Aerotropolis: Business Mobility and Urban Competitiveness in the 21st Century

The 21st century is bringing competitive advantage to cities that understand and capitalize on the changing context of business mobility and commercial development. This context is being altered by a catalytic interaction of digitization, globalization, and aviation transforming where and the way business is conducted. It is also transforming the pace and distances that products and people routinely traverse. These dynamics have heightened competition among places as well as firms around the world 

Airport cities: The evolution

Airport City and aerotropolis development is gaining substantial traction, multiplying rapidly around the world. With cities now being built around airports, rather than the reverse, propitious opportunities await metropolitan regions that can marshal the vision, planning skills, and coordinated actions to capitalize on them.

The Airport City Phenomenon: Evidence from Large US Airports

As air transport for leisure trips, business travel and goods shipment increased rapidly over the past several decades, the emergence of airport cities has been hypothesised. Busy commercial airports may be emerging as central transport nodes in large metropolitan areas, much as ports and rail terminals were in the past, anchoring employment servicing passengers, facilitating frequent travellers and providing a spatial focus for unrelated firms. An analysis of small-area employment data for the areas surrounding 25 major US airports and the related central cities reveals the concentration of employment within 2.5 miles of these airports to be substantial—approximately half that within 2.5 miles of the central point of the corresponding CBDs—and growing. The analysis refocuses a question about the nature of spatial differentiation within metropolitan regions supporting multiple employment nodes.

See http://online.sagepub.com for full-text, as the final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Urban Studies, 50/6, May 2013, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. © SAGE Journals.

Stephen Appold and John D. Kasarda are in the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise, University of North Carolina, CB 3440 Chapel Hill, 27599-3440, USA. Email: appold@unc.edu and John_Kasarda@unc.edu.

A Tale of Two Airports

Brazil's Belo Horizonte International Airport went from stagnation to major growth success, but it took bold government decisions, and substantial investment in connecting surface transportation infrastructure.

Aerotropolis: Landing in the Heart of 21st Century Urban Planning

The future of economic development is taking shape at major international air hubs that have become the anchor of an organically expanding growth strategy, the Aerotropolis

The Aerotropolis and Global Competitiveness

A new urban form is emerging worldwide that is shaping the competitiveness of metropolitan regions and nations. It is the aerotropolis, a city built around an airport which offers aviation-oriented firms speedy connectivity to their suppliers, customers, and enterprise partners nationally and worldwide.

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next?

John D. Kasarda is co-author of the new book Aerotropolis, an astonishing treatise on the metropolis of the future and the integral role of the airport. Kasarda argues "Look for yesterday's busiest train terminals and you will find today's great urban centers. Look for today's biggest airports and you will find the great urban centers of tomorrow." In his career he has consulted with four White House administrations and advised companies such as Boeing, FedEx and Bank of America. He is professor at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. For a rare moment when he is not in the air, Atlantis asks him about the future of the airport, the city and the implications for the Netherlands.

Are Airports Non-Places?

Social scientists view airports as quintessential "non-places". "Places" communicate identity, social meaning, and history while "non-places", lacking these attributes, are held to be anonymous, disorienting and off-putting.

Big plans for Panama: Panama’s Airport City and Aerotropolis Ambitions

Central America has lagged behind other regions of the world in airport city and aerotropolis development. This is about to change.

Seeding growth at airports and airport cities: Insights from the two-sided market literature

Airports are evolving from simple infrastructure providers to complex multiproduct, multiservice enterprises wherein consumption of one product cross-subsidizes the provision of others. Nowhere is this better seen than in the airport cities which are evolving around many mid and large sized airports. Rather than separate portfolio businesses which can smooth or augment airport revenue, these developments raise the prospect that airports are platforms for two-sided markets.