Simulated Urban Combat Area

Or SUCA for short.

A Simulated Urban Combat Area is a very realistic simulation of an urban area, complete with realistic signage, buildings and other stuff like that.

Good place for tricking the audience. It can also be used for espionage training.

Truth in Television, as some military bases do make use of these as part of their training courses.

Examples of Simulated Urban Combat Area include:

Anime and Manga

• The Riot Force 6 in Nanoha Striker S erects an entire city block Made of Magic over the nearby ocean bay to provide cheap training grounds for the Forwards.
• Witchblade had one of these owned by Doji Group Industries, what's with being a weapon manufacturer. So when Takayama and Segawa dropped Masane there without explaining what's going on, the fake Ghost City quickly creeped her out, but then Witchblade smelled an active I-Weapon, and the whole thing quickly becomes simple, noisy and fun.

Literature

• The James Bond novels Brokenclaw and Role of Honour
• A training place for KGB spies and saboteurs, with mock-ups of many areas of the West, is the source of the climax of The Bourne Ultimatum.
• The New Jedi Order novel Star By Star featured two facilities of this sort. One was built for the YVH-class droids, and was accurate down to the "pedestrians" (actually weapons techs, who knew the droid wouldn't target them) - and absolutely no challenge whatsoever for the YVH. The other was designed to train voxyn, and included not just buildings and walkways but (nonfunctional) vehicles, aircraft, and even a wrecked AT-AT, along with a sizable slave population to play the "residents".
• Alex Rider is trained in a Scorpia SUCA in the Alex Rider book Scorpia.
• The Jack Higgins novel Confessional starts with an IRA terrorist being captured during an attempt to plant a bomb. He then kills his captors, only for it to be revealed he's a KGB assassin in a simulation of an Irish village.
• There are a couple of these in CHERUB, including an SAS training facility near the campus, and an American version where a group of the kids are part of the Red Team against American military personnel.
• The third book of The Hunger Games trilogy features Katniss training for the invasion of the Capitol in one of these called the Block in District 13

Live Action TV

• Although it's another training place for spies, Alias features a mock-up of a US town in Russia.
• Star Trek and its holodeck, which can recreate any environment, features this trope. Such as with Voyager trying to get the hunt-happy Hirogen to use a SUCA.

Video Games

• The Game Boy Colour version of Perfect Dark.
• America's Army basically uses this for half of its maps. Now, since the players effectively make each map a warzone, there are very few civilians around. Those that are still in the area are usually hostages.

Western Animation

• American Dad, with Stan's job at the CIA, features this. Witty comments are graded.
• In the Galaxy Rangers episode "Supertroopers," Shane was spending a lot of time in one of these, avoiding his hostile fellow Supertroopers. It was because he was spending so much time there that he avoided getting dosed with the Psycho Serum Wheiner circulated in the barracks.

Real Life

• Copehill Down, a UK Ministry of Defence training facility located on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, England. Built in 1988 to resemble a German village in Bavaria, it was intended to train Cold War-era troops for operations in the European Theatre. In recent years it's been expanded and modified to incorporate Afghan and Iraqi settings.