When they combine these with arcologies, *then* we'll see some action...;-)
Udhay
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/107/aerotropolis.html?partner=rss
The name wasn't terribly auspicious: Nong Ngu
Hao, the "Cobra Swamp." But the location, a
mammoth piece of ground in the sparsely settled
landscape between Bangkok and the southern coast,
was nearly perfect. Thailand's leader at the
time, the visionary-if-dictatorial field marshal
Sarit Thanarat, had chosen this spot to build his
country's bridge to the 21st century, in the form
of a gleaming international airport. It would be a long time coming.
Suvarnabhumi Terminal
The field marshal died suddenly in 1963, and the
airport was postponed for decades; meanwhile,
Thailand's neighbors either eviscerated
themselves or else offered up their cities as the
First World's factories. By the time the 21st
century actually came into view, the field
marshal's democratically elected heirs watched
enviously as the Dells, Seagates, and Motorolas
of the world parceled out pieces of their
sprawling supply chains across Indochina,
creating hundreds of thousands of jobs for
lottery-winning cities such as Kuala Lumpur and Singapore.
But before the end of this year, on a still-soggy
tract that now lies at the creeping border of
Bangkok's suburbs, a new $4 billion mega-airport
will finally open, forming the heart of a nascent
city. When it's finished, the erstwhile Cobra
Swamp, now Suvarnabhumi (the "Golden Land"), will
pump more than 100 million passengers a year
through its glass portals, about as many as JFK,
LaGuardia, and Newark aiports combined. Within 30
years, a city of 3.3 million citizens--larger
than Chicago now--will have emerged from the swampland.
To the jaundiced American eye, such a project
might appear to be the terminal metastasis of the
sprawl represented by O'Hare, LAX, or JFK. But to
dismiss it as the product of Asia's infatuation
with all things mega would be to miss the
carefully calibrated machinery underneath. It's a
machine U.S. companies ignore at their peril at
this time of escalating global trade and
frictionless competition. It even has a name, the
"aerotropolis," and a creator, John Kasarda.
In the relatively obscure world of urban
planning, Kasarda, a professor at the University
of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business
School, has made a name for himself over the past
decade with his radical (some might say
bone-chilling) vision of the future: 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%. Today, 40% of the
total economic value of all goods produced in the
world, barely comprising 1% of the total weight,
is shipped by air (and that goes for more than
50% of total U.S. exports, which are valued at
$554 billion). Raw materials and bulkier stuff
still take the slow boats, but virtually
everything we associate with our postindustrial,
value-added economy--microelectronics,
pharmaceuticals, medical devices, Louis Vuitton
handbags, sushi-grade tuna--travels via jumbo
jet. We may think of the 1960s as the jet-set
era, but the supremacy of (soft) airpower has
only now begun to reshape our ideas about how
cities should look, how they should function.
"They're now effectively a part of global
production systems," Kasarda says, "and without
that connectivity, you're out of the game."
Those statistics lay out much of the story line
of the coming age of global competition, and it's
a story being written by many of our most
formidable current and future rivals. Hong Kong
is premising its entire world-trade strategy on
the primacy of the airport: Its Chek Lap Kok
already has a mini-city stationed on a nearby
island for its 45,000 workers, and SkyCity, a
complex of office towers, convention centers, and
hotels will soon be visible from its ticket
counters. On the Chinese mainland, construction
has begun on Beijing Capital Airport City, a $12
billion master-planned city of 400,000, and a
massive airport expansion is coming to the city
of Guangzhou, in the Pearl River Delta.
Thirty-three miles to the south of Seoul, New
Songdo City, billed as the most ambitious
privately financed project in history, is taking
shape in the Yellow Sea: The metropolis of
350,000 people, many of them expatriates living
and working on-site for multinationals, is being
built on a man-made peninsula the size of Boston.
The estimated $20 billion cost is being
underwritten by Korea's largest steel producer
and by the real-estate developers from the U.S.-based Gale Group.
The same process is taking place elsewhere in the
world as well. Several cities in India will see
their airports dramatically scaled up in the
coming years. The endless building spree in Dubai
includes construction of the world's largest
aerotropolis--Dubai World Central--which will
begin opening in stages as early as next year.
(By the time it's completed, DWC will have more
than twice the capacity of Frankfurt's airport
and a permanent population of 750,000, all at an
estimated cost of $33 billion.) In Amsterdam,
office space next door to Schiphol Airport costs
more per square foot than an open loft on one of
the city's picturesque 17th-century canals.
Suvarnabhumi will be the largest terminal in
the world when it opens this year. By 2036, a
city of 3.3 million people--larger than Chicago
today--will have grown around it. A
half-billion-dollar high-speed train will connect
the airport city to downtown Bangkok.
The aerotropolis represents the logic of
globalization made flesh in the form of cities.
Whether we consider globalization to be good or
simply inevitable, it holds these truths to be
self-evident: that customers on the far side of
the world may matter more than those next door;
that costs must continually be wrung from every
process; that greater efficiency is paramount,
followed closely by agility; and that distance
equals time, which equals friction. To cope with
these demands, we've already taken to living much
of our lives in the digital world. But for every
laptop order that zips to Penang via email, a
real 747 must wing its way back with the laptop
itself in its hold. If the airport is the
mechanism making that possible, everything
else--factories, offices, homes, schools--will be
built in relation to it. "This is the union of
urban planning, airport planning, and business
strategy," Kasarda says. "And the whole will be
something altogether different than the sum of its parts."
A Well-Oiled Machine
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."
The budding city surrounding Suvarnabhumi
illustrates Kasarda's claim that "the three
essential rules of real estate have changed from
'location, location, location' to 'accessibility,
accessibility, accessibility.' There's a new
metric. It's no longer space; it's time and cost.
And if you look closely at the aerotropolis, what
appears to be sprawl is slowly evolving into a
reticulated system aimed at reducing both." In
his sketches for Suvarnabhumi, the outermost
rings extend nearly 20 miles into the countryside
from the runways. There, giant clusters of
apartment towers and bungalows will take shape;
the former will house Thais working the assembly
lines and cargo hubs in the inner rings, the
latter the expatriate armies imported by the
various multinationals expected to set up shop
around the airport. (No fewer than 10 golf
courses are planned to keep the expats happy, not
to mention shopping malls, movie theaters, and
schools that seem airlifted straight from southern California.)
Moving in from the residential rings, the next
layer will likely be occupied by the manicured
campuses of those same multi-nationals--the back
offices, R&D labs, and regional headquarters of
the Dells and Motorolas that have been persuaded
to relocate. Here, one will also find the hotels,
merchandise marts, convention centers--anything
and everything to sustain the knowledge workers
laboring in the shadow of the airport. In the
innermost rings, essentially abutting the runway
fences, will be the free-trade zones, factories,
warehouses, and logistics hubs designed for the
FedEx/DHL/UPS combine--the just-in-time
manufacturers and suppliers for whom time and
distance from the belly of the 747 equals, quite
literally, cost. New six-lane highways will link
the inner and outer rings, with semitrailers
barreling down dedicated "aerolanes" while
residents stroll along prefab boulevards. A
high-speed rail link costing more than a half-
billion dollars will connect Suvarnabhumi to Bangkok.
"This is the key to Thailand's growth over the
next five years," says Suwat Wanisubut, director
of the Suvarnabhumi Airport Development
Committee. "No other project is this big. It will
bring high-tech companies to this region from
Malaysia, Singapore, and even southern China. We
are now competing directly with them, and even with Korea and Japan."
Despite a fondness for Olympian pronouncements,
Kasarda is neither a Le Corbusier nor a Robert
Moses (to name just two men who wanted to mold
cityscapes in their own images). He sheepishly
concedes that his visions of monstrous highways
and multimodal cargo hubs would make Jane
Jacobs--the late patron saint of human-scale
cities--toss and turn in her grave. But Kasarda
has moved beyond the comfy, retro dictates of the
New Urbanists. He isn't concerned with "the way
we live now" but with the naked realities of how we do business now.
Is the United States prepared for those
realities? The closest thing to an aerotropolis
in America today is Memphis International, home
for 25 years to FedEx. Memphis has been the
busiest cargo airport in the world now for 14
years running, a fact visitors learn before
they've even left baggage claim. Ninety-four
percent of that title is owed to FedEx, whose
nightly "sort" is still one of the logistical
wonders of the world: 200 planes descend in a
swarm, disgorging more than a million packages
and overnight letters that must pass through the
interlaced conveyor belts and chutes of the
"primary matrix" before being reloaded and shipped out.
Since its first sort in 1973, FedEx has become
the largest private employer in a metropolitan
area of close to 1 million people. The University
of Memphis concluded in a study two years ago
that the airport (and essentially FedEx) was
directly and indirectly responsible for more than
$20 billion in annual output and for 166,000
jobs--one of every four in the region. Only
30,000 or so of those are on FedEx's payroll; the
rest have flourished within the ecosystem of
warehouses, trucking firms, factories, and
offices nestled within its footprint.
On completion, the $33 billion Dubai World
Central will be the size of O'Hare and Heathrow
combined, with three times the cargo capacity of
the FedEx hub in Memphis. DWC will house 750,000,
making it almost as large as Stockholm.
To calculate the value of setting up shop in
Memphis, just compare its informal FedEx drop-off
deadlines with your own: Midnight or even 1 a.m.
versus 9 p.m. on the East Coast and as early as 4
p.m. out West. That's a lot of extra production.
Jo Ferreira, FedEx's managing director of
hub-area business development, routinely juggles
the requests of as many as 40 to 50 companies
jockeying for space around Memphis and smaller
hubs like Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Oakland.
"Proximity matters more and more to them," she
says, and Memphis offers an ideal combination of
inexpensive, semiskilled labor, acres of turnkey
warehouse space, and the junction of three states
all fighting for their business. "But the biggest
driver," Ferreira says, "is the growing urge that
when we want something, we want it now. And as
soon as one company relocates here or to any of
our hubs, the next thing that happens is that
three or four of its competitors come calling."
But while Memphis might qualify as a
proto-aerotropolis--with the FedEx hub providing
just enough gravity to keep its customers from
spinning out of orbit into Mississippi or
Arkansas--few other American cities are even
remotely ready to build their own analogues. The
zoning is too haphazard, the NIMBY-ism too
rampant, the love of the strip mall and ranch
house too profound. In other words, there's a
reason Kasarda could get his vision built in
Bangkok but not Atlanta. And that could be
dangerous in the long run: "Individual companies
don't compete," he says. "Supply chains compete.
Networks and systems compete." People forget that
FedEx started in Little Rock, Arkansas, but the
airport there couldn't keep up--so FedEx founder
Fred Smith looked around until he found one that could.
Kasarda is fond of quoting the biologist Sir
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's insight that growth
creates form, but form limits growth. The
challenge facing our airports today is the same
confronting any company that has at last bumped
up against the limits of its growth and is
contemplating some creative destruction. Much
like Microsoft and its dilemma about what to do
with Windows, our airports are the operating
system underlying a network that endlessly
crisscrosses the globe. And like the software
giant, they are bound to maintain backward
compatibility with everything that has come to
flourish around them. But whereas Microsoft only
has to worry about its third-party developers,
urban planners attempting to retrofit an
aerotropolis will be forced to choose between
optimization and saving people's homes. The
consequences of each decision are equally stark:
Either risk building competitive disadvantage
into the very fabric of cities, or begin unwinding the fabric itself.
The Thais and other governments across the
developing world play the part of Apple or Linux
in this metaphor. Their willingness to break with
the past in pursuit of something truly new stems
largely from their having so little to protect.
Indeed, the imposition of an aerotropolis may be
one of the only remaining ways some developing
countries can restore order to their collapsing
urban grids, a process made considerably easier
by the relatively weak civil rights of their
citizens. In Dubai, for example, the emirate's
ruler and "CEO," Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al
Maktoum, has been building an aerotropolis
basically by fiat for at least the last decade.
Essentially a finger of sand jutting into the
Persian Gulf, Dubai is almost always approached
from the air. It also happens to sit less than an
eight-hour flight from half the world's
population. The $33 billion Dubai World Central,
probably the purest expression of the
aerotropolis concept to date, will unwrap its
first ring late next year--a logistics hub with
more than three times the capacity of FedEx's in
Memphis. Dubai Logistics City is to have its own
access to the runways, a forest of warehouses and
office space, "e-customs" processing for anyone
operating within the zone, and enough on-site
housing for 40,000 workers. Some 1.2 million
square meters of factory and warehouse space will
serve customers including Boeing, Caterpillar,
Chanel, LVMH, Mitsubishi, Porsche, and
Rolls-Royce. In the second ring, free-trade zones
like Dubai Internet City are to host the regional
outposts of titans such as IBM, Microsoft, and
Oracle. And in the outermost ring, prepackaged
burbs such as Dubai Festival City will warehouse
77,000 residents, who will pass their days in one
of the world's largest malls, on a Four
Seasons–maintained golf course, or working in one
of the on-site office towers that offer,
according to its promotional Web site, "a
thriving, dynamic centerpoint situated just two
kilometers from the emirate's award-winning international airport."
I paid a visit to Dubai in February and found
little more than a few apartment buildings, an
Ikea, and a six-lane highway leading to the
airport a mile or so away. The man in charge of
selling this city to its future inhabitants was
an affable Canadian mall-developer named Phil
McArthur. At the end of my tour--which included
all 18 holes on the golf course and watching
Pakistani laborers getting bused back into the
desert--I grilled him about whether anyone would
want to live in "hillside villas" built into the
sides of sand dunes. "I already live here," he
said, shrugging. "But then again, I know what's
coming, and when, so that makes me a little different from everyone else."
A Cure for What Ails Us?
John Kasarda obviously sees the aerotropolis as
key to America's competitive agility, and a
critical one at that. Implicit in his thinking is
a coming world of exponential population increase
and cutthroat competition for resources and
profits. His vision may evoke everything
Americans find terrifying about globalization--a
civilization cast in quick-drying cement, packed
with worker drones--but if you grant Kasarda's
seemingly implacable logic, you have to ask: How
willing or able are we to adapt? Ours is a
country, after all, that allowed Denver's
Stapleton to be abandoned outright after
encroaching suburbs cut off its oxygen supply.
Compare that with Suvarnabhumi, slated to become
a self-contained province governed by the prime
minister himself, and it's clear our
squeamishness about dictating how and where our
cities grow could ultimately come back to haunt us.
Nearly a decade ago, Kasarda met with World Bank
officials in Bangkok to convince them of the
broad social benefits an aerotropolis would
bring. His sales pitch was ingenious: By helping
to connect the city and the surrounding
countryside to the rest of the world, Thailand
would actually be furthering its own, seemingly
unrelated goals for the region. It would improve
the lot of women (by bringing in manufacturing
jobs), help farmers and fishermen sell their
orchids and tiger prawns overseas (by connecting
them to foreign markets), and stem the flood of
farmers into overcrowded cities such as Bangkok
(by creating a new population center with a
tremendous hunger for labor). Kasarda's plea got
nowhere at the time, but his thinking eventually won the Thais over.
In January, Kasarda made a similar pitch to
another hard-bitten city: Detroit. He had been
asked to make his usual stump speech for a group
of 60 or so University of Michigan architecture
students who were about to undergo an annual
urban-planning exercise known as a "charrette."
Held every year by the dean of Michigan's
architecture school, each charrette contemplates
a different aspect of Detroit's ongoing attempt
at urban renewal--which makes for plenty of ground to cover.
This year's installment opened with the
possibility of a Detroit aerotropolis as its
premise. Nearly unique among major U.S. cities,
Detroit has 25,000 acres of woods and open fields
surrounding its main airport, a hub for Northwest
Airlines. Just seven miles to the west--a
straight shot along I-94--is a second, smaller
airport, Willow Run, which caters to the
chartered cargo and corporate jets of the Big
Three automakers and their assorted suppliers. If
one were to link the airfields with the highway,
and with mass transit stretching to downtown
Detroit, the spine for an aerotropolis would be in place.
Upon emerging three days later, three student
teams presented master plans that offered
everything from full-fledged logistics hubs
around Willow Run to a grand boulevard running
through a greenbelt of mixed-use neighborhoods
and office parks designed in the high style of
Silicon Valley. The aerotropolis, they concluded,
could stem the massive brain drain from local
universities and the entire region. It could
anchor a new city, with 100,000 new residents, in
Wayne County's western suburbs. Kasarda was
ecstatic: "This could turn around all of
southeastern Michigan!" And his hosts became his newest converts.
Three months later, Mulu Birru, Wayne County's
economic development guru, presented a "best of"
compilation of the students' designs to his boss,
Wayne County executive Robert Ficano, along with
a "nonbinding memorandum of understanding" for
building the aerotropolis--a plea to the governor
to grant them the cash and the planning powers
necessary to bring Detroit and adjoining
communities to the table. Birru, who worked a
minor miracle by helping to turn Pittsburgh
around, sees a Detroit aerotropolis as a haven
for "green" architecture and a magnet for auto
suppliers, biotech firms, ethanol plants, and
just about any other technology-intensive
business you can think of. In fact, auto-parts
outfits such as Visteon, Magna, and the Chinese
entrant Century Automotive have either built or
are eyeing new campuses in the aerotropolis zone.
(Many auto components today are lightweight and
digital, and thus easily shipped by air.)
After our meeting, Birru's deputy and I drive off
for another aerotropolis-site inspection, wending
our way through the parking lot of Visteon
Village, home to some 3,000 auto-parts workers
and nearly as self-contained as the 19th-century
New England mill town it resembles. We take the
back roads to the future grounds of the Pinnacle
Aeropark, a parcel of open land just south of
Detroit's airport that will serve as a prototype
for the aerotropolis when ground is broken next year.
At one point, we pull over next to a field of
dandelions less than a mile from the runways.
These thousand acres are set to become the
Entertainment Center, a Magna-supported vision
that could have been a leftover sketch from
Suvarnabhumi. Hotels, a casino, a performing-arts
center, retail, and even a horse-racing track
(Magna's entertainment division happens to own
Pimlico) would all sit here, cheek by jowl.
When you stand there, the airport peeking out
from behind the overpass suddenly seems an
optimistic symbol. It makes as much sense--and
probably more--for the people of Detroit to orbit
a new global portal as it does for them to cling
to some frayed and decrepit version of Jane
Jacobs's ideal. It's an opportunity for the city
to start fresh, to recast itself in our networked
economy's own image. It's a chance that Detroit,
of all places, can ill afford to miss. The rest
of us had better take good notes.
Map of the Global Aerotropolis
Greg Lindsay is an editor-at-large at Advertising
Age. His work has appeared in I.D., Fortune, and elsewhere.
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
