If you drive about an hour east of Gothenburg and reach the locality of Sandhult, you might just find yourself in Harlem, New York. Well, a superficial replica of Harlem, at least, where the storefronts of video stores and beauty salons sit beneath clear Swedish skies. This is AstaZero, a site that Volvo designed to look like a neighborhood nearly 4,000 miles away to test the sensors of their prototypes. The storefronts are fake, simply wallpapered to resemble a bustling street.

Astazero is one of the many artificial districts the photographer Gregor Sailer visited during a two-year journey for his eye-opening book, The Potemkin Village, which was published recently by Kehrer Verlag. Included in the series are photographs of European-style villages in Shanghai; a fictional Iraqi town in California’s Mojave desert; and buildings in a Russian city that are dressed to conceal their true appearances. Sailor himself does not attempt to trick his viewer, at times highlighting details of these villages that reveal their inauthenticity — peeling corners of a building’s “facade,” for instance, or the stands that prop up a row of fake Swedish houses, like a theater set.

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