By Scott Beauchamp
The Atlantic
Grigory Potemkin, the 18th-century war hero and nobleman, was also Catherine the Great’s lover and military advisor. According to ubiquitous legend, Potemkin fabricated villages along the banks of the Dnieper River in a bid to impress her. Historians aren’t convinced that Potemkin really constructed entire fake villages, their facades illuminated by enormous bonfires—but the concept may not be so far-fetched.
These days, when people talk about a Potemkin village, they’re usually referring to a ruse to make something appear better than it actually is. It’s a useful metaphor, but also a reflection of people’s fascination with fake cities and questions about the line between authenticity and artificiality in man-made environments.
All cities are “fabricated,” of course, in the narrowest of terms. They’re constructed by humans. But Potemkin Villages are fabrications of another order. The distinction between a real village and a Potemkin one might seem stark, but under close examination the definitions can blur. There is, for example, the proliferation of China’s “ghost cities”—left empty as the rate of construction outstrips the rate of home occupancy. On the other end of the spectrum, there are unofficial tent cities of indigent populations, such as the ones that have cropped up on Oahu, in Hawaii. Examples of fabricated cities abound in literature—Joyce’s Ulysses, Magdalena Tulli’s unnamed city in Flaw, or Andrei Bely’sPetersburg—all serving to underscore the interplay of ideas, artificiality, and the actual bricks and mortar that constitute a city.
There is also in the works a plan to build an entire city without residents in the New Mexico desert.
The Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation (or CITE), will be, when finished, a to-scale fabricated town, built to code, complete with schools, roads—basically everything you would consider the necessary components of a functional city. Except, of course, no residents. You can think of CITE as a sort of ghost town in reverse. First the vacant buildings will be constructed, and then the people will come. And while there won’t be actual residents at CITE, there will be visiting scientists, business leaders, and government representatives all passing through. According to its own website, “CITE will be a catalyst for the acceleration of research into applied, market-ready products by providing ‘end to end’ testing and evaluation of emerging technologies and innovations from the world’s public laboratories, universities, and the private sector.” In other words, this ghost town is going to be a giant petri dish for city planning.
When construction is completed in about four years, CITE will be the largest scale testing center on Earth. Meant to simulate a town with a population of 35,000—about the size of Bennington, Vermont—it will cover about 26 square miles and include a city center as well as suburban and rural zones. There will be a city hall, airport, regional mall, power plant, school, church, and gas station. As models go, this one is a behemoth, but necessarily so. Large-scale efficiency and industrial product tests require a lab this size. The bigger the better, in fact. And that’s why Pegasus Global Holdings, the technology company financing CITE, is willing put up the billion dollars that the project is expected to ultimately cost. Pegasus plans to rent the facility out to parties interested in conducting large-scale tests, and they’re anticipating demand.
The simplest way to imagine the sort of large-scale experiments that might eventually take place at CITE is to consider the existent problems of any city. Security and first responder experiments could be conducted. Infrastructure projects like smart grids and more efficient ways to distribute renewable energy could be tested. Nonprofits could practice disaster-relief scenarios. Corporations could also test products on a scale that’s currently implausible. This might be the place where automated driving is perfected or a new kind of wireless communication pioneered.
Read the full article here.