It was in 2012 that I first put up a post about CITE, an insta-ghost town planned to be built in the New Mexican desert for the express purpose of testing technologies, and I still can’t say I fully get the concept. Is a discrete soundstage city really required when driverless cars are tested on public streets and highways? Wouldn’t it just be better for tech firms to make agreements with small urban areas for pilot programs? That would seem a truer test.
From Kieron Monks at CNN:
In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
The CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) project is a full-scale model of an ordinary American town. Yet it will be used as a petri dish to develop new technologies that will shape the future of the urban environment.
The $1 billion scheme, led by telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, will see 15-square-miles dedicated to ambitious experiments in fields such as transport, construction, communication and security.•