The Newest New Town

Minnesota's "big north country," with its gentle hills and thick stands of birch and pine, seems an unlikely spot for the most ambitious urban test yet conceived in the U.S. But last week 50,000 acres of Aitkin County, some 120 miles north of Minneapolis-St. Paul, were officially chosen as the site of the Minnesota Experimental City. If all goes as planned, MXC, as the city is called for the time being, could be completed in 1985 and have a maximum population of 250,000.

The experimental city is planned as a totally new town--with the accent on new. Unlike most of the nation's other new communities, it will not be an instant suburb of another city. Instead, MXC will nestle in the wilderness as a self-contained entity, serving as a living laboratory for the most advanced ideas in urban planning, environment and technology. Planners expect that 130,000 jobs could be created in MXC, mainly in research-oriented industries like environmental technology and communications.

MXC will look like no other city anywhere. The whole downtown area will be roofed over so that residents can enjoy an overcoatless climate all year round. Electricity for the air conditioning might come from a municipal power plant that burns garbage in pollution-free furnaces. As for the people who live outside the city center, they will be able to shop either by cable TV from home, or else drive to automated highways that will whisk their cars to downtown parking lots that are a short, pleasant stroll from the stores. Or if people prefer to ride, there will be moving sidewalks and computer-run, driverless minibuses.

Farms will be mixed with factories and homes to provide what Neil Pinney, MXC's chief architect-planner, calls "a rural-urban balance" throughout the city. Nowhere in MXC will there be skyscrapers ("Psychologically alienating," says Pinney, who used to work with Los Angeles City Planner William Pereira). In their place will be "megastructures" complete with their own housing units, streets and transit systems.

While all this might sound like a Buck Rogers vision, the truth is that the planners have looked back as often as forward. Their stress is on old-fashioned values--"good food, good friends and a good relationship with the earth," Pinney says. That means a return to windmills for some electrical power, to cottage industries for some employment, to a feeling of community through the intimate clustering of neighborhoods.

Test Center. This dream city is the brainchild of freewheeling Scientist Athelstan Spilhaus, an oceanographer, physicist and meteorologist. In the eight years since he first got the idea, MXC has drawn support from Twin Cities business leaders, the federal and state governments, and top thinkers like R. Buckminster Fuller, Economist Walter Heller and Urbanologist Harvey Perloff. Their combined efforts are aimed at starting construction by 1975.

Surprisingly, the estimated cost--$8 billion to $12 billion--is not one of the prime worries of MXC'S eleven-man steering committee, which is confident that private industry will be willing to foot most of the bill. Industrialists see MXC as a perfect test center for their new products and processes--everything from waterless toilets to people movers and charge accounts controlled instantaneously by computers. The primary financial objections so far have come from the Minnesota state legislature. Some senators wonder if the money needed to build MXC would not be better spent in helping existing cities and rural areas with their problems. But Otto Silha, publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and a driving force behind MXC, replies tersely that everything done to date to help the sick cities has failed. MXC, on the other hand, represents a chance to stop both urban and rural decay by promoting a new and lively kind of city that is planned down to its last birch.

The people most directly affected, of course, are the present residents of Aitkin County. Some have banded together to form a "Save Our Northland" committee devoted to doing everything it can to preserve the area's deer and quail hunting and wild, uncrowded spaces. But other residents favor having MXC as a neighbor. "What do we have to lose?" asks Housewife Barbara Hansen. Right now the county's job opportunities are so limited that the only future for her children is "a one-way ticket to Minneapolis. With MXC we have a chance to give them a choice." For city planners round the world, MXC's bold concept also offers a choice in planning for the future.

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