A land reclamation project in the Strait of Johor, which separates the country from the small island state of Singapore, is on hold, after Singapore voiced concerns about the potential transborder impacts.
Forest City is a proposed 2,000-hectare high-rise housing development jutting out from the Malaysian port of Tanjung Pelepas. Construction work began in June 2014, with an expanding sandbar to create new land on which to build.
In response, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong requested that the Malaysian government halt work on the project, and threatened to file a complaint with the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg. An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) report was requested as a result, but has not yet been received.
Interestingly, it is not quite clear which state is behind the land reclamation project. “It is almost certainly not ‘Malaysia’ itself’, concludes Joshua Comaroff in Harvard Design Magazine, noting that the investor for the proposed development is Country Garden Holdings – a Chinese company for which the Sultan of Johor (a regional hereditary ruler) is a minority partner.
Image credit: digitalpimp / Flickr
