I was walking beneath the tightly packed, identical high-rise towers of Danga Bay, a new 20,000-person mixed-use development built entirely on reclaimed land in Johor Bahru, in the south of Malaysia, with my camera drawn. I had been writing about new cities and developments like this all over Asia for many years, and doing informal visits where I could get a feel for the place, chatting with home buyers and people running local businesses, was part of my standard operating procedure.

But something happened here that I hadn't experienced before: I was approached by a security agent and was sternly told that I couldn't use my camera—that cameras were not allowed in Danga Bay.

I questioned him: "So in a development where 20,000 people are supposed to live, nobody is allowed to have a camera?"

He said that was correct.