The American economist and academic John Kasarda coined the term Aerotropolis around the Millennium, to specifically depict the arising economic structures around airport hubs. Together with Greg Lindsay, he also published the book “Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next” in 2012.
The Aerotropolis is a sustainable, smart-growth city evolving around a hub airport. The airport basically becomes a city.
Even though there are examples of already existing aerotropolises, such as Amsterdam, Dallas Fort Worth, Memphis (the headquarters of FedEx) and New Songdo City (where Incheon is based), Kasarda’s proposal for the future of the aerotropolis lies mainly in the concept of “greenfield airports” which are newly masterplanned airports outside of city centers. Such new greenfield airports are no longer to be found in densely built Europe, but mainly in the Far and Middle East.
The aerotropolis is the smooth symbiosis of aviation infrastructure, commodities and resources trade, production, commerce, finance, technology and a highly reliable network of connectivity and transportation. This kind of transportation works very well with European airports such as Zurich, London, Amsterdam. In Japan, as well as in Chinese megacities such as Shanghai and Hong Kong, the airport connectivity via rail and road is just as reliable.
When Hong Kong International Airport Chek Lap Kok was masterplanned in the early 1990s, not only was a whole artificial island erected with its connecting railway and motorway infrastructure to downtown, including suspension bridges, but a whole planned city as well. Tung Chung is a suburban new town built on the periphery of the airport. It primarily houses airport workers and airline personnel but also includes shops and outlet centers, as well as airport hotels.
One of the earliest aerotropolis models might have sprung up from the industrious mind of Henry Ford (1863–1947). The inventor of the assembly line and of the famously successful Model T automobile (1909) aimed to expand his mobility enterprise into aviation. Henry Ford democratized the initial status symbol of the affluent class by his automated mass production in 1914 and the use of the conveyor belt. The cost of his Ford Model T was affordable enough that even the Ford Motor Car workers could buy one. Henry Ford stood not only for the democratization of the car but also of the mass-produced airplane, his Ford Tri-Motor.
For his subsequent Tri-Motor airplane he hired Charles Lindbergh as his test pilot and had an airport built on the grounds of his factory in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford Dearborn Airport, completed in 1926 by Albert Kahn, who had also designed Ford’s factories, was the first airport built with permanent concrete runways, flood light, a restaurant and hotel. At Dearborn, the entrepreneur Ford not only built cars and planes but also provided their stage – an airport!
Albert Kahn’s Ford Airport in Dearborn, Michigan, was one of the first realized architect designed commercial airports in the United States. Built in a modernized Spanish style with white brick walls as uniform pilasters, it offered a spacious waiting area, an observation deck, and other attributes to enhance passenger comfort. Most of the American terminals built after 1927 followed the Ford airport model of a symmetrical facade and depot-style interior with a waiting room and ticketing office.
The Italian Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916) proposed a giant aerodrome and train station for the city center of Milan in his sketches for the Città Nuova in 1912. Those were ideas for the first hybrid between a central station, airport terminal and public square in a city center, a fascinating prescient design for future aerotropolises and transportation center hybrids.
The aerotropolis bears resemblance to Spanish urban sociologist Manuel Castells’ technopole, a theory Castells developed in the early 1990s. The technopole as a planned development of technology and industry is tied to the new economy, which itself is based on productivity, knowledge and innovation. Technopoles are the knowledge sources of our information age. Examples of technopoles are Silicon Valley, Cambridge in Massachusetts with MIT and Harvard, as well as The Research Triangle in North Carolina (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). Technopoles, science cities, smart cities, aerotropolises, and the global village are all part of the mobility culture of globalization. The Science City at ETH Hönggerberg is a perfect example of the synergy between universities and regional industries of the technopole.
The concept of the aerotropolis is tied to the ubiquity of transport infrastructure. Kasarda’s model shows a generic outline with the various functional and economic clusters surrounding the aerotropolis.
In 1995, Rem Koolhaas developed his Generic City theory as an example of rapidly growing Asian metropolises. Growing urban development has led to the reproduction of cultural identity out of itself, thus these cities have no recognizable connection to their own history and identity. For Koolhaas, a connection to place as an expression of tradition, cultural identity, and history is irrelevant in contemporary architecture. Instead, he is outspoken in favor of dynamic modernism or modernization.
Sources:
Manuel Castells and Peter Hall. Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes, 1994.
John Kasarda, aerotropolis.com
John Kasarda, Greg Lindsay: Aerotropolis. The way we’ll live next, 2012.
Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL, 1995.
Hugh Pearman. Airports: A Century of Architecture, 2004.
Antonio Sant’Elia, “L’architettura futurista: Manifesto” (1912). In: Futurism: an anthology. Ed. Rainey, Poggi, Wittman, 2009.
