"Pegasus Global Holdings, through its operating subsidiaries and special purpose vehicles, is an international technology development firm. We have demonstrated expertise in defense, security, telecommunications, and Intellectual Property capture through its ability to source globally “market-ready” IP from public and private innovators, enablers, and incubators."
Between that lovely back-of-the-Economist description and the CVs of their management team [1] (DoD, DoD, "aerospace", nuke industry, etc.) it's at least clear they're a Deep State affiliate.
I cannot help but say that this reminds me (an awful lot) of the Umbrella Corporation. Except for its involvement in bioengineering that is, but who knows what's yet to come.
The truth may yet turn out to not be that much stranger than fiction after all.
Housing bubble speculative option purchase. If you can sell for a profit after holding for a decade, you win. Meanwhile you get at least some minmal return on investment via "research fees". Its not a really a neighbor of Hobbs NM, its an extreme ex-urb of Odessa/Midlands TX or an extreme ex-urb of Lubbock TX.
Its an interesting funding model for ultra extreme real estate speculation. This fits in well with real estate investors tending toward the ultra optimistic, it might not make financial sense, but the mantra of "housing only goes up" "they're not making any more land" will take care of that.
The article alludes to resource-rich environment, so possibly a distant branch of the same company is planning on opening a "xyz" mine or chemical plant or something in five years and they're trying to implement a company town policy and coincidentally there happens to be a town ready for purchase a couple miles from the anticipated mine. Also related to, you move in 35 kiloemployees, and that might help with public support against environmental regulation.
Getting grant money and government contracts is the real reason.
Edit: actually it seems like they plan to rent it out to people funded by grants money and government contracts: Pegasus plans to rent the facility out to parties interested in conducting large-scale tests, and they’re anticipating demand.
Doesn't sound like it's about city planning. Nowadays you can simulate that quite well. No need to pluck down Billions.
City planning with real buildings just doesn't make sense. To iterate solutions you need to be able to change quickly, which doesn't work in this case.
But it says: "... 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"
So it seems it's more about testing of technologies inside an urban environment that cannot be tested in real cities (due to risk, exposure, secrecy ?).
Sure sounds a bit sinister if you read between the lines.
Sounds like an ideal "end-to-end" testing site for urban drone warfare (both aerial and ground.) The only thing missing is car/pedestrian traffic to route around.
Alternately, they might mean technologies for building pre-fabricated structures at a larger scale than is currently done with e.g. townhouse developments.
Of course they could have a research facility underground, and then call it "Raccoon City" :-) But that might give it away...
If they build it I suppose it might show up in some movies or TV shows, would make an ideal sort of place for anytown USA. And of course if you're building an urban surveillance system or a hunter killer manhack drone, well testing that in a "normal" city would cause too many questions to be raised now wouldn't it :-)
Setting aside small towns, I find it a bit alarming how many huge cities I know nothing about, places like Tianjin, Dhaka, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad, and Yangon. (Of course if everyone but me is familiar with these cities, I'm sure you'll let me know...) My theory is that the "culturally important" cities that everyone knows (Moscow, Cairo, London, etc.) lags by decades behind the actual growth of cities. Of course, renaming places like Rangoon to Yangon also doesn't help.
What jumped at me was the fact that list seems significantly inaccurate/unrepresentative. For example, Delhi which has a population of 11 million according to its wikipedia article is missing entirely from the list (It would be between 10 and 14 rank as it stands now). The article is controversial due to conflicts in the definition of the boundaries of a city, but by any definition, Delhi should definitely be up there.
Being in Asia, I'm more familiar with those cities than the ones to the west. The renaming often just corrects bad names picked by Europeans (e.g. Tienstin vs. Tianjin, though everyone still uses Bangalore when I was there last).
i've lived my whole life in california so monterey, ca. is what popped into my head. wikipedia confirms it's about 28k population. the peninsula area has more though.
after poking around on google maps, most historical towns are quite large now (roanoke, va and plymouth, ma are at least double that size).
bangor, maine is right around 30k. i bet most have at least heard of that town.
most of the famous little towns in the south like savannah, tuscaloosa, galveston are 50-120k+ population. key west is 25k though. with tourists in town i'm guessing it's right near 30k. there's also some really small towns by it that are probably not counted in the city population.
i think you'd be hard pressed to find a more famous 30k population town than key west. i'm willing to bet nearly every adult in the US has heard of the place, and has a pretty good idea in their head what it looks/feels like in terms of population.
(This is not a well known place, but one of its schools was in "Saved by the Bell" so there's a tenuous pop culture link.
Wikipedia has several lists of US cities and, being polite, they tend to obscurity at the latter half of the lists. And those are places with over 100,000 people. My town - Cheltenham UK - has about 100,000 people.
So, how do you give an idea of how big a town for 35,000 people is? Number of high schools? Number of Starbucks? The article lists one church. A UK equivalent might list twelve pubs.
(my niece fibbed to me and said it was in "Greece" - something I believed for years. She also told me "oh yeah Deerhoof, they all went to my school" which is also totally untrue.)
We used to build this sort of thing to blow it up. Now we use a supercomputer... I imagine the goal is much the same just less radioactive, a very realistic "city" where everything from self driving cars and better home insulation to heat seeking drones and urban warfare tools, can be put to the test for a price.
The plan sounds wildly implausible because of the immense expense involved. A modern house today costs crudely about 295K to build. To build housing for 35,000 would start at about 10 billion but would probably be several times that for the other amenities. Add to that the fact that, because this won't be a city, everything will be built by companies from out of town, further increasing the costs.
Just as much, unoccupied dwellings and infrastructure require maintenance, sometimes more maintenance than occupied areas since cars driving on streets is what stops grass (or tumble-weeds) from growing, etc.
Moreover, what would it be a model of? The lack of residents would also mean everything would be fairly different from an occupied city.
Testing autonomous vehicles sounds reasonable but it's hard to see that or other hypothetical uses needing an entire purposes built city. A "smart grid" test would require a working power grid. Would you have an unoccupied city with a continuously operating power-grid?
If nothing else, this implausible plans makes me think how interdependent and hard-to-simulate a real, working city is.
