Baladia is a mock urban warfare town made up of 600 structures, including streets, storefronts, schools, houses, shacks, high-rise apartment blocks and mosques.It was built in the Negev Desert in Israel between 2005 and 2006. Part of the 7.4square-mile Tse’elim facility, Baladia was designed as a Military Operations onUrban Terrain (MOUT) centre and cost approximately $45 million, with funding provided by the US military. In order to fulfil its military training function, the site is highly modular. Buildings can be rearranged to resemble particular urban terrains, such as Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Training also incorporates realistic audio effects, such as mortar fire, prayer calls and traffic noise. Here, the concept of urban design or architectural planning is turned on its head. Rather than serving the interests of an urban community, the urban design is the very means by which that community is controlled, occupied and destroyed. Baladia is one big dress rehearsal, or as described by urban scholar Stephen Graham a“theme park for practicing urban destruction, erasure and colonial violence.” (CitiesUnder Siege, Theme Park Archipelago, 2010) From the set to the actors’ habits and lifestyles, the mock city is a space where modes of social control are constantly being refined. As French philosopher and media theorist Jean Baudrillard famously stressed, simulations are not just copies of the real world, but hyperreal constructions – simulations of things that don’t exist - through which war and violence are constructed, legitimised, and performed. In Israel, mock-cities are spread out across the state. The simulated Lebanese towns are located close to the Lebanese border in the north, and in the south bordering Egypt, the simulated Palestinian cities. In the US, there are over 73mock-cities built in the Mojave Desert alone. Located inside the Fort Irwin training centre, Medina Wasl is a mock-city that was designed to function as an Iraqi village. I investigate both Baladia and Medina Wasl, its US counterpart, as primary case studies.

This thesis focuses on the construction and maintenance of simulated cities by the US/Israeli military in West Asia in the 2000-2010 decade. Simulated cities multiply after the second Palestinian Intifada (2000),and prior to the invasion of Iraq (2003), and the 2006 Lebanon war. In this period, a new kind of military warfare is introduced that involves architects and planners, but also gamers and actors. While the research focuses on this particular timeframe, there is a much longer history of the simulated city. TheUnited States military develop the concept as a response to their painful losses in Vietnam. Military centres are revised to include replicas of informal and unfamiliar urban environments. Military planners and engineers formulate studies in which they classify “foreign” architectural typologies. A central aspect of training, these cities are developed to control unfamiliar terrain and effectively prolong military occupation.

The military training site is a space of performance, rehearsal, and deception. It prepares us for new realities of war while shaping new urban geographies in which fiction and reality collide and conflate. In this work I address the confusion between fiction and reality in the context of military training. The activities that take place within the mock-city draw on studies of the Other’s cultural practices, interactions and modes of living. A collection of Hollywood talent, academics, toymakers and game industry insiders assist the military in producing a shadow world. The simulacral collective (borrowed term from Graham) rely on both physical and virtual tools to immerse and familiarise the soldiers with the theatre of war. Authentic architectural peculiarities are orientalised and disfigured: Architecture serves as the backdrop onto which methods of violence are continuously refined. Virtual simulators are paired with curated physical spaces to increase immersion and render the simulation indistinguishable from reality. The real is confused with the model. In Baladia’s shadow world, architectures both elaborate and artful are easily reconfigured into Gaza, Baghdad, or Bint Jbeil. Architectural inauthenticity is transposed onto desert landscapes: false fronts and stage sets contribute to the production of endless fields of repetitive preparatory violence. 

The thesis is divided into three parts. First, I explore the emergence of the simulated site as the test-bed for a renewed approach to warfare in the post-Gulf War era. Then, I turn to the choreography of war itself, investigating the ways in which it shapes the contours of contemporary warfare and legitimises permanent occupation. Lastly, I investigate the relationship between the media and the simulated site: Simulation and reality cross-pollinate. Mediated by the screen, the perverse performances of the theatre of war spread far beyond its reach.

The first chapter is a spatial inquiry into the architectural development of the military simulated site. I juxtapose fundamental military historical events with the construction and development of simulated cities. Looking at Baladia and its layout, I create a dialogue between updated military doctrine and spatial(re)-configurations inside the training site. The continuous exchanges between military strategy and the planning of the mock city give rise to a generic“Arab” architectural style and aesthetic, also found in military virtual environments. The second chapter is a deep-dive into the activities, technologies and mechanisms at play; the operational and performative aspect of the mock-city which I refer to as the choreography of war. Here, I focus on the interplay between virtual and physical simulation and the role of surveillance in consolidating these two realms. I further investigate the ways in which cultural cues, domesticity and intimacy are weaponised in these spaces to contribute to the blurring between reality and fiction. The final chapter investigates the role the media plays in representing and transmitting the simulated reality to a civilian audience. I focus on the use of image, framing and curation as tools used to conceal or misrepresent the true nature of these spaces. I return to the spatial analysis and overlay the lens of cinematic technique resorted to by media and entertainment experts to export the model of the simulated city outside of the training sphere.

I work with US Army military field-manuals produced in the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq. Attention to culture, tradition and the human dimension of warfare are reflected in the development of game design in that same period.They mirror the military’s ambition to pre-emptively control all aspects ofArab life. Drawing on photographs, virtual simulator advertisements and satellite imagery of the two studied sites, I explore the spatial materialisation of a shifting doctrine. I resort to 3d modelling and drawing process and interpret images, and to complete where information lacks. Testimonies from former soldiers, personnel from the military training sites as well as second-hand accounts from both anthropological and academic visits to the sites are worked into the thesis.