Chilling photographs of an abandoned “Paradise City” in the middle of the desert show decaying towers and roads leading to nowhere.
Located 31 miles from Tehran, Iran’s capital, in an arid landscape, the Mehra Mer project in Pardis has been left abandoned and incomplete.
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What was supposed to be a community equipped with public transportation, hospitals, schools and even parks is now something reminiscent of a post-apocalyptic world.
Built between 2001 and 2011 to help Iran combat its demographic crisis and housing shortage, the tower blocks were supposed to be an affordable alternative for middle-class and low-income workers.
But early apartments had faulty sewage and heating systems, inadequate access to water and intermittent electricity.
Many were also destroyed in the 2017 earthquake, contributing to the large number of homes that were already empty.
Bird’s-eye view images show around 100 tower blocks that appear to have sprouted directly from the ground.
At first glance you could easily mistake the buildings for Lego blocks, but they are actually real.
Basking in the desert heat, they cast large shadows over the rest of the half-finished city.
But that’s all there really is to look at.
The failed project is a basic copy and paste job, with everything exactly the same.
There are no trees, no cars, no parks, no people. There are no signs of life whatsoever.
All you can see are the ghostly buildings, the surrounding desert, and the roads leading to nowhere.
This is because little attention was paid to ecological conditions when builders began building Pardis more than two decades ago.
Inflation rates in a struggling economy also proved to be the final nail in the coffin, making affordable apartments unaffordable for many.
What was originally intended to help house the disadvantaged is now only affordable to the middle class.
Before you knew it, the developers kept the project mid-construction and failed to complete it.
The Mehr housing plan became one of Iran’s biggest failures and a huge obstacle to its economic recovery.
Pardis means “paradise” in Persian, but you couldn’t be further from it if you tried.
Interestingly, some people occupy some of the apartments offered in high-rise buildings.
The last census in 2016 showed a population of 73,363 people in 23,938 households.
Photographer Hashem Shakeri visited Pardis in 2007 and described it as eerily quiet, despite having an estimated population of around 30,000.
Most of the residents have moved to one of Pardis’s desolate cul-de-sacs, but as soon as they are here, they spend most of their days going to and from Tehran, only returning to sleep.
“There is a recurring vicious cycle where people lack sleep: they have to get up early and work late to travel to Tehran, which takes a long time,” Shakeri said. The New Yorker.
“They only sleep in the cities,” he said. “They have to repeat the cycle over and over again.”
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