Rise of the Aerotropolis

11 October 2006 at 12:35 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Historically, cities have sprung up at the junctions of oceans and rivers (New Orleans) or railroad networks (Chicago), which made the docks or the blocks around the central station the choicest real estate in town. But “cities are always shaped by the state-of-the-art transportation devices present at the time of their founding,” observes Joel Garreau, author of Edge City and chronicler of American sprawl. “The state of the art today is the automobile, the jet plane, and the networked computer. Because of the airport, it’s possible to imagine a world capital in a place that was once an absolute backwater — a Los Angeles or a Dallas appearing in an utterly improbable location, including Bangkok.”

Hence the rise of the “aerotropolis,” the name for the cities springing up around mega-airports like Thailand’s Suvarnabhumi (near Bangkok), which will handle 100 million passengers per year (as much as New York City’s three major airports combined), and Dubai World Central, which will be able to accommodate twice as many passengers as Frankfurt’s airport and will host a permanent population of 750,000.

University of North Carolina management professor John Kasarda has studied this phenomenon extensively:

Rather than banish airports to the edges of cities and then do our best to avoid them, he argues, we should move them to the center and build our cities around them. Kasarda’s research has laid bare the invisible plexus of air-cargo networks that have shrunk the globe (much as railroads did for the American West). And his conclusions are expressible as a series of simple numbers: Over the past 30 years, Kasarda will tell you, global GDP has risen 154%, and the value of world trade has grown 355%. But the value of air cargo has climbed an astonishing 1,395%.

Fast Company has the story. (HT to Stanford’s Jackson Library Blog.)