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.

Pegasus has created renderings of what the finished CITE might look like, and it’s fairly astounding—like a cross between an intentional community and Disney World. There are separate districts in which it will be possible to test distinct products: Energy District, Development District, Water District, Agricultural District, and a downtown area. And each will be connected by an underground nervous system of sensors, water, and sewer systems. Of course, in order to accommodate researchers, there will be a sort of cutting-edge campus with offices, conference rooms, and a hotel.

Pegasus Global Holdings

When researchers will be able to begin work at CITE, though, remains a question. The project was originally slated to break ground in June 2012 near the town of Hobbs, in Southeastern New Mexico’s arid, but resource-rich, Lea County. Sam Cobb, the mayor of Hobbs, was understandably excited about the huge project, not only for the jobs and the money that it would provide, but also for the prestige. “It brings so many great opportunities and puts us on a world stage,” Cobb told the Associated Press three years ago.