At the end of a six-mile road in a dry valley in southern New Mexico, researchers are building a first-of-its-kind testing ground for the future. Here among the cottonwoods and coyotes, they are creating a city designed to serve as a living laboratory for the latest in cutting-edge technology, such as goods-delivering drones and roads filled with driverless cars. It’ll be identical to any other city except for one thing: No one will live there.

Groundbreaking is scheduled to begin in fall 2015 outside Las Cruces for the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation (CITE), a real-life SimCity that resembles a modest American town with a population of 35,000 people spread over roughly 15 square miles. The brainchild of Washington state-based tech development firm Pegasus Global Holdings, it will include tall office buildings, narrow alleys, parks, houses, churches, a simulated interstate highway, even a gas station and a big box store. There will be urban, rural, and suburban zones and, below ground, it will have the typical support infrastructure, including utilities and telecommunications.

The goal of CITE is to provide an opportunity to test large-scale tech experiments in real-world conditions “without anyone getting hurt,” explains Bob Brumley, managing director of Pegasus. (Previously, Brumley was CEO of a satellite and telecomm company, and he chaired the Reagan Administration policy group that privatized commercial space transportation.) Brumley hopes to have the utilities infrastructure done in about 24 months and the city built between 2018 and 2020. If CITE succeeds, it will provide a fascinating peek into how weird and wonderful our future cities might be.

Sidestepping Those Pesky Humans

Think of CITE as a full-scale lab for next-generation urban planning. Experiments could revolve around intelligent transportation systems (such as AI-enabled traffic management and roads filled with driverless delivery vehicles), alternative energy power generation (including solar and geothermal), smart grid technologies, or experiments in the areas of data collection‎, sensors, public monitoring, security, and computer systems.

“It will be a true laboratory without the complication and safety issues associated with residents,” Brumley says. “Here you can break things and run into things, and get used to how they work, before taking them out into the market.”

One experiment, Brumley explains, could involve coordinating a fleet of driverless freight trucks controlled by a centralized wireless network. Testing unmanned trucks on a real highway would be a logistical nightmare, but at the unpopulated CITE it would just be another day on the job. Another might involve fleets of small drones dropping packages on doorsteps.

But what happens if, say, spectrum interference occurs during those deliveries, or with driverless cars at rush hour, even for just a moment? Researchers at CITE could use these experiments to perform a controlled interference with existing wireless systems, which is difficult to test at scale.

On the security side, Brumley adds, the city could also simulate a large-scale real-time attack on energy, telco, traffic systems or simulate the effect of a massive electromagnetic pulse attack on all of the integrated circuits in our economy. In testing new forms of power, CITE could also try previously unlicensed energy sources producing at scale, such as a thorium nuclear reactor.

Some futurists are skeptical, saying the SimCity approach sidesteps a critical challenge. “One of the most difficult things to do when developing these new technologies is have them safely navigate around people, who are unpredictable and can suddenly jump out in front of something,” says Reese Jones, an associate founder of Singularity University, which helps organizations learn how cutting-edge tech can help solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. In addition, “a desert doesn’t have snow or rain or trees. Some of the key issues are concerned with weather conditions, rather than circumventing fixed physical objects. The time of testing in a desert was 10 years ago. Now we need real-world conditions.”

Brumley counters: “If the human experience is a key part of the test, we can add people at any time.”





Where the Wild West Meets Tomorrowland

This portion of state, just 60 miles north of the Mexican border, is no stranger to futuristic planning that stretches the limits of imagination. In 1944, the White Sands Missile Range was established nearby; it was there, in July 1945, that the first nuclear device was detonated. Up the road is Spaceport America, a newly built commercial spaceport that boasts tenant companies like Virgin Galactic and SpaceX.

The entire costs of the project, Brumley says, will be about $550-600 million in direct investments, with an estimated total of about $1 billion of investment over the next five years as the city grows in size and complexity within five years.

Although the plan for CITE was announced in 2011, it was delayed in July 2012 due to land suitability issues. Another site was taken off the consideration list in May 2014 when President Obama declared that nearly a half-million acres of land in southern New Mexico would be protected as part of the new Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.

Critics thought those delays might be the end of the grand experiment, but Pegasus persevered and it’s ready to go. “We believe this would be a great place where someone like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk could test something at scale before bringing [it] into the marketplace,” Brumley says. “We hope they feel that way too.”

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