The Burning Man Project begins today as nearly 50,000 people already have or soon will converge on the dry lakebed (known as the playa) of the Black Rock Desert. Burning Man takes its name from the eponymous, culminating act of burning a statue of a man on the penultimate night. Before that happens, however, an entire city is built in the desert, and ultimately taken down in what may be the world’s largest “leave no trace” event.

Black Rock City, as it is known, becomes the fourth largest city in Nevada during the week leading up to Labor Day. During that time, it is home to much of what you would expect in a permanent city: streets, monuments, public and private transportation, post offices, police force, public works, zoning, an airport, a radio station, stores, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. That said, most everything is a bit different from the real world – at turns more imaginative, ironic, humorous, transgressive, vulgar or just plain strange. Participants get access to all of this for the price of a ticket ($200-360, depending on when it was purchased), and once inside, it’s all free with the exception of ice and coffee. Burning Man functions on a gift economy, with restaurants cooking up free dinners, boutiques outfitting citizens in free attire, nightclubs throwing free parties, and bars serving up free drinks.

In addition to the bustling streets full of theme camps and villages that offer the above services (and many more, from fresh fruit to massages to movies to just about anything you can imagine), Black Rock City and the surrounding open playa is peppered with extravagant public art projects. The sheer space and lack of restrictions that Burning Man presents to artists leads to breathtaking works, whose size, scale, and interactivity cannot be replicated in other settings. The Burning Man LLC supports this public art through grants, as well as provisions for the basics of Black Rock City: a street plan with demarcated space for registered camps, portable toilets, the Black Rock Rangers who help mediate conflicts. (Check out a Burning Man infographic here.)

The rest is up to the citizens of Black Rock City. “Radical self-reliance” is the motto of Burning Man. The result is a tremendous mix of creativity, DIY spirit, and serious investment – larger theme camps with sound systems may spend upwards of $50,000. Some participants use this freedom to go overboard on free parties, but focusing on the syndrome of NPRAOD (naked people running around on drugs), as “The Truth About Burning Man” argues, is really missing the point about what the Burning Man experience means. With minimal rules imposed by the organizers (though local law enforcement has been cracking down on everything from health permits to underage drinking in recent years) and a culture of cooperation to survive in the harsh desert environment, Burning Man has been interpreted by some as an experiment in libertarian and communitarian ideals. Brian Dougherty, in his history This is Burning Man, makes that argument, also proposing that Burning Man is a successful implementation of “temporary autonomous zones.”

Black Rock City offers much of interest to urban planners, designers, and observers of city life in any given year, but 2010 is exceptional. The theme this year is “Metropolis,” specifically foregrounding the urban aspect of the Burning Man community. Burning Man’s founder, Larry Harvey, who first burned the effigy of a man on a beach in San Francisco with some friends in 1986 before moving the annual ritual to the playa in 1990, suggested in a speech on this year’s theme that “Burning Man project is a kind of portable Zócalo – adapted to produce culture in the 21st century.”

The organization also frames the theme as you pass through the gates. The entry road is festooned with quotations about cities from Theodore Parker, Jean de la Bruyere, Mignon Parker, James Agee, Richard Hoagland, Walter Benjamin, and a heavy dose of Jane Jacobs. They reflect on the variety and diversity of cities and speak up for the rich theater and spectacle of urban life.

Black Rock City embodies all those notions of urban life and much more. All this week, your very own dusty reporter will filing from the Media Mecca as he covers the Burning Man beat, checking out what makes this offbeat city tick and discovering what lessons a temporary city in the desert can offer to permanent cities everywhere else. But since there are no full-time observers – everyone must participate – I’ll also be building a 1940s Bombay restaurant and speakeasy, The Sacred Cow Grille, and once it’s open, DJing Bollywood beats and bhangra for the dinner crowd. Between the two, it will be a busy week, but expect dispatches on the city layout, zoning, infrastructure, transportation, commerce, and public art. Until then, it’s back to work – cities don’t build themselves!