“Ghost City” testbed for Smart City Technology
Posted by George Martinidis at 17 May 2012 in Intelligent Cities / Smart Cities
A “ghost town” will be build from scratch in the State of New Mexico, USA, to be used as a testbed for future Smart City technology. The city will be built by Pegasus Holdings and its New Mexico subsidiary, CITE Development. The Centre for Innovation, Technology and Testing (CITE) is being billed as a first-of-its kind smart city. This experimental smart city will be constructed next to Hobbs, Lea County, near the Texas-New Mexico border.
The initial development cost is estimated at $400 million, although the overall investment in the project is estimated to exceed $1 billion. Construction will begin by June 30. The town will be modelled on the real city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, complete with roads, houses and commercial buildings, old and new. No one will live there, although it would be possible, as houses will include all the necessities, like appliances and plumbing.
Smart city researchers will use this scientific “ghost town” to look at everything from intelligent traffic systems and next-generation wireless networks to automated washing machines and self-flushing toilets. The point of the town is to enable researchers to test new technologies on existing infrastructure without interfering in everyday life. For instance, while some researchers will be testing smart technologies on old grids, others might be using the streets to test self-driving cars.
The original article can be found here.
This is another symbol of how not to understand urban innovation. Let´s better concentrate on other approaches such as living labs, user experience or any other that helps us to take citizens from the begining to conceptualise, test, improve and own technologies. Let´s better concentrate on trying to make technologies make sense in the everyday life in cities, taking first steps of research to the streets.
I wrote about it: http://www.ateneonaider.com/blog/manu-fernandez/bring-research-streets-not-cities-without-people
Cities, citizens and people empowerment with technologies is the perspective of the FIREBALL White Paper “Smart Cities as Innovation Ecosystems Sustained by the Future Internet”.
Download: http://www.urenio.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/2012-FIREBALL-White-Paper-Final.pdf
Manu thanks for your comment, I think you’re absolutely right!
Nicos, that paper is a must-read (as well as other research work you are doing) and is, somehow, a hidden inspiration on my thoughts on how to build an open approach on research and testing urban technologies. I think we are sharing same perspectives and the effort on clarifying within this -sometimes- messy discussion on smart cities. Fireball and other research project conducted by URENIO are for me an inspiration.
Thanks for posting the post and spreading the word.