A Giant, Fake City in the Middle of the Desert
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Between that lovely back-of-the-Economist description and the CVs of their management team [1] (DoD, DoD, "aerospace", nuke industry, etc.) it's at least clear they're a Deep State affiliate.
The truth may yet turn out to not be that much stranger than fiction after all.
City planning with real buildings just doesn't make sense. To iterate solutions you need to be able to change quickly, which doesn't work in this case.
But it says: "... 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"
So it seems it's more about testing of technologies inside an urban environment that cannot be tested in real cities (due to risk, exposure, secrecy ?).
Sure sounds a bit sinister if you read between the lines.
Alternately, they might mean technologies for building pre-fabricated structures at a larger scale than is currently done with e.g. townhouse developments.
Its an interesting funding model for ultra extreme real estate speculation. This fits in well with real estate investors tending toward the ultra optimistic, it might not make financial sense, but the mantra of "housing only goes up" "they're not making any more land" will take care of that.
The article alludes to resource-rich environment, so possibly a distant branch of the same company is planning on opening a "xyz" mine or chemical plant or something in five years and they're trying to implement a company town policy and coincidentally there happens to be a town ready for purchase a couple miles from the anticipated mine. Also related to, you move in 35 kiloemployees, and that might help with public support against environmental regulation.
Edit: actually it seems like they plan to rent it out to people funded by grants money and government contracts: Pegasus plans to rent the facility out to parties interested in conducting large-scale tests, and they’re anticipating demand.
If they build it I suppose it might show up in some movies or TV shows, would make an ideal sort of place for anytown USA. And of course if you're building an urban surveillance system or a hunter killer manhack drone, well testing that in a "normal" city would cause too many questions to be raised now wouldn't it :-)
because we all know how big Bennington is.
(This is not a well known place, but one of its schools was in "Saved by the Bell" so there's a tenuous pop culture link.
Wikipedia has several lists of US cities and, being polite, they tend to obscurity at the latter half of the lists. And those are places with over 100,000 people. My town - Cheltenham UK - has about 100,000 people.
So, how do you give an idea of how big a town for 35,000 people is? Number of high schools? Number of Starbucks? The article lists one church. A UK equivalent might list twelve pubs.
(my niece fibbed to me and said it was in "Greece" - something I believed for years. She also told me "oh yeah Deerhoof, they all went to my school" which is also totally untrue.)
after poking around on google maps, most historical towns are quite large now (roanoke, va and plymouth, ma are at least double that size).
bangor, maine is right around 30k. i bet most have at least heard of that town.
most of the famous little towns in the south like savannah, tuscaloosa, galveston are 50-120k+ population. key west is 25k though. with tourists in town i'm guessing it's right near 30k. there's also some really small towns by it that are probably not counted in the city population.
i think you'd be hard pressed to find a more famous 30k population town than key west. i'm willing to bet nearly every adult in the US has heard of the place, and has a pretty good idea in their head what it looks/feels like in terms of population.
It's about twice that.
Take a look at the list of big cities and see how many you know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...
edit- I take that back. Los Gatos is 11 square miles and about 30,000 people. So it is in the ballpark.
The plan sounds wildly implausible because of the immense expense involved. A modern house today costs crudely about 295K to build. To build housing for 35,000 would start at about 10 billion but would probably be several times that for the other amenities. Add to that the fact that, because this won't be a city, everything will be built by companies from out of town, further increasing the costs.
Just as much, unoccupied dwellings and infrastructure require maintenance, sometimes more maintenance than occupied areas since cars driving on streets is what stops grass (or tumble-weeds) from growing, etc.
Moreover, what would it be a model of? The lack of residents would also mean everything would be fairly different from an occupied city.
Testing autonomous vehicles sounds reasonable but it's hard to see that or other hypothetical uses needing an entire purposes built city. A "smart grid" test would require a working power grid. Would you have an unoccupied city with a continuously operating power-grid?
If nothing else, this implausible plans makes me think how interdependent and hard-to-simulate a real, working city is.