Aeotropolis Developments

The sociologist John Kasarda (2000) relates the new power of airports to warp contours of development to the “speed imperative” of time-based competition and the globalization of economic activity. Air transportation makes it possible to reconcile these trends by conveying more people and goods faster, farther than ever before. As a result, a new urban form, the “aerotropolis” is taking shape in and around major airports. Articulated across a series of idealized rings, Kasarda’s “aerotropolis” contains an inner zone of distribution centers, logistics complexes, and just-in-time manufacturers, then a ring of office parks, hotels, restaurants, and convention centers, and then still farther out a largely residential periphery home to the thousands who make their livelihood in the aerotropolis. Cutting across all these rings are aerolanes, high capacity highways and rail lines providing access from ring to ring and to the rest of the metropolitan area within which an aerotropolis is set.

Dubai may be the best illustration of an aerotropolis planned from the ground up (Lindsay, 2006), but several Asian airports are also nuclei for this kind of development and even in the US and Europe a few examples can be found, including Dallas-Fort Worth International. Kasarda’s Fifth Wave and aerotropolis can both be criticized as being somewhat simplistic. In fact, the idealized aerotropolis, inasmuch as it depends on highway and rail access to link it to the surrounding hinterland, is itself testament to the continued relevance of the modes that defined his Third and Fourth Wave. Still, there is no denying the new importance of air transportation and that is nowhere more in evidence than in and around the world’s great airports.