The world is full of architectural fake overs, from individual facades to entire buildings designed to look like something other than what they really are. Historically, some of these disguises have been less well-intentioned than others. During World War II, Nazis gave the Red Cross access to a concentration camp but they controlled the experience, putting up false fronts to make it seem more humane. Along similarly duplicitous lines, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez reportedly had workers paint the bottoms of potholes along the routes taken by foreign dignitaries to disguise the degree of road disrepair.

When President Vladimir Putin was scheduled to visit a largely abandoned town, entire vernacular facade-covering banners were hung over rundown building exteriors. Colorful faux painted walls, windows and even cats were draped over the sides of derelict structures. Some of these quirky examples may sound outdated or limited to extreme regimes, but similar trickery can be found around the world. In anticipation of an upcoming G8 summit in 2013, for instance, closed storefront windows in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland were populated with images depicting open businesses stocked with goods, an illusion set up to impress visitors.

Sometimes, subterfuge is about making something look better, a kind of economic camouflage, but it can also be about political or military concealment. In World War II, a the entire rooftop of a Seattle airplane manufacturing plant was covered with a fake suburb complete with plywood streets, sidewalks, trees and houses. This elaborate deception was erected to conceal a vital piece of wartime infrastructure, confusing potential enemy spy planes and bombers that might pass overhead. In hindsight, attacks on the American mainland might sound improbable, but in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack the people in power were taking no chances.

Many misleading designs are less elaborate but also far more prevalent than most people realize. Hiding in plain sight in cities like New York, London, Paris and Toronto, among others, some architectural facades have been used to cover up infrastructure including sewer and subway exhaust vents. In other cases, entire fake buildings have been built as shells around around facilities like electrical substations. Similar strategies have been employed to reduce the appearance of blight in cities including Cincinnati, Cleveland and Chicago, where fake interior scenes have been applied to boarded-up windows on homes and businesses.

Not all of these fakes are meant to distort reality or create believable illusions. Test track villages in places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, for instance, are used to help study road conditions and try out new autonomous vehicle technologies.

There are also “Hogan’s Alleys” around the world — fake towns made for training police, military and other emergency personnel by setting up simulated crimes, riots and terrorist attacks in semi-realistic built environments. Some of these can be quite detailed, like Survival Town, an entire development complete with furniture and mannequins built simply to be blown in bomb tests. Whatever their particular form and intended level of deception, all of these fake places share a common designation — and so-called “Potemkin Villages” have a strangely compelling origin story.

The Original Potempkin Village

A Potempkin Village is a false front designed to cover facts with fictions, painting a better picture (literally or otherwise) over the face of a less attractive reality. The name comes from governor Grigory Potemkin who, as the story goes, wanted to impress his former lover, Russian Empress Catherine II, as she toured the Crimean countryside in the wake of war. To win her approval, he concocted one of the craziest architectural plans in history, involving the erection of entire portable villages at various locations along the way. These fake towns would be disassembled when her delegation passed by on a barge and then moved downstream along the Dnieper River to be rapidly reconstructed at the next stop on the route — the changeovers happened while the empress slept.

Thus, the same faux buildings would be seen over and over again in new contexts by her highness and other ambassadors. Potempkin’s underlings, meanwhile, would dress up and pretend to live in these places along the way. While it can be hard to disentangle facts from fantasies in this particularly peculiar history, one thing is certain: from these stories arose the idea of the “Potemkin Village,” which came to have political and economic as well as architectural meaning.

Potempkin’s story is extreme, but his motivations are relateable — he was driven by that same desire ordinary people have to make their homes a bit tidier than usual when entertaining guests or that inspires business owners to put slightly idealized versions of their wares upfront on display. The difference is arguably one of scale and degree, and his position of power and authority enabled him to take things further. In the realm of international economics, politics, business and military operations, such deceptions can indeed become massive, surreal and in rare cases are persistently maintained, even when people know a place is fake.

The World’s Biggest Facade

Perhaps the most sizable and strange contemporary example is the village of Kijong-dong, located near the Korean Demilitarized Zone. To understand this place, though, one needs to first understand the context in which it was constructed.

The Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) have effectively been at war for over 60 years. The Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the active hostilities of the Korean War in 1953, but it was only meant to be a temporary measure. Absent a more permanent settlement, the conflict technically remains open-ended. The resulting KMZ spans 160 miles from coast to coast and is 2.5 miles wide with the Military Demarcation Line running down the center. To this day, the border between remains one of the most militarized in the world as both sides claim the right to govern the whole Korean peninsula. Along the border, both North and South Korea maintain “peace villages,” each of which is peculiar in its own way.

On the south side, residents of Daeseong-dong live tax-free and exempt from military service. The place may seem a bit artificial, but it has real residents living out their real lives. On the north side, the situation appears much stranger — even at a glance, Kijong-dong looks conspicuously luxurious for a rural North Korean town. Interior lights turn on and off at set times while street-sweeping caretakers and other “citizens” are positioned to make it look occupied. “Farmers” show up during the day but depart at night rather than heading into one of the “buildings” where people might be expected to live.

North Korea is well known for guiding visitors through particular routes of its capital city and controlling the experience of travelers to the country, but Kijong-dong takes this kind of coercive deception to the next level, staging an entire town for display complete with a support cast and crew. However real and fake modern accounts of Potempkin’s historical efforts may be, he would presumably at least be impressed by the effort.

Construction is a deadly industry. Falls, electrocution, blunt force trauma and mishaps with heavy machinery are just a few of the hazards workers face on project sites around the world, whether they’re building a small house or a massive dam. Historically, it hasn’t just been the nature of the work that makes this job so dangerous, but also attempts to cut costs and boost productivity at the expense of worker safety. Though tighter regulations have made mass worker deaths less common, they still happen, and the numbers can still be shocking.

When we calculate the costs for major infrastructure projects, we rarely include human lives in the figures. How do we do that math, anyway? Bridges, canals, tunnels, dams, railways and highways have made a lot of human “progress” possible over the last two centuries, but it’s worthwhile to consider their true toll – and remember that many of the dead were migrant workers, colonized people and prisoners.

Death and the Dam

Even putting aside the environmental cost of dams – which have the greatest negative impact on rivers of all human activities – these behemoth structures are wildly expensive, and thousands of lives have been sacrificed to build them. The Hoover Dam, a 1,244-foot-long, 726-foot tall monstrosity on the Colorado River that holds back so much water it actually deformed the Earth’s crust, famously involved over 100 deaths throughout its construction between 1922 and 1935. The first was J.G. Tierney, a surveyor who drowned while looking for an ideal spot, and the last, strangely enough, was Tierney’s own son Patrick, an electrician’s assistant who fell from an intake tower.

In between were at least 100 “industrial fatalities” and dozens of deaths officially attributed to pneumonia but possibly linked to carbon monoxide poisoning. Workers often found themselves using gasoline-powered equipment in poorly ventilated spaces that reached temperatures as high as 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Though legend has it that some of the men are buried in the Hoover Dam, it’s unclear whether there’s any truth to it – unlike a similar situation at Montana’s Fort Peck Dam. When a 1938 structural failure caused 34 workers to become trapped by debris, eight died, and only two bodies were recovered. The other six remain entombed somewhere beneath all that shale, bentonite and concrete.

In Washington State, the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam not only damaged crucial salmon runs and flooded the traditional fishing sites, burial grounds and sacred cultural gathering places of the Spokane Tribe without adequate compensation, it resulted in the death of 77 workers between 1933 and 1941 and another four during construction of the Third Powerhouse between 1967 and 1975. As of 2018, there’s no monument or placard honoring any of the lives lost. Other dams along the Columbia, including the Bonneville, The Dalles, the John Day and the McNary, displaced the Native American tribes who lived along the shores of the Columbia River for millennia, leading to generational poverty that makes the true death toll of the dams a lot higher than the official numbers from the time of their construction.

The single deadliest dam remains the Aswan on the Nile River in Egypt, which took over 30,000 workers a decade to complete and resulted in 550 deaths. This didn’t happen at the turn of the 20th century, but rather 1960-70. Though it’s credited with boosting the Egyptian economy, at least 100,000 people had to be relocated, and many priceless archaeological sites were flooded.

Tragic Tunnel Disasters

One of the worst industrial disasters in United States history, the Hawks Nest Tunnel began as a diversion project for the New River in West Virginia. When workers discovered valuable silica in the rock, they were asked to mine it as a byproduct of construction – without any protective gear. All the dust they inhaled led to a disease known as silicosis, a lung disease marked by inflammation and scarring. The official death count is 109, but due to the number of workers who quit in the midst of the project, the number could be as high as 1,000.

New York City’s Third Water Tunnel has been under construction since 1970, and it’s still not complete. The largest capital construction project in New York City history, the tunnel is located more than 500 feet below street level and will ultimately stretch more than 60 miles once the third and fourth sections are finally built. Twenty-four deaths are attributed to the project, mostly consisting of workers, but also including a twelve-year-old boy who fell into an uncapped water pipe in the Bronx.

And, in Switzerland, 19 people died while working on the ten-mile St. Gotthard Road Tunnel, which connects central Switzerland to Milan, Italy through the Alps, with an additional 8 perishing during the construction of the separate 35.5-mile Gotthard Base Tunnel, the world’s longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel.

Treacherous Highways & Railways

Connecting Pakistan and western China through the Himalaya Mountains, the Karakoram Highway is the highest paved road on Earth and passes through the 15,397-foot Khunjerab Pass, the world’s highest border crossing. It’s full of hairpin curves and deadly drop-offs and often gives drivers altitude sickness, making it dangerous to navigate. It was also unsurprisingly arduous to build. 810 Pakistani workers and 82 Chinese workers died due to landslides and falls throughout its 27 years of construction between 1959 and 1986.

Constructing railways is even more treacherous. The First Transcontinental Railroad, a 1,912-mile continuous rail line built between 1863 and 1869 from the eastern U.S. rail network at Omaha, Nebraska to San Francisco made California and the rest of the West Coast of the United States accessible during a time of westward expansion. Americans were free to travel from coast to coast with unprecedented ease, and the railroad enabled the shipment of millions of dollars worth of freight every year. It also had a massive impact on the Native Americans through whose lands the railroad passed, resulting in cultural, economic and human destruction that’s hard to quantify, including the loss of the bison many tribes relied on for survival. The tribes who did attempt to fight back, like the Paiute, were dismissed as saboteurs.

Meanwhile, the manual labor required to produce the railroad was almost entirely carried out by thousands of emigrant workers from China, who received less pay than white workers for difficult and dangerous tasks. The Central Pacific didn’t keep records of worker deaths, but it’s estimated that some 1,200 died. They were temporarily buried along the rail line by fellow workers, the bones collected and shipped back to China at a later date according to Chinese practice.

The Burma-Siam Railway is nicknamed “The Railway of Death” for a reason. Built by the Empire of Japan in 1943 to support its forces in the Burma campaign of World War II, the railroad was completed using the forced labor of up to 250,000 Southeast Asian civilians and 61,000 Allied prisoners of war. Conditions in the jungle were so brutal, with guards beating and torturing workers and not enough food and medicine to go around, that an astonishing 90,000 laborers and 16,000 Allied prisoners died.

The High Cost of Huge Canal Projects

Hailed as one of the greatest infrastructure projects the world has ever seen, the 48-mile Panama Canal required the removal of more than 3.5 billion cubic feet of dirt to connect the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific Ocean through the Isthmus of Panama, diverting the Chagres River and creating the artificial Gatun Lake. France began the project in 1991, but engineering challenges and a high worker mortality rate brought their efforts to a stop, and the United States took over in 1904. Ten years later, it was open for business.

The Panama Canal is often considered one of the wonders of the modern world, and its annual traffic is estimated to be over 15,000 vessels. A grandiose display of American exceptionalism that helped make the U.S. a major world power, the project forever changed Panama’s culture. But it came at the cost of at least 5,609 lives (likely far more than that, by many historians’ calculations), most of whom were contract workers from the Caribbean.

In 1931, the Soviet Union put 126,000 gulag inmates to work on the White Sea – Baltic Sea Canal, a ship canal running through Russia from the White Sea in the Arctic Ocean to the Baltic Sea in St. Petersburg. The 141-mile route was hailed as a success for its quick construction, completed four months ahead of schedule using almost entirely manual labor, though it ultimately wasn’t as deep as originally planned due to cost issues. Though prison labor projects weren’t usually publicized, the White Sea project was an exception, with the Soviet Union boasting about how the “class enemies” (political prisoners) rehabilitated themselves in the process. Prisoners who were able to complete their work the fastest were rewarded with food. Needless to say, conditions were rough, and though it’s unclear exactly how many died, estimates generally run around 25,000.

Clearly, well-built infrastructure is a crucial component of the modern world. But if we can learn anything from the mistakes humans have made throughout history, perhaps we should keep in mind just how much we’ve sacrificed to reach this point and how much thought we should put into the impact of each and every project, from design to demolition and beyond.

When it rains, it can pour, but in the world’s drylands the net result can be disastrous: flows of water washing away useful soil and what little gets left behind dries up, forcing locals to take long treks to find more during dry seasons. Unless, that is, these flows are stopped by sand dams.

Sand dams are simple but effective on multiple levels. Like normal dams, they involve walling off areas where water flows — channels that turn into streams and rivers when it rains. They trap water (up to millions of gallons per dam), which can sink into the sand for longer-term storage above the dam (then be tapped via pipes below).

Sand dams also help keep valuable soil in place, preserving and creating new areas of arable land around them. The sand also helps filter and protect these water sources from contamination and disease.

So far, the charity pioneering these (called Excellent) has worked in multiple countries across Africa to construct around 1,000 sand dams, but they are branching out, too, aiming to take this technology to South America and South Asia as well. Their strategy is to partner with communities, helping them build out sand dams and spread knowledge of their construction as well.

“Sand dams transform lives,” explains the charity. “They provide a sustainable, clean, local source of water for rural communities, saving time and creating opportunities for farming, education and poverty alleviation. By breaking the cycle of dependence Sand Dams create choice; freeing people to realise their own potential.”

As cities grow and change, complex networks of elevated concrete highways and railways sprout up like vines, twist around each other and radically transform the space beneath them. Formerly vibrant urban districts are shrouded in darkness, and the potential to use that space is often wasted as officials fence it off or incorporate hostile features into the infrastructure to ward off loiterers and people lacking housing. Over time, some of those elevated roads might become obsolete, making the whole area feel like an urban wasteland.

But the need to make use of every available square foot of land is intensifying – and city planners working on the viaducts and overpasses of the future should probably take note of how that land is currently being reclaimed and rehabilitated to enhance its value to surrounding communities.

After the success of the High Line in New York City, an elevated linear park running along a former New York Central Railroad spur, many cities have begun transforming their own underpasses, viaducts, abandoned highway sections and even the tops of tunnels into verdant public spaces.

Atlanta’s BeltLine, Detroit’s Dequindre Cut and Washington D.C.’s planned 11th Street Bridge Park all demonstrate the how valuable the land can be to residents living nearby once it’s reactivated. These underpass parks can be surprisingly vibrant, like the 8-acre Underground at Ink Block park in Boston, Houston’s Sabine Promenade (top) or Toronto’s Bentway, which includes a 720-foot ice skate trail. Skate parks, like Portland’s Burnside ramps, are a natural fit.

Art installations brighten up cavernous underpass spaces, whether with colorful lights like San Antonio’s temporary Ballroom Luminoso installation by JB Public Art or with oversized sculptural elements like the flowers of Glasgow’s Phoenix Park. Some underpass spaces draw regular crowds as venues for movies or events, like Folly for a Flyover by Assemble in Hackney Wick, England.

In Yokohama, Japan, a notorious red light district flourished beneath an overpass for decades before authorities wiped out it, turning a bustling (if crime-ridden) area into a ghost town virtually overnight. A recent redevelopment project called the Koganecho Centre tucks a complex of new buildings into this underutilized space to make it functional for residents in a new way, adding an art gallery, a cafe, a meeting space, an artist’s atelier and an open-air piazza to a 328-foot stretch under the concrete arches.

Housing can take shape around and beneath viaducts, too. In 2005, Zaha Hadid completed the Spittelau Viaducts Housing Project as part of a waterside revitalization scheme in Vienna, Austria. A three-part structure of apartments, offices and artist studios winds through, around and beneath a disused railway viaduct, playfully interacting with it while creating a contrast between old and new. Even tiny slivers of land beside viaducts can avoid feeling dwarfed, darkened and constrained by the infrastructure when cleverly designed, like the narrow Archway Studios live-work space by Undercurrent Architects or the Koops Mill mixed-use development occupying a former brownfield (both in London.)

Unfortunately, even when they become magnets for pedestrians, cyclists, families and tourists, these urban revitalization projects aren’t all sunshine and rainbow bike racks. Some of them perpetuate cycles of displacement, pushing low-income and other marginalized populations further away from amenities instead of serving them. Urban infrastructure projects are often built in poorer areas of town in the first place.

Transforming empty space into parks and venues might improve them, but it might attract deeper-pocketed buyers to the area, too. The High Line, for example, is currently struggling to make up for the imbalances it has created in once-affordable areas of Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Incentivizing affordable housing developments along with all the other elements of an underpass or viaduct makeover could help build equity into these projects from the beginning phases.

You may think you’ve made it when your military base, hospital or corporate HQ boasts a helipad but sooner or later, the whirled WILL come to an end.

Genting Highlands Resort (now Resorts World Genting) opened in 1965 as an integrated community of hotels, shopping malls, theme parks and casinos. Situated 5,900 feet above sea level at the peak of Mount Ulu Kali on the border of Malaysia’s Pahang and Selangor states, the complex was/is an ideal summer getaway for the wealthy – or just the weekend wealthy. The latter travel by highway, the former prefer helicopters.

One of the resort’s helipads was deemed to be superfluous in 2015 but instead of demolition, the abandoned pad was entrusted to an arts collective. As documented by Flickr member Le Trang (Trang T. Le), the artists employed discarded materials to create a fantastic mindscape featuring a giant hibiscus (Malaysia’s national flower) and a huge 3D bird.

Drone: Legacy

Just as most sports car drivers aspire to spin their wheels on a race track, drone owners (droners?) salivate at the thought of launching from a helipad… or so we assume. Then there’s this guy – Dron odromo (dronodromo1) at Flickr – whose stated mission is “Find an abandoned helipad. Have to take off from it.” Dude’s livin’ the drone dream!

Prehistoric Man

The Man Appalachian Regional Hospital in Man, West Virginia opened in 1954 and closed in 2001 as the region’s population has been falling for decades. Less than 1,000 people live in Man now.

Flickr member DunMiff/sys snapped the above photos of the abandoned hospital’s asphalt helipad in May of 2010. The decline of the coal industry means fewer chronic care and emergency patients. If MAGA revives Big Coal and the need for this hospital, that would be great… wouldn’t it?

Too late: the hospital and its associated infrastructure were demolished in 2012. Thanks, Obama.

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