December 13, 2024 Ι The New York Review of Architecture
As promised by its title, Julia Schulz-Dornburg’s book often reads like a travel guide. Tourist season—in select parts of Combat City—is year-round, despite limited opportunities for sightseeing. What attractions there are include an archaeological dig and a folkloric festival, plus a heavy emphasis on boot-camp workouts and other intense exercise regimens. There’s information where visitors can find pizza and coffee, though foodie heat map this is not. Immediately after teasing the city bazaar, with “butchers, backers, and pushcart vendors” offering an “ample” array of street treats, Schulz-Dornburg opines that many of these comestibles are indigestible. After all, they’re plastic.
The city’s unblinking, rubbery denizens come, commendably, “in all shapes and sizes.” When they are inevitably drawn into the line of fire, the dummies will emit blood and realistic groans; the more “sophisticated, high-end medical dolls,” meanwhile, “will not only bleed, blink and breathe, but additionally produce five different kinds of bowel sounds.” The town’s resourceful planners have thought of everything. For convenience, tunnels for simulating subterranean operations are built above ground. Buildings are designed with both flat and pitched roofs so combatants can practice rappelling down each. A high school football field is big enough for a helicopter to land on and a gymnasium doubles as a detention center for POWs—no unitaskers here.
The architecture is similarly supple, evincing an ethic of postmodern pastiche. Although cinder block is the basic brick of all new construction in the city, it disappears beneath alpine gables, minarets, and other place-evoking flourishes. The materiality of this global village of destruction extends to the fantastical terrain of films and, increasingly, video games—industries that make up a growing share of the local economy.
Combat City is not quite as unified as Schulz-Dornburg describes; strictly speaking, it does not exist. Through a sustained act of speculation, she has stitched together a fictional metropole with an all-too-real carbon footprint. Each discrete borough—seventeen in all, sprinkled throughout the US, Europe, and the Middle East—is made contiguous and relational, slotted into a recognizably real yet fabricated story of contemporary urban development.
Although The Complete Guide to Combat City dips a toe into Baudrillardian meditations, it only occasionally gets lost in a hall of mirrors. Like the young Rem Koolhaas, Schulz-Dornburg groks the surrealist subject at hand through dry accounting. She doesn’t linger on the ethical dimensions of role-playing, the most outlandish example of which may be the real Iraqis and Afghans who, having sided with the Americans during the 2003 invasion, acted the part of enemy combatants in the counterfeit district of Medina Wasl (actual location: Irwin, California). A 2019 NBC News investigation found that more than 250 private companies had benefited from a $250 million role-playing program set up by the Pentagon.
In an email, Schulz-Dornburg clarifies that she hoped to analyze the “complex urban character” of these conflict-ridden theme parks in the aggregate. The decision in part obscures the veracity of the “facts” presented in the book’s case studies, which researchers interested in this underexplored phenomenon might actually want to know. Did the Muscatatuck combat town outside Indianapolis really once house both soldiers and the developmentally disabled? How, exactly, did those displaced Iraqis and Afghans make their way to the Bay Area exurbs? But the conceit succeeds at the level of narrative. Combat City powerfully illustrates how the operational capacity to wage destruction in any context is the preserve of empire, even if Schulz-Dornburg never once uses the term. But if the effects of empire’s totalizing logic and networked convenience are most palpably felt in the core, might not a study of these doppelgänger cities reveal these pathologies in even sharper relief? Or put another way, the world is rapidly urbanizing, and the theater of battle is urbanizing with it. Combat City, then, is the sinister flip side to the urban developmentalist tide we hear so many good things about.
Initially, Combat City was the chilly antechamber of war, mediating the ground between agonism and antagonism. Though its origins lie in Nazi Germany, the typology, Schulz-Dornburg notes, is just beginning to come into its own. These “shadow cities” have been the site of rehearsals for the Israeli Defense Force’s (IDF) invasion of Lebanon (the one in 1982), troubleshooting the Irish Troubles, and the United States’ recent misadventures in the Middle East. Militaries preparing for wars in the Ukraine and Gaza have trained in these places. Of late, this sanguinary form of tactical urbanism has been deployed almost exclusively for training in asymmetric warfare pitting the Western NATO alliance against faceless insurgents who are assumed to be forever scurrying down alleys and popping out of sewers, which abound in Combat City. The King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) in Jordan most keenly signals the typology’s drift from its justification in national security toward free-for-all antiterrorism and LARP-y amusement. Built in 2009 (and paid for by the United States), the dupe district “not only offers a base for training of international special forces and Jordanian border guards but also for military adventure holidays, corporate leadership programs, and stunt training for actors,” Schulz-Dorburg writes. (She’s fond of the “not only … but also” correlative conjunction.) Rentable to anyone, KASOTC is the first kampfstadt to generate its own income, which seems to make it all the more real. Combat City, whatever else it may be, is still real estate.
Schulz-Dorburg keenly attends to the “experimental” side of such enterprises. She recounts the IDF’s campaign to pacify the Palestinian city of Nablus in the early aughts. There, IDF soldiers blasted their way through party walls to stay out of view of snipers, effectively subsuming the interior of every home into the spatial continuum of battle. The method was later codified at Israel’s Baladia training ground, located an hour’s drive from the Gaza Strip border and featuring prefabricated concrete piles with “built-in star shaped blast holes,” as well as a “kasbah, a refugee camp, a downtown neighborhood, a rural village section, a market area and plenty of urban outskirts.” In Combat City, buildings are frequently left without roofs so commanders can observe troop movements. Freestanding façades made from reinforced concrete are designed to withstand frequent explosions. Entire niche industries have sprung up around these places, hawking products like Photo Immersive Realistic Aid for Training Environments, or PIRATE, wrap, a self-described “revolutionary façade technology system” that uses custom-printed adhesive laminate to quickly alter the look of conflict environments. It’s ugly as sin.
As an object, Combat City is deliberately monotonous. The desaturated beige and gray of its pages have their source in the grisly combat towns of the Tennessee wilderness, French hinterlands, and English countryside. The geometries of the buildings are blunt and communicate a sense of hollowness, even as basic rules of urban proportion are adhered to. The minaret, qubba, and ogee arch would appear to be obliging signifiers of local authenticity; in fact, they are eminently notional, capable of being swapped out for a Protestant cross or church steeple, depending on the war game that’s being enacted. Deep in this uncanny valley, Roomba-propelled mannequins traverse empty roads, and flesh-and-blood combat actors harass the interfaithful.
Schulz-Dornburg diligently attends to the architecture of Combat City. From time to time, she pulls on disciplinary precedent. The distressed tectonics shared by nearly all battle burghs are related to SITE’s deconstructed big-box showrooms of the 1970s for the retail chain Best Products, though Peter Eisenman’s series of artfully obliterated Connecticut houses seem apt as well. Multistory blocks, their blank surfaces broken only by gridded openings, bear an undeniable and fitting resemblance to Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo charnel house outside Modena, built from 1971 to 1984. Schulz-Dornburg’s central procedure—of agglutinating disparate case studies into a legible whole with its own logic—meanwhile recalls that of Colin Rowe’s Collage City (1978).
Ironically, if and when these correspondences to the history of postmodern architecture are raised, they serve to downplay design as a factor in determining Combat City’s physiognomy. Its precincts increasingly lose the context-rich specificity of earlier constructions. Verisimilitude is a dead letter, Schulz-Dornburg contends; narrative scripting has killed the faux building. The simulation, having become aware of itself, “no longer simulates the faraway theater of war, nor the proper homeland under duress,” but seeks only its own reproduction. As she concludes, “essentially, combat city simulates itself.”
The book consistently avoids moralizing, and Schulz-Dorburg’s commitment to the bit may strike some readers as unfeeling. A quarter of Combat City may be intentionally ruined, but she declines to interrogate the ruinenlust of its planners. Indeed, her impulses often go in the opposite direction: Discussing a mock village in northern France, she praises the “exquisite aesthetics” of the purpose-built rubble, whose monumental portals and thresholds-to-nowhere recall outsize theater flats. Her prose, particularly in image captions, at times tips into austere poetry. The description appended to a photograph of Yodaville, an air-to-ground firing range in the Arizona desert, reads: “Charred cars, tanks, and human-sized metal targets animate the streets, everything else falls from the sky.” In pivotal moments, she leaves a thought-missile hanging in the air, only to deny us the fireworks show. Such forbearance reflects her preoccupation with “the central question about the nature of military, mock cities,” which “is less about what they represent than about what they enable.”
This restrained approach is undercut by woolly, involuted passages that would likely go over the heads of the architects and builders actually engaged in this type of work. Schulz-Dornburg’s unearthing of so much sensitive military documentation is an incredible feat—and still, large pockets of Combat City remain shrouded in the fog of war, or the intractable matrix of a Pentagon Excel sheet.
Of course, stage sets for state violence are not just a military phenomenon. In Chicago, where I live, the city built a “tactical scenario village,” complete with brick two-flats as part of a new police training complex. With the appearance of Cop City, the epithet given by activists opposed to the construction of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, Schulz-Dornburg may feel inspired to expand the remit of her study. If she does, she’d do well to drop the more circuitous passages of Combat City, which have the effect of blunting its sharpest edges. When Schulz-Dornburg writes, “The militaristic viewpoint of our urban futures is continuously absorbed, rehearsed, and ingrained in these simulations, threatening to project their well-rehearsed violence and destructive force back into the world and shape our cities in its image,” she is overcomplicating a truism: The violence of the front always comes home. Will we, bearers of first-world privilege, allow ourselves to be shaped by these places, too?