‘We don’t do ordinary,” declares the billboard at the entrance to the Battersea power station building site in London, where cranes are busy conjuring up a new world of 3,500 homes, 150 shops and 15,000 jobs from the mud. After standing derelict for decades, Giles Gilbert Scott’s majestic temple to electricity will soon be surrounded by a forest of luxury apartment blocks, some in the shape of thrashing metallic flowers by Frank Gehry, another like a writhing glass snake by Norman Foster, all clustered around a plunging piazza by Bjarke Ingels. It is a heady cocktail of competing forms and egos that will make the gargantuan brick cathedral seem almost humble in comparison.

It is true that the developers of Europe’s largest regeneration project don’t appear to do ordinary. But they don’t seem to do many black people either. In the computer-generated visions emblazoned across the site hoardings, the bustling cafe-lined streets are inhabited by an almost entirely monocultural society of white thirtysomethings. Women with long blond hair and shopping bags, occasionally accessorised with prams, fill the foreground of a scene drenched with that scorching Miami sunshine so familiar to this part of Britain’s capital. “New exciting concept coming soon,” coos another billboard over a vacant shopfront where this tableau is intended to unfold. The new real-estate concept of ethnic cleansing.

It might seem like an odd decision, particularly given that the project is masterminded by a Malaysian consortium, and that the first phase of flats was sold mainly to buyers in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. But therein lies the answer: speak to any property-marketing agency and they will tell you their east-Asian clients are buying a piece of England, which – for them – means blond-haired, blue-eyed Burberry models.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest An Embassy Gardens brochure image. Photograph: PR

The whitewashing continues up the Dubai-style strip of Nine Elms, along the Thames to Vauxhall, where £15bn of international investment is shaping the riverside into a gauntlet of luxury enclaves. Surrounding the new US embassy in a £1bn fortified arc of paranoia, “London’s new diplomatic precinct” of Embassy Gardens trumpets the arrival of “a London address with international significance”. But not that international: its hoardings are once again populated by white models staring into the middle distance, trying their best to look like dashing diplomats as they loll in the glass-bottomed swimming pool that will connect two of the towers, hoping that its glass is as bombproof as the 6in-thick windows of the embassy next door.

It’s the same story down the road at the Albert Embankment, where a clutch of silvery silos by Foster and Partners now stands, topped with £22m penthouses. “When you’re in a place like this, you literally have London at your feet,” proclaims the billboard of the Corniche, showing this new-look London to be a place populated solely by Caucasians. For a bit of balance, a solitary Asian face stares forlornly out from one of the building’s goldfish-bowl windows, trapped in her hermetically sealed investment unit.

The marketers say it’s an accident. “I would be appalled if people thought this was conscious ethnic cleansing,” says William Murray of Wordsearch, the communications agency behind the branding of Battersea power station and many of the world’s most exclusive developments, from the Shard to One World Trade Center in New York. “It just comes down to whatever stock people the rendering company happens to have in its image library. Visualisations are a blunt tool, not something to be relied upon as representative of the place being created. We spend a lot of time discussing what kind of clothes people are wearing, not what colour their skin is.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Advertising for Greenwich Peninsula by Knight Dragon. Photograph: Knight Dragon

As developers compete for attention with ever-more elaborate pieces of “placemaking”, construction hoardings have become a parody of themselves, a phenomenon recorded in all its surreal glory on the Development Aesthetics blog. Property companies no longer build homes, but “curate concepts”. They don’t sell flats, but offer “boutique collections”. On the Greenwich Peninsula, where Hong Kong developer Knight Dragon is busy building a new quarter of 16,000 homes, buyers are invited to “join the land rush”, with an image of white settlers loaded into a horse-drawn wagon. “Be a peninsula original,” along with the other 16,000 lumberjack-shirt-wearing pioneers. Across town, Chelsea Barracks claims to be “the most coveted 12.8 acres in the world,” a place where you can acquire “A Heritage. A Destiny. A Legacy” of Britishness, courtesy of the development arm of the Qatari royal family.

Others are more desperate. “Drink beverages together,” is the glamorous lifestyle opportunity offered by Stratford’s Prospect East, while in the newly minted speculators’ hotbed of Aldgate East, they have decided to do away with any pretence of building actual homes for people to live in. “Off-plan investment opportunities,” trumpets one hoarding. “Proven return. Project 54% growth to 2020.”

As prices have inflated beyond all reason in the capital, investors are flocking to the regions to find better rental yields on “affordable luxury” schemes outside the bubble, from Manchester and Liverpool to Birmingham and Leeds. In Salford Quays, the first of four 26-storey barcode-striped towers is fast rising out of the ground, but there is no marketing suite in sight. The 1,100-flat “X1” scheme is aimed specifically at buy-to-let investors who will likely never even visit, hence the build quality and the towers’ tacky grey livery in keeping with the Carbuncle Cup-winning MediaCityUK complex nearby. A little further east, north Manchester has been rebranded as NOMA, an £800m 20-acre lifestyle concept that claims to be “where the modern world began” – although any evidence of that heritage will soon be trampled beneath “Manchester’s most exclusive and iconic landmark” in the form of a 36-storey slab of luxury flats.

In Liverpool, that historic hub of international trade, the origins of overseas investment are making themselves known more explicitly than ever before with the arrival of New Chinatown, a £200m symbol of “the burgeoning energy and dynamism of modern China transplanted into the heart of an historic world heritage city”. Emerging from behind bright-red billboards below the Anglican Cathedral, the development will feature 800 five-star serviced apartments looking on to a sunken Chinese bazaar, based on the “idea and motif of the awakening dragon – a powerful symbol of China’s resurgence and status as a new global power”. As Hong Kong-based estate agent Neil Jensen told the Guardian: “You can’t just put up a block of flats in Liverpool and expect people to buy it … If you want foreign buyers, there has to be a story.”

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Such stories are increasingly being told on the other side of the world from where the concrete realities are taking shape. Most buyers of these kind of schemes will never see the roadside hoarding, but acquire their assets at an exhibition stand in a far-flung hotel lobby.

In the deserted marketing suite at the Battersea power station site, which is clad with vaguely crumpled metal panels to hint at the coming Gehry, a sales assistant admits that most of the units have already been sold off-plan overseas – but that now I have the chance to buy one back at a premium. “Many of the investors are reselling their units before the project has even been finished,” he says, handing me a PlayStation controller so I can take a walk through my virtual future home. “They only paid 20%, then they’ll sell them on again a year or so before completion and make a load of money, which is pretty cool.” But is it possible that many are ditching their assets as fast as they can, realising there is a huge glut of oversupply at the top end of the market? Thankfully, I’m still in time to snap up a £1.7m Gehry two-bed, or a penthouse on the roof of the power station for £45m.

The globalised nature of the high-end property market is having an interesting effect on how developments are being presented on the street. Given that the UK’s super-prime apartments are increasingly sold elsewhere, via agents trained to ensnare the world’s ultra-high-net-worth individuals, the traditional site hoarding is mutating from a device to sell flats into an instrument to appease the local community. It has evolved from glitzy advert to defensive justification, trumpeting the community benefits that the project will bring.

“Over 50% of the development is public realm,” insists a sign at the foot of the swollen 53-storey shaft of One Blackfriars, a building that attracted ridicule for its promotional video, which featured a young couple arriving in the capital in a private helicopter, visiting museums and “exclusive boutiques” before heading to their penthouse. “50 Shades of Grotesque,” tweeted writer Nereida Diesent. “British condo pitch or trailer for the worst soft-core porn flick ever?” But at least we now know that half of the luxury tower will be open to anyone to walk in whenever they please.

Stung by the widespread animosity, the developer of One Blackfriars, St George, a branch of the Berkeley Group, now stresses the local benefits of its bulbous totem. “Not only building homes, but building futures,” says the hoarding. “Over 200 new jobs created upon completion of the development.” Never mind that the project gets away with providing no affordable housing on site, paying just 4% of its total value to the council instead.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Billboards outside the Corniche. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

The Berkeley Group continues to propagandise its philanthropy across the capital wherever it can. A large sign outside the Corniche lists the total bounty that the developer has magnanimously given back to the community. It asserts that “over the last five years, Berkeley has contributed £1.5bn to pay for affordable housing, as well as £396m to help pay for schools, parks, shops, transport and other public amenities”. The project in question contains “84 affordable senior living homes,” it adds, using the Newspeak definition of affordable: the one-bed retirement flats start at £565,000, and they will be overshadowed by the hotel next door.

I conclude my luxury property safari at the dense thicket of concrete stumps that will soon be Southbank Place, “a location where residents feel they have truly arrived”. This £1.3bn joint venture by the Canary Wharf Group and Qatari Diar will see 900 flats squeezed in behind the London Eye and packed so close together that, according to an independent survey, a third will fall below the minimum daylight standards. The estate agents’ sales strategy identifies the target market as “international tycoons” and “Middle Eastern couples”, but I give it a go anyway. I am greeted by a jovial butler, who politely hides his disbelief at my intention to buy a £1m studio apartment, and ushers me into the oak-lined corridors of County Hall to await my tour of a glowing buffet of Perspex models, where a Chinese family and their agent are exploring touch-screen panoramas of their penthouse options.

It turns out to be an appropriate setting for such a scene. This palatial suite, with windows looking out over the Thames, used to be the office of Ken Livingstone when he was head of the leftwing Greater London Council. As mayor of London, he first opened the doors of the capital to investors as a place to park their cash.

“I was very keen to get foreign investment into London,” Livingstone said in an interview last year. “But that was in terms of constructing developments and creating new jobs, not flogging them off to people who just keep them there in case there is a coup and they have to flee.” Southbank Place will have plenty of those, but it also professes to be a mixed community. The sales assistant assures me there are handful of affordable homes, though I won’t have to meet the residents; they are tucked round the back in a separate block facing the main road.

• This article was amended on 14 April 2017. An earlier version said the first phase of flats in the Battersea power station development was “sold exclusively to buyers in Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong”; that should have said “sold mainly to…”.