Along the thread of fake towns, let’s look at particular instances of small-scale urban plagiarism. Here’s a trio of built duplicates: one to revitalise, another to profit and a third to trick.

In Tyneside, a false shopfront (a possible critique of shopping as a valid form of urban activity?) is providing a pleasant facade to an empty unit. It’s the first in a move to cover up the recession’s impact on the town, which has claimed many businesses. In practical, spatial, architectural terms, this scheme of urban pseudo-renewal “involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required.”

When more are installed, one can anticipate a Learning from Las Vegas-esque survey of these false typologies. My suggestion for the screw-on celebrity chef gastropub? The Flat Duck, or perhaps The Decorated Shed. Or will these instant shops take a more sinister turn? Promenading around your local high street prompts a strange sense of having seen that shop before, on a different street, only a matter of days ago. Townspeople go plagued with deja-vu, when unbeknown to them, it’s merely the same fake deli rotating around empty units, endlessly installed and re-installed in a crazed cycle of urban/consumer/economic denial…

To jump back to reality, here’s a nice link from flat to three-dimensional retail-falsification. Not content with merely producing cheap imitations of electronic goods, the counterfeiting industry has extended to actual shops: fake Apple stores have sprung up in China.

It’s interesting that the fake only gives the game away on particular details, “such as the poor quality of the staircase and a sub-par paint job.” Even the staff thought they were actual Apple employees.*

Comparing Tyneside’s false deli to the pretend Apple stores reveals a particular difference: one implies, whilst the other imitates, a specific retail experience. The deli’s not selling anything – it’s all facade, no content – whereas the store presents a spatial simulation of your fruity expectation.

Furthering the notion of misleading duplicates, in a fantastic example of decoy urbanism, Boeing’s vast wartime factory Plant 2 featured “a whole suburb for camouflage.”

“In 1942, Hollywood set designer and art director John Stewart Detlie was called in to work his magic on Plant 2’s enormous – and very obvious – flat roof.” This is programmatic falsification on a huge scale: a suburb sitting 12 metres above ground, purely for the sake of aerial trickery…

“The picturesque neighbourhood was a clever combination of plywood, clapboard, chicken wire, burlap and many, many litres of paint. The windows may have been painted on, and the houses may not have stood full-height, but they did a very convincing job from the air.”

An extraordinary facility masquerading as something entirely ordinary. FACTORY = SUBURB. It’s ludicrous and brilliant in equal measure. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, if ever there was one. – * It later transpired that the goods themselves are genuine Apple, but that only adds to the retail Inception going on: real products within a fake shop within a real city (or is the city a copy too? Is it all just a dream?)