Grand schemes originally envisioned as the perfect human habitats, many of the world's 'utopian' urban areas ended up as anything but, with some even morphing into hellish dystopias. From the infamous Kowloon Walled City and the crime-ridden Le Vele di Scampia, to Hitler's horrifying Welthauptstadt Germania metropolis, click through the gallery for six of the most notorious failed archetype cities, both projected and realised.

The original Kowloon Walled City was constructed as a military fort, before becoming a Chinese enclave within British Hong Kong in 1898. The 6.4-acre district was laid out in accordance with feng shui principles, which should have made it a harmonious and prosperous place to live. In reality, the utopian vision descended into a chaotic, squalid monstrosity of a slum.

Following World War II, the Chinese government reclaimed the enclave with hopes of turning it into a model city with decent infrastructure, schools, a police force and so on. But then the Communist Revolution happened, and in 1947 more than 2,000 refugees from the mainland were squatting in the settlement. By 1950 their numbers had swelled to 17,000. That year a catastrophic fire broke out, destroying swathes of the shanty town.

The myriad ramshackle huts were simply rebuilt and lawlessness reigned in the enclave, with both the Chinese and British authorities pursuing a hands-off policy. Triad gangs controlled the city which, from the 1950s, was awash with brothels, opium dens, clandestine casinos and other illegal businesses. Needless to say, it fast became a magnet for criminals from far and wide.

A significant wave of construction ensued in the 1960s, with concrete structures built modular-style over existing edifices, eventually standing 14 storeys-high; by the late 1980s, a staggering 33,000 people were living in the one block-sized city, making it the most densely populated place on the planet. A mass of dangerous wires and pipes dripping with raw sewage riddled the dark labyrinthine passageways, while rubbish piled up on the roofs.

Yet despite the squalor, lack of regulation and high crime levels, some residents are said to retain fond memories of living in the enclave, which reportedly had a strong sense of community. This didn't prevent the Walled City's demise, however – in 1987 the Chinese and British authorities finally agreed to raze it to the ground. Residents were rehoused, and the mass of 300 interconnected buildings was demolished by 1994 to make way for a tranquil urban park.

A sci-fi-esque oddity in Arizona's Sonoran Desert, 70 miles north of Phoenix, Arcosanti is an experimental 'city' conceived by Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri showcasing his 'arcology' philosophy, a fusion of architecture and ecology. The idea was to create a super-dense self-sustaining concrete megastructure housing 5,000 people that would work with the environment, not against it.

Soleri bought up 25 acres of land in 1970 and construction began that same year, but to date, only 5% of the proposed city has been completed. And though the concept could be seen as ahead of its time – green urbanism was cutting-edge back in the 1970s – Arcosanti is fundamentally flawed (as was the man who created it).

For starters, the structure – composed of around 10 dilapidated interlinked buildings, the last of which was erected way back in 1989 – is made from concrete, which is extremely damaging to the environment. Plus, according to architect Mark English, Arcosanti is very poorly sited with no natural shading, making it thoroughly unsuitable for the hot desert climate.

Ostensibly designed to be self-sufficient, Arcosanti is anything but. The 50 or so residents rely on mains power to live there, and nothing is cultivated on the site apart from some non-native plants – another ecology no-no. A slew of visitors have commented on the place's eerie vibe, with one reviewer on Tripadvisor likening Arcosanti to a “post apocalyptic cult-like compound”.

Soleri did indeed attract a cult-like following, effectively using his adoring fanbase – who worked for minimum wage, or for nothing – to construct the unfinished 'city'. A monument to one man's misguided vision, Arcosanti is a failure in almost every respect.

Envisaged as a utopian city to replace the slums of medieval central Naples, Le Vele di Scampia ('the Sails of Scampia') was a housing project dreamt up in the early 1960s by local architect Franz di Salvo, who drew inspiration from Le Corbusier's Unité d’Habitation as well as Kenzo Tange's iconic trestle designs.

The idea was to reimagine the ancient alleyways and courtyards of the old city where people would congregate, and create green spaces while keeping the residences minimal to foster community interaction. Built in a sail-like form (hence the name), the complex of seven enormous brutalist buildings was to have included schools, service areas, churches and other amenities.

Le Vele di Scampia was constructed between 1962 and 1975, but failed miserably at living up to di Salvo's idealistic plans. The amenities were scrapped, walkways were narrowed, communal spaces within the structures got ditched and the blocks were built too close to one another, inhibiting natural light, while many of the apartments lacked essentials such as electricity and working toilets.

Following the devastating earthquake that struck southern Italy in 1980, thousands made homeless by the disaster flocked to the housing project, squatting in vacant apartments. This, together with the buildings' criminal-friendly design, provided a breeding ground for illegal activity and Camorra gangsters soon took over. They began selling smuggled cigarettes and counterfeit clothing in the largely unpoliced zone but swiftly moved on to hawking hard drugs.

Le Vele di Scampia became Europe's premier drug-dealing hotspot, and though three of its buildings were torn down from 1997 to 2003, by the mid-2000s murders were an almost everyday occurrence. The housing project became the setting of Robert Saviano's acclaimed book, movie and TV series Gomorrah. But three of the surviving blocks are undergoing demolition, while the last remaining one is set to be repurposed as offices, and the entire area is being regenerated.

In 2017, Waterfront Toronto – a partnership between the City of Toronto, Province of Ontario and Canadian government – launched a global competition and selected Google's urban planning subsidiary Sidewalk Labs to design a futuristic smart mini-city along a 12-acre site on Toronto's eastern waterfront.

The hyper-connected development was promoted as an environmentally sound utopia incorporating a host of green features and wow-factor tech such as carbon-neutral wooden skyscrapers, heated bike lanes powered by solar energy and even a network of underground tunnels through which an army of robots would make deliveries and collect waste for recycling.

The city would be kitted out with sensors and cameras monitoring residents' behaviour and harvesting data, from how they use their household appliances and cross the street to what time they cycle to work. The info would then be analysed by AI-powered computers using algorithms to “better match supply and demand” and make the city more liveable. 

The project was lauded by the Google offshoot as “the future of sustainable development”, but sceptics lined up to pour scorn on the plans, slamming the smart city as an Orwellian data-stealing dystopia straight out of an episode of Black Mirror, with BlackBerry cofounder Jim Balsillie and early Google and Facebook investor Roger McNamee calling it an example of “surveillance capitalism”.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association went as far as to sue Waterfront Toronto for infringing citizens' privacy rights and even the partnership itself was critical of the project, calling aspects “irrelevant” and “unnecessary”. Sidewalk Labs strenuously denied the data collected would be used for nefarious purposes, but ultimately killed the troubled development, blaming COVID-related economic uncertainty rather than the widespread opposition when it pulled the plug in June 2020. 

Back in the 1920s, the British Empire had a stranglehold on rubber production and was able to keep prices of the commodity artificially high, exasperating Henry Ford, whose eponymous company had a huge need for the material to make tyres and other essential auto components. The pioneering carmaker's answer was to create his very own latex-producing model city deep in the Amazon jungle of Brazil.

Christened Fordlandia, the planned city was established in 1928 after Ford negotiated a deal with the Brazilian government for 3,900 square miles of land in exchange for a cut of the profits. A population of 10,000 was projected and the city was laid out on a US-style grid pattern with American-inspired houses, schools, a hospital, library, hotel and leisure amenities such as a swimming pool and golf course, with the chief landmark being a soaring water tower.

The model rainforest community was beset by problems from the get-go. Housed in inferior accommodation to the American managers, local workers rebelled against the strict rules opposed upon them, which included bans on alcohol, tobacco, pre-marital sex and even playing football. The workers were also compelled to eat American food they was unaccustomed to, including oatmeal, wholemeal bread, hamburgers and canned peaches.

Tensions came to a head in 1930, following an argument over the way the food was served in the main cafeteria, which sparked a riot that left parts of the city destroyed. These problems were compounded by the abject failure of the rubber plantations, which had been planned by Americans with little knowledge of the local ecology. Positioned too close together, the rubber trees became plagued with diseases and pests.

Not a single drop of latex from Fordlandia made it into a Ford car. The plantation was abandoned in 1934 and operations moved to a new site called Belterra, 62 miles away. But this too proved a failure, and in 1945 Ford sold its rubber interests to the Brazilian government at an enormous loss. Vacant for decades, Fordlandia has enjoyed something of a revival in recent years and now boasts a population of around 3,000.

Staying in Brazil, the country's new capital Brasilia was hailed as a modernist miracle upon its inauguration in 1960. Built from scratch in a mere 41 months, the gleaming city was partly inspired by a prophetic dream the Italian saint Don Bosco had in 1883, of a utopian place in the New World roughly in the location of the planned metropolis, which is situated on an isolated plateau.

Brazil's capital had been moved from Rio de Janeiro for a variety of reasons, including to avoid a maritime attack on the seat of government, and to draw people away from the crowded coast to the sparsely populated heartland of the country. Laid out by urban planner Lúcio Costa, Brasilia became a showpiece for architect Oscar Niemeyer's expansive, brutalist buildings.

The city's layout mimics the shape of a plane, with the centre or 'fuselage' consisting of the Monumental Axis – made up of two extra-wide avenues, dotted with imposing brutalist structures, flanking a massive park – while the Residential Axis comprises the 'wings', nodding to Le Corbusier's unrealised Ville Radieuse and containing numerous high-rises.

Brasilia features the sort of soulless architecture that tends to be loved by elite critics and architects like Norman Foster (who describes Niemeyer's buildings as “hauntingly beautiful”), but loathed by ordinary people who actually have to live and work in them. And that's not the only issue with this artificial city. Designed for the car rather than the pedestrian, the streets in the centre are devoid of life and character.

Described by one commentator as “a warning to urban dreamers”, the city was demarcated into sectors with no mixed-use areas, making it exceedingly unliveable. Coupled with overpopulation, rife inequality – the poor live in grim favelas on the outskirts – high crime levels and severe traffic congestion, Brasilia is far from the utopia it set out to be. 

Magnitogorsk was designed for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as the world's first completely planned city. Founded in 1929, the one-industry steel-producing city was built along the Ural River at the foot of the iron ore-rich Gora Magnitnaya ('Magnetic Mountain') and billed as a socialist workers' paradise. But it turned into hell on earth.

Ironically, the Soviet authorities relied on the nation's capitalist arch-enemy America to make the "steel heart of the motherland" a reality, hiring US engineers to design the main metals plant, which was completed at breakneck speed. The rest of the city, however, was painfully slow to take shape and workers endured horrific living conditions for years.

Slave labourers – peasants who had been evicted from their farms – made up much of the early workforce. They lived in vermin-infested tents and makeshift barracks, enduring severe cold in winter, blistering heat and dust storms in summer, chronic hunger and diseases like typhus and scarlet fever. Even by 1939, the city had just one hospital, despite a fast-growing population which then stood at 200,000.

Many of the city's buildings were erected after World War II – Magnitogorsk had played a crucial role in the 'Great Patriotic War', supplying steel for the war effort. But while residents had access to facilities ranging from communal baths and canteens to libraries and cinemas, amenities tended to be limited and housing stock ugly and substandard. Shopping for food and other items is said to have been called “hunting” by residents, due to the challenge of finding anything to actually buy.

And then there is the city's shocking pollution levels. The steelworks have emitted hundreds of thousands of tons of industrial waste over the decades, including 68 known toxins, which has had a terrible effect on the wellbeing of the population. Only one in twenty children in the city are born in good health, and rates of cancer and many other serious diseases are worryingly high.

Welthauptstadt Germania ('World Capital Germania') was Adolf Hitler's jaw-dropping redevelopment plan for Berlin. His "utopian" vision of an imperial metropolis “comparable only to ancient Egypt, Babylon or Rome” would have been a totalitarian nightmare had the unthinkable happened and the Nazis emerged as victors in World War II.

Designed by Albert Speer, "the first architect of the Third Reich", the monstrous overhaul of Berlin would have involved the destruction of up to 100,000 homes and countless other buildings, and entailed the construction of various colossal and intimidating structures centred around an extra-wide 'Avenue of Splendours', with the enormous 'Triumphal Arch' as the southern end.

Brought to life in CGI in Amazon's The Man in the High Castle, the city would have been dominated by the Volkshalle ('People's Hall'), which would have had a capacity of 180,000 and featured a dome 16 times higher than the Vatican's St Peter's Basilica, so lofty in fact that it is said clouds would have formed inside it. Bolstering the city's dystopian vibe would be its lack of trams and traffic lights, which Speer opposed, no doubt creating traffic chaos.

A completion date of 1950 was set for Welthauptstadt Germania, and several structures were finished, including the New Reich Chancellery (pictured) and Tourist House, both of which were demolished after the war. A test structure was also built, which still stands today. It was erected to mimic the weight of one of the pillars of the 'Triumphal Arch'.

However, the test failed, and the pillar sunk some way into the ground – Berlin is built on marshland. It's unlikely many of the monumental structures would have been viable. Tragically, tens of thousands of forced labourers died quarrying stone for the new city, and in all likelihood untold others would have perished constructing it, had the Nazis won the war. 

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