The Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) was a proposed planned community to be located in northern Minnesota (near Swatara in Aitkin County). Proposed and studied beginning in the 1960s, it would have been constructed as a public–private partnership. In contrast with many of the model cities of the time, the MXC was to be experimental, trying new things rather than proposing to select from the best of the existing practice. The project was initiated and directed by scientist and University of Minnesota dean Athelstan Spilhaus, and reflected the confidence of that era in the ability of science and technology to solve the world's problems -- "If we could send a human into space, we could do anything"
Supporting MXC were Otto Silha, publisher of the two largest newspapers in the state, the Minneapolis Star and Minneapolis Tribune; a four-star general, the physician of president at the time Lyndon B. Johnson; civil rights leader Muriel S. Snowden; and Buckminster Fuller.
In October 2017, roughly 50 years after talk of the city began, a documentary film about MXC, The Experimental City, directed by Chad Freidrichs, premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival.