modes of regula-
tion (Coˆ te
´-Roy and Moser, 2023; Cugurullo,
2017; Datta, 2017; Datta and Shaban, 2017).
Locals whose livelihoods were to be affected
were not notified and only learned of the
project when they saw dozens of dredgers
dumping sand in their fishing grounds in the
Johor Strait. Land reclamation started in
2014 without a legally required Detailed
Environmental Impact Assessment (Ourbis
and Shaw, 2017). The way in which Forest
City was given the green light exemplifies
the power of growth coalitions to bypass
local laws and norms, change land use desig-
nations and so on, a process Roy (2009)
describes as ‘informality from above’, a con-
trast to how informality is conventionally
conceptualised, namely as the poor illegally
squatting on land they do not own. While
the powerful are able to bypass local laws
and expropriate land illegally, Indigenous
villagers are routinely treated as illegal
squatters or obstacles to development and
progress as coastal land in Johor has become
more attractive to developers. Indigenous
communities have fought back in overt and
covert ways, attempting to live their daily
Moser and Avni 1551
lives in the shadow of eviction threats
(Bayat, 2000).
Forest City creates social exclusions based
on ethnicity, religion, and socio-economic
class and it is clear throughout the project
that Chinese buyers are the target while
Malay Muslims, who constitute the majority
of nearby villagers and the majority of
Johor’s population, are absent from promo-
tional material. Signs throughout the project
are written in Chinese, information about
visa programmes feature prominently
throughout the Sales Gallery, show flats are
designed for Chinese tastes and feature mock
alcohol, sales staff speak Mandarin, and the
project’s slogans, such as ‘jade carved out of
the ocean’, are written for a Chinese audi-
ence (Figure 1). Forest City’s only school, a
branch of a Minnesota-based private school,
offers only two languages: English and
Mandarin. A year of tuition for a day stu-
dent costs $24,000 – about four times the
average annual wage in Malaysia (Mahtani,
2018). To date, only Chinese businesses have
attempted to open in Forest City and there is
a total lack of amenities and religious infra-
structure for Muslims. Significantly, accord-
ing to Google Maps, the nearest mosque is
23 minutes away by car or 1 hour and
11 minutes away on foot in a distant village,
a significant inconvenience for those who
choose to attend daily prayers. Due to
Forest City’s intricate and high-maintenance
decorative gardens, there is no room in the
master plan for kitchen gardens, which are
cherished by Malays as spaces to grow herbs
and fruit trees (Moser and Avery, 2021). As
such, Forest City marks the opposite of
Malaysia’s official national goals of promot-
ing social diversity, social inclusivity, and
multiculturalism (Hamzah, 2021; Tan, 2020),
which are also considered building blocks of
the just city (Fainstein, 2010; Fincher and
Iveson, 2012; Yiftachel et al., 2009).
Country Gardens, Forest City’s developer
and China’s top property developer, negoti-
ated various conditions that mark a contrast
between Forest City and the rest of Johor,
Figure 1. Throughout Forest City it is clear that ethnic Chinese buyers are the target.
Source: Authors.
1552 Urban Studies 61(8)
and even the rest of Iskandar Malaysia, the
Special Economic Zone in which Forest City
is located. The project is policed by private
security guards from Nepal with question-
able training and, just like security in a shop-
ping mall, have the authority to expel people
from the project for no reason. For example,
one colleague who is an Indonesian Arab in
her late 20s visited Forest City in 2017 with
her cousin, who was heavily pregnant. After
arriving, they sat down on the main beach
near the Sales Gallery to rest. A security
guard immediately blew a whistle at them
and told them they were not allowed to sit
on the beach or anywhere else. When they
questioned this rule, they were told that they
were being expelled from the project and
they were not to return. According to our
colleague, this was racial targeting as
Chinese visitors were sitting on the beach
and elsewhere, so they suspected they were
not considered potential buyers and their
presence was sending the wrong signal to
Chinese visitors. ‘Public’ space in Forest City
is not, in fact, open to the general public, and
there is neither the practice nor the ideal of
the commons in private Chinese develop-
ments. Locals are discouraged from utilising
Forest City’s green spaces, including its
waterfront area, which is typically considered
public domain in virtually every waterfront
redevelopment project around the globe
(Moser and Avery, 2021). The different living
compounds in Forest City are also guarded
and secured, with checkpoints located
throughout the project, and even we, as west-
ern foreigners, could not walk around freely
(Figure 2a and b).
According to several sales staff, the num-
ber one fear of potential buyers from China
is being ‘surrounded by’ Muslims, who they
perceive as potentially violent and intolerant
(tour of Sales Gallery taken in 2018). A sec-
ond racialised fear of potential buyers from
China is of Indians, who many perceive as
‘always drunk and misbehaving’ (tour of
Sales Gallery taken in 2023). The developer
has responded to the security concerns of
Figure 2. (a and b) Dozens of checkpoints throughout Forest City feature English and Mandarin, but
significantly not Malay, the national language of Malaysia; (c and d) Smart security features in Forest City’s
Visitor Gallery.
Source: Authors.
Moser and Avni 1553
potential investors with three ‘smart’ secu-
rity platforms to ‘shield the city’, including
electric fencing, a 3D security management
cloud platform, and an ‘integrated security
management platform’, which includes eight
systems to ensure a ‘smart and safe city’
(Figure 2c and d). The use of AI technology,
which itself has been criticised as replicating
real-world racism (Photopoulos, 2021), and
other digital safety features designed by
Huawei, China’s largest ICT provider, are
slated to securitise the project and detect
threats, particularly Muslim threats against
Chinese residents (Moser, 2018). Whether
these features are built as planned remains
to be seen, but the aspiration to include
‘smart’ technology to exclude undesirables
and protect wealthy residents and the racia-
lised fear embodied in Forest City is deeply
concerning for access to the site. The gated-
ness of Forest City negatively impacts
nearby residents, who do not have legal
access to its amenities and might feel like
second-class citizens as a result. Residing in
Forest City is not simply a matter of housing
affordability, which is in itself a justice issue
(Avni, 2019; Mun
˜oz, 2018), but is explicitly
and implicitly dependent on one’s national-
ity, ethnicity or race, a classic example of a
‘fortress city’ (Low, 1997).
In a similar vein, while Forest City has
won awards for its claims to be building
affordable housing (Avery and Moser,
2023b), it has failed to produce any or even
a substantive plan to open up the project to
a broader swath of Malaysian society.
Employees of Forest City have stated that ‘it
is clear that the price of the property is too
high for Malaysians, and [we have] specifi-
cally marketed towards the Chinese’ and
admitted that ‘the people who are working
in the area probably can’t afford to live here’
and ‘the majority of our buyers are foreign’
(Mahtani, 2018). While cities all around the
world struggle with issues of diversity and
affordability, Forest City makes no attempt
to be inclusive and, in fact, broadcasts its
exclusivity as a selling point. Residents of
Johor confirm their exclusion, with one
Johorian simply stating: ‘Forest City was
not built for us’ (Interview, 2018). Finally,
aspects of social justice concern not only the
project’s targeted population but also the
city builders. Forest City, much like many
other new private cities built from scratch,
has been constructed by foreign migrant
workers from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan,
Indonesia, and other Asian countries.
Malaysian economic development in partic-
ular has become progressively reliant over
the past several decades on the ‘constant
availability of an invisible, highly diverse,
fragmented, disposable pool of migrant non-
citizen labour’ (Muniandy, 2020: 2294).
Migrants working in the construction sector
suffer dehumanising living conditions and
tend to be housed in ramshackle camps
without proper light, ventilation or privacy
(Muniandy, 2021) while also facing danger-
ous working environments and even deaths.
In the evenings, the movement of migrant
workers is restricted by guard posts set up
by Forest City management, and many
workers were irregularly paid and even
raided a nearby island for food (Rahman,
2017b). Due to their precarious status, they
make do with this predicament while they
construct the ‘smart’, ‘safe’ and ‘ecological’
city of the future. The juxtaposition of the
labour camps with the luxurious condos and
high-rises of the newly built city reveals yet
another aspect of stark injustice.
Environmental injustices of an eco-city
The environmental impacts of Forest City
far exceed the physical boundaries of the
project. The project is located atop
Malaysia’s largest seagrass field, a rich and
sensitive ecosystem that provides habitat for
endangered species including seahorses and
dugong (Hossain et al., 2019) and that had
1554 Urban Studies 61(8)
been earmarked for environmental protection
(Avery and Moser, 2023a). The land reclama-
tion activities, which started without the leg-
ally required Detailed Environmental Impact
Assessment (Ourbis and Shaw, 2017), have
had a serious impact on local ecosystems and
Indigenous and Malay rural livelihoods, with
sedimentation dramatically reducing yields
from mussel farms, prawning activities in
nearby mangroves, and fishing (Rahman,
2017a). The ongoing prioritisation of city-
centric economic development neglects and
marginalises the poor, who arguably have
longer and more compelling claims to the
land and have a far smaller ecological foot-
print, in favour of the wealthy foreign inves-
tors and the intended population.
Forest City has the potential to signifi-
cantly impact a variety of environmental
aspects inland in the state of Johor. The
project can be understood to have a parasitic
relationship with the state of Johor, upon
which it is wholly dependent for water,
energy, food, garbage disposal, cemeteries/
columbaria, labour and more. Forest City’s
lavish decorative gardens, swimming pools
and plans for luxury condos with pools on
each floor completely overlook that Johor
has been prone to droughts in recent years
(Chuah et al., 2018). Sand for the project is
being dredged from the sea and mined from
islands and river beds around the Malay
Peninsula, wreaking environmental damage
far from the location of Forest City (Arnez,
2021; Beiser, 2017; Peduzzi, 2014; Figure 3).
Beyond the lack of justice for nearby resi-
dents, the project also casts a long shadow
on the long-term sustainability of Malaysia’s
natural resources.
Finally, the exclusion of locals from the
project, both as residents and visitors,
described in the previous section, also has
implications on environmental justice
aspects due to the significance of access to
green spaces for health and wellbeing (Avni
and Fischler, 2020; Wolch et al., 2014).
Projects such as Forest City allocate the
many positive attributes of Malaysia’s
coastal environment to a select few over the
public at large, similar to green gentrifica-
tion trends, but on a much larger scale.
Nearby communities are not only burdened
with the destruction of their local habitat
but are also prevented from enjoying the
natural amenities in their vicinity (Smardon
et al., 2018) and green space in Forest City
itself.
While Forest City claims to be a futuristic
eco-city and a model for future urban devel-
opment, it has smothered and destroyed
most of the sea grass field upon which it is
built and damaged surrounding mangroves
(Rahman, 2017a). It does not attempt to
recreate a mangrove ecosystem, but is filled
with high-maintenance, manicured, purely
decorative gardens with predominantly
Figure 3. Dredging and land reclamation activity in and around Forest City.
Source: Authors.
Moser and Avni 1555
imported species from Africa, Latin
America, and elsewhere (Moser and Avery,
2021). The city design is also oriented
towards private car use, with wide lanes, ele-
vated pedestrian passes, and no sidewalks
on most streets, rendering it totally unwalk-
able. While claiming to be an ‘eco-city’,
Forest City is failing to meet even basic sus-
tainability standards.
Justice in a ‘model city of the
future’? Concluding thoughts
The emergence of a private, gated urban
mega-development in the ocean such as
Forest City is a troubling new form and
scale of speculative urbanism (Goldman,
2011), the implications of which urgently
require attention from scholars, policy mak-
ers, and the public. We use the Forest City
case study as a call for social scientists to
investigate the global proliferation of ex
nihilo development through a social and
environmental justice lens, particularly since
most such projects are emerging in authori-
tarian contexts with little freedom of the
press and where local scholars may fear reta-
liation for writing critically on high visibility
projects (Moser and Coˆ te
´-Roy, 2022).
This article seeks to contribute to social
and environmental justice and new cities
scholarship. While scholars have noted the
deep inequalities generated by neoliberal
capitalism and technocratic planning
(Brenner et al., 2011; Harvey, 1973), they
have considered established cities as their
reference point. Yet new private cities add
critical dimensions of injustices in their scale,
modes of governance, and financial mechan-
isms, and, most importantly, they are key
sites of contemporary urbanisation. Thus
far, the limited scholarship on new private
cities seems to suggest that they fail on every
justice front: democracy, participation,
inclusion, social and environmental sustain-
ability, and diversity are simply absent from
their planning and execution despite the
sophisticated rhetoric and renderings used
to promote these projects.
Forest City appears to be an extreme and
uniquely audacious example of a private for-
eign city being built in the ocean, yet the
construction of private urban mega-
developments on artificial land is an acceler-
ating trend in Asia, the Middle East and
Africa due to the profitability and financiali-
sation of real estate, the growing demand
for securitised and elite spaces, and the
increasing affordability and ease of land
reclamation as opposed to land grabbing.
These developments are the product of pow-
erful growth coalitions that coalesce for the
purpose of capital accumulation, with little
or no regard for the adverse social and envi-
ronmental outcomes. Some projects have
recently stalled or collapsed due to China’s
restrictions on outflows of capital, an over-
supply of housing, and the COVID-19 pan-
demic. For example, Gateway Melaka, a
new Chinese city project and seaport off the
coast of Melaka on three artificial islands
slated to be the largest artificial island proj-
ect in Southeast Asia, was launched in 2014
and cancelled in 2021 (Kumar, 2020). The
project devastated the fishing grounds of the
Kristang, a 500-year-old Portuguese settle-
ment in Melaka (Arnez, 2021; Beech, 2020;
Low, 2016) while undermining the cultural
and historical significance of Melaka as a
coastal city designated as a UNESCO
World Heritage site (Connolly, 2023).
Despite the environmental devastation
and the collapse of these projects, new mega-
developments on reclaimed land continue to
be announced (Table 1), including City of
Pearl, an elite Chinese mega-development on
artificial islands planned for the harbour of
Manila (Cheng, 2017); the Maharani Energy
Gateway, an offshore energy storage facility,
near Muar, Malaysia (SCMP Reporters,
2022); five new city projects on reclaimed
land in Bahrain, expanding the country’s
1556 Urban Studies 61(8)
land mass by 60% (Ebrahim, 2021); and the
Red Sea Project, a massive coastal resort
mega-project underway in Saudi Arabia
(Narayanan, 2022). Yet only limited scholar-
ship to date has explored the multiple injus-
tices these projects are expected to bring. A
joint social and environmental justice per-
spective is useful to unpack the various
forms of violence, dispossession, and
inequality that new city projects create and
perpetuate.
Further work needs to be done on the
legal contexts of projects such as Forest City
to understand how local laws inequitably
distribute justice in support of private inves-
tors and state actors. International invest-
ment law, property law and the legacies of
colonial British law all need to be disen-
tangled to understand how legal regimes tip
the balance in favour of projects such as
Forest City while denying rights and access
to justice for poor locals. Future research
could also productively interrogate what
‘smart’ refers to in the context of new city
projects, what technologies are being
employed, and how these technologies are at
odds with creating a democratic and equita-
ble society.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank three anonymous
reviewers and the editor for constructive com-
ments and Emma Avery for her insights on
Forest City.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following
financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This research
has been supported by a SSHRC Insight Grant
(#435-2018-0842) and an SSHRC Insight
Development Grant (#430-2021-01032).
ORCID iDs
Sarah Moser https://orcid.org/0000-0002-
5864-8067
Nufar Avni https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8317-
808X
Table 1. Private mega-developments and new city projects on artificial land.
Name of project Location Date
announced
Projected
population
Size Status
Durrat al Bahrain Bahrain 2002 60,000 5 km
2
Nearly
complete
Colombo International
Financial City
Colombo,
Sri Lanka
2011 80,000 2.69 km
2
Underway
Ocean Flower Island Hainan, China 2012 200,000 3.81 km
2
Underway
Forest City Johor, Malaysia 2013 700,000 13.7 km
2
Partially
complete,
stalled
Melaka Gateway Melaka, Malaysia 2014 Unknown 5.5 km
2
Cancelled/on
hold
City of Pearl Manila Bay,
Philippines
2017 500,000 4.1 km
2
Proposed
Red Sea Project Saudi Arabia 2017 1 million
visitors/year
28,000 km
2
Underway
Maharani Energy
Gateway
Muar, Malaysia 2022 Unknown 13.7 km
2
Proposed
Source: Authors.
Moser and Avni 1557
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