It will be a brand-new, from-scratch American city like any other, with urban, suburban, exurban and rural zones dotted with houses, malls, power plants, police and fire stations, missing only one key ingredient: inhabitants. Currently under construction in the New Mexico desert, the Center for Innovation, Testing, and Evaluation (CITE) is a sort of real-life Sim City, the “first of its kind, in scale and scope,” a unique “fully integrated test, evaluation and certification facility dedicated to enabling and facilitating the commercialization of new and emerging technologies.”

Known informally as City Lab (click to enlarge the diagram above), the 26-square-mile urban laboratory complex has a billion-dollar budget and will host all kinds of tests, including but not limited to: intelligent transportation systems, smart grid technologies and green energy strategies. Wired for data collection and replete with tunnels, system-wide scenarios can be monitored in the minutest detail, a dystopian twist on what might otherwise seem an idyllic mid-sized city capable of supporting 35,000 citizens.

Complete with all the infrastructure of a ‘real’ city, the developer’s target clients include university researchers, federal agencies and commercial enterprises. The facility aims to combine elements of private and governmental test environments like Gravesend, a military and police complex in the UK, Liberty City, a drone-oriented cityscape in the US and Mcity, a newly-built autonomous vehicle testing site in Detroit.

If you have one in your town it is a safe bet CITE has one as well, from churches and highways to a city hall and even an airport. While this place contains all a community could ever hope for, the only ‘residents’ of the place will be a staff of over 300 that maintain its infrastructure and supervise experiments. Imagine the reaction of some archeologist from the distant future, seeing a sort of dystopian settlement wired for full surveillance and connected by a vast array of underground tunnels (The Cabin in the Woods comes to mind, poster below), but at the same time oddly unoccupied and devoid of art, brands or billboards.

Noting the lack of these quintessential hallmarks of modern civilization, a professor at the University of New Mexico decided to ask what kind of public art would fit such a strange and made-to-be-deserted city. Her students solicited proposals from around the country and selected a set of winners. Ingenious ideas included: sculptural mounds made from the dirt displaced during excavation, testing paint colors around the complex for durability and weather resistance and a farcical strategy to sell lots and gentrify the faux city.

More from Pegasus Global Holdings: “As a privately-owned, privately-operated test and evaluation center, CITE is open and accessible to a wide array of public and private customer segments – domestic and international. The structure and policies in place at CITE are specifically designed to remove legal, cultural and budgetary impediments as are currently prevalent in the process of moving beyond basic research and development activities.”

Opening this week, Mcity is a completely artificial village for self-driving cars, bringing the future of automobiles back to Michigan, the historical home of Motor City. Taking lessons from military testing facilities like Gravesend in England or Yodaville in the US, the complex is made to simulate a wide variety of conditions.

Featuring 32 acres of roads, intersections, sidewalks, streetlights, signals and building facades, Mcity is part of a statewide effort to advance connected technologies and test autonomous vehicles. More than a simulated combination of urban and suburban environments in their ideal forms, these experimental grounds also incorporate stress-testing defects like graffiti and faded lane markings as well as different street terrains, tunnels, roundabouts and multi-lane freeways on a combination of pavement, cobblestones, gravel, grass and dirt.

Given that all crashes to date involving autonomous cars have been caused by human error, it is critical not only to test the vehicles themselves but also the people they will interact with on the road. In addition to its proximity to Detroit, a key benefit of the Ann Arbor area is the varied weather in the area, with everything from hot humid midsummer days to serious rain, snow and hail in the winter. The test area can be reconfigured on demand to simulate complex intersections, blind corners and other real-world challenges.

The project represents a $10,000,000 private/public partnership between the University of Michigan, local governments and various industries, including but also beyond regional and international automotive powerhouses (Ford, GM, Honda, Nissan, Toyota but also State Farm, Verizon, and Xerox).

“We believe that this transformation to connected and automated mobility will be a game changer for safety, for efficiency, for energy, and for accessibility,” said Peter Sweatman, director of the U-M Mobility Transformation Center. “Our cities will be much better to live in, our suburbs will be much better to live in. These technologies truly open the door to 21st century mobility.”

“In addition to Mcity, MTC has three on-roadway connected and automated vehicle deployments underway. With the help of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, MTC is building on a nearly 3,000-vehicle connected technology project launched three years ago by the U-M Transportation Research Institute to create a major deployment of 9,000 connected vehicles operating across the greater Ann Arbor area. MTC is also partnering with industry and the Michigan Department of Transportation to put 20,000 connected vehicles on the road in Southeast Michigan. The third piece of the plan calls for deploying a 2,000-vehicle mobility service of connected and automated vehicles in Ann Arbor.”

One pleasant spring day in 1955, an atomic bomb blasted an American city into oblivion. This is the story of Survival Town, a purpose-built collection of structures, buildings, even mannequins designed to measure the effects of an atomic weapon used against urban centers. Its optimistic name notwithstanding, Survival Town was destined to become, in a flash, Loserville.

Operation Teapot Steams Up The Desert

(images via: Weird Wild Realm and Deseret News)

It can get hot in Nevada, but 1955 saw temps in selected areas reach that of the surface of the sun. In a roughly three month period in the spring of that year, the U. S. Army set off 14 nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site at Yucca Flats under the name of Operation Teapot. The explosions ranged in yield from 1.2 to 43 kilotons. The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, ten years earlier had a yield of approximately 12 kilotons.

Home Sweet… Uh Oh

(image via: Wired)

The stage was set for Survival Town two years earlier when, on the first day of tests for Operation Upshot-Knothole, the charming 1950’s house above was exposed to an atomic blast. The walls of the house look unnaturally bright in the first image (above top left) because they’re reflecting the light of the just-detonated bomb. The rest, as they say, is history.

“Honey, Call State Farm”

(image via: Corbis)

The Apple-2 test on May 5, 1955… yes, 5/5/55, showed similar results to the 1953 structures and materials test. Civil Defense workers provide a composite Before & After photo of one of the homes built to be destroyed in what is known today as Operation CUE. This rare color photo was taken on May 6, 1955.

Nobody Home, Gone Fission

(image via: Spectrum)

The stark set of photos above shows another Survival Town building that sustained a somewhat less degree of damage – in other words, it wasn’t pulverized into kindling. The Army set up a variety of homes, buildings and other structures at varying distances from Ground Zero in an effort to determine how the power of an atomic blast would carry over an urban landscape.

This video of the “Survival Town Atom Test” is at once cute and creepy, backed by over-the-top melodramatic monster-movie music. Note that “a million dollars worth of equipment was installed”. Who planned this test, Doctor Evil??

Eve Of Destruction

(images via: Nebraska Studies, Curiositas Mundi and OSU Library)

Survival City had it all: homes, buildings, electrical power lines, even people… well, fake people. Got to give the DOD some credit here, they stocked the homes with mannequins sourced from J. C. Penney. On a somewhat freaky note, the Army posed the mannequins in the acts of playing, eating and so on; then left cameras on to record the “fun” that was about to ensue.

Cue The Bomb

(images via: Postapocalypse, Vegaslandfill and National Archives)

The May 5th explosion dubbed Apple-2 took place 9 days late as the test site had been experiencing high winds. When the all-clear was finally given at 8:10am, nearby residents (and those who were tuning live on radio and TV) witnessed an atomic explosion weighing in at 31 kilotons. The explosion’s blast area extended 3 miles out from Ground Zero. Most of the approximately 6,000 spectators watched from about 6 miles away but Army troops in tanks and trenches got a birds-eye view at a mere 2 to 3 miles from the epicenter.

Gosh Mom, We’re Havin’ A Blast!

(images via: Flashpoint)

These rare color photos bring “home” the surreal horror of the mannequin tests with a bit more clarity. Once again the attention to detail is almost disturbing as it shows a typical, “Leave It To Beaver” type family engaged in typical middle-American pursuits, frozen in time just before their demise.

Behlen Buildings Bounce Back

(images via: Nebraska History and Nebraska Studies)

If one recalls anything about the mannequins & materials tests of the early Atomic Age, it’s the exploding houses – they make good visuals. At the time, however, survival was on the nation’s collective mind and though the test subjects of Operation Cue were inanimate, there WERE heroes among them. One of the most celebrated was the Behlen building, a corrugated steel structure that suffered not much more than the odd dent even though it was placed just 6,800 feet from Ground Zero. Behlen got a lot of mileage out of Operation Cue – the building was trucked around to state fairs for years after. The B&W photo above shows the building at the 1955 Nebraska State Fair.

Survival Town Survivors

(images via: Nevada Test Site Tour and Travelrag)

(images via: Seattle Times, Skyscraper City and Auroral Chorus)

You’d think the Army would have destroyed any and all traces of Survival Town once Operation Cue had wound down, but surprisingly some of the buildings remain standing today. The Nevada Department Of Energy conducts tours of the entire test area (no cameras allowed) including the remains of Survival Town, though visitors must be over the age of 14 and pregnant women are advised not to attend – not out of concern for any lingering radioactivity, but due to the long and bumpy bus ride.

(image via: Maison Bisson)

Survival Town, USA… wish you were here?