Standing in the middle of the desert are rows of concrete sentinels, the half-constructed shells of ghosts.
Tower blocks consisting of thousands of homes stand largely empty, a warning to any overzealous city planners for what not to do.
These are Iran's attempts at building a 'paradise city' as a satellite to their capital city of Tehran, but it's done little to progress far beyond the status of ghost town.
Tower after identical tower has been plonked atop a barren series of dusty hulls with no character to recommend them, and many of them have simply been abandoned before construction was completed, tombstones to a dead idea.
Advert
This city's name is Pardis, or 'paradise' in English, though one look at the place will tell you it's anything but.
Instead it's a concrete hellscape where many of the homes sit empty and the towers unfinished, while those that are lived in struggle to develop any sort of community.
The place isn't totally abandoned, as a census in 2016 showed that over 70,000 people were living there, but amid the concrete towers there are tens of thousands of unoccupied homes.
What's worse, the ghost town with nobody living there or the one which feels empty despite people actually living there?
It's reminiscent of Malaysia's own ghost town, the 'Forest City' which ended up unfinished and barely occupied.
Just because you build it, it doesn't meant that people will come, while some that were built were destroyed by an earthquake in 2017.
According to the New Yorker, these ghost towns of abandoned towers were supposed to be affordable housing for the people who couldn't afford Tehran's rising property prices.
Describing them as 'satellite towns of sterile high-rises on barren land far from the capital', it's not hard to imagine why these supposed paradises of concrete never really caught on.
Especially not when the towers had 'faulty sewage systems and heating' combined with 'inadequate access to water' and 'intermittent electricity'.
People simply won't want to live somewhere that's too far away from where they'd rather be and wherever you go in this world humans are going to need proper access to water.
While these abandoned projects are supposed to be satellites to Tehran, they are too far away for many people to do anything other than spend all of their day commuting and then working.
The people who do live in these ghost towns spend hours travelling to and from their lonely concrete shells, with little to do but sleep until it's time to get out and commute again.
One wonders what there is to dream for in paradise.
Topics: World News, Weird
Joe Harker