America's Most Innovative Neighborhood: 15 Square Miles In New Mexico, Population: 0

This summer, Pegasus Global Holdings will begin building a city from scratch in the desert just outside of Hobbs, New Mexico, that will look not unlike Hobbs itself. The Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation will be modeled on a mid-sized, mid-American town of about 35,000 people. Hobbs, located just outside the Texas border in the Southeastern corner of the state, is just a bit larger than that. The new city--CITE, as the locals and out-of-town developers call it--will similarly have a kind of downtown, a retail district, residential neighborhoods, and collar communities. It will have functioning roads, self-sustaining utilities, and its own communications infrastructure. It will not, however, have a single permanent resident. After years of pursuing high-tech companies, Hobbs will be getting what might be one of the most impressive high-tech novelties around: a 15-square mile, fully functioning but empty town next door, unlike any other R&D facility in the world, that will be used to test everything about the future of smart cities, from autonomous cars to new wireless networks. This empty city would address one of the great obstacles to the commercialization of new technology: that “valley of death” between early-stage R&D and the deep pockets that are willing to invest in products once they have hard data behind them. Pegasus itself develops early-stage intellectual property at that moment just after basic R&D but before prototyping. It has routinely struggled, however, to find testing beds to evaluate prototypes before they can be commercialized. As it turns out, there are not a lot of places in the world to test real-life conditions without real, live people around...more