Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next

Publishers Weekly

Financial journalist Lindsay introduces readers to the ideas of academic and global management guru Kasarda, explicating and championing Kasarda's concept of the aerotropolis, urban design premised on the centrality of air transport, air routes, and airports. Lindsay reviews the uneven history of major American airports, designed "before we knew what they were for," while praising two recent aerotropli, Memphis and Louisville--"the cities that ‘shipping and handling' built"--whose revitalized economies and infrastructures were attendant on the rise of hometown global giants FedEx and UPS, respectively. Skyrocketing numbers of air travelers reinforce "Kasarda's Law of Connectivity": technologies circumventing physical distance, from the telegraph to the Internet, only fire our desire to travel ourselves. The inevitability of an airborne future rests on economic but also human imperatives. The prose is brisk and affable, but thorough almost to a fault, leading to some redundancy. The prognosis, meanwhile, lands squarely within a capitalist worldview and, thus, on the rosy side, in assessing, for example, the environmental sustainability of "Airworld." But our increasing dependence on air travel is real enough, and this is an eye-opening picture of that trend. (Mar.)

From the Publisher

“The days when we built our airports around cities now seem distant; in the new, mobile century, we build our cities around airports . . . Cities are becoming like airports—places to leave from more than to live in. I'd always sensed this, but it came home to me with almost shocking immediacy when I was reading the dazzling new book Aerotropolis. One of its authors, John F. Kasarda, is a business professor in North Carolina who flies from Amsterdam to Seoul preaching the gospel of building homes and businesses near airports. Co-author Greg Lindsay is a journalist who knows how to make Kasarda's research racy while raising questions about the cost of living in midair . . . Aerotropolis points out that we can still address the oldest needs but in new and liberating ways.” —Pico Iyer, Time

“I’d wager that the notion [of the aerotropolis] is about to occupy a little more real estate in the popular imagination. This book will no doubt do for airport cities what Joel Garreau and his “Edge City” did for suburban office parks and shopping malls two decades ago: It will relocate the center . . . The prospect sketched out in Aerotropolis—while slightly thrilling, as tectonic shifts often are—feels about as dispiriting as those warehouse zones clustered near the ends of runways. And it’s made all the more so by the realization that the authors are undoubtedly right.”        —Wayne Curtis, Wall Street Journal

“In Aerotropolis, John Kasarda of the University of North Carolina and his co-author, Greg Lindsay, convincingly put the airport at the centre of modern urban life.” —The Economist

“To find yourself at La Guardia Airport, that repository of bad food, dim lighting, unsettlingly indistinct odors and too-short runways, is to be inclined toward embracing John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay and all they have to say about the future of travel and modern life. Kasarda, a professor in the business school at the University of North Carolina who has consulted with four White House administrations and numerous cities and governments, believes that something very different from La Guardia is transforming our world . . . Kasarda’s theories are presented in the ambitious Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, which is written by [Greg] Lindsay, who as the journalist onboard fulfills the role of eager messenger . . . [He] flies around the world, conducting interviews, seeking evidence, translating Kasarda’s technical jargon into a lively if sometimes flawed work of pop behavioral economics . . . Aerotropolis offers intriguing arguments.” —Michael Powell, The New York Times Book Review

“An odd, fascinating new book… an enthralling and only intermittently dogmatic tour of some of the gigantic, no-context sites that globalization has created, such as the all-night flower auction in Amsterdam that gets roses from Kenya to Chicago before they’ve wilted, the FoxConn factory in China where iPods and iPhones are made, and the mega-hospital Bumrungrad in Bangkok, which performs cut-rate major surgery on the uninsured from all over the world.” —Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker

“Fascinating and important work . . . Aerotropolis follows in the tradition of works such as Edge City (1992) that blend jargon-free scholarship with shoe-leather reporting to tell readers why they’re living and working as they are . . . That Kasarda and Lindsay are onto something big seems beyond dispute.” —Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek

“An essential guide to the twenty-first century.” —Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)

“Thanks to the manifold effects of modern aviation, earth and sky are merging in our world faster and more thoroughly than most people know. But you won’t be most people after reading Aerotropolis. Throw out your old atlas. The new version is here.” —Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air

“A fascinating window into the complex emergent urban future. This book is an extremely sophisticated, often devastatingly witty and ironic interpretation of what is possible over the next two decades. It is not science fiction. It is science and technology in action. The authors have one foot firmly planted in the possible and foreseeable.” —Saskia Sassen, Professor, Columbia University, and author of Territory, Authority, Rights

“Aerotropolis presents a radical, futuristic vision of a world where we build our cities around airports rather than the reverse. This book ties together urbanism, global economics, international relations, sociology, and insights from adventures in places that aren't even on the map yet to present a plausible new paradigm for understanding how we relate to the skies. Perhaps the most compelling book on globalization in years.” —Parag Khanna, Senior Fellow, New America Foundation, and author of How to Run the World

“Very few people realize how profoundly air transport is changing our cities, our economies, our social systems, and our systems of governance. If you want to be way ahead of the curve in understanding one of the most important drivers of change for the twenty-first century, read this book.” —Paul Romer, Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

“Aerotropolis redraws the world map, using air routes to trace the new connections and competition between mega-regions that will shape the geography of the Great Reset. This lively, thought-provoking book is a must-read for anyone interested in how and where we will live and work in a truly global era.” —Richard Florida, director of the Martin Prosperity Institute, University of Toronto, and author of The Great Reset

“Aerotropolis comprehensively explains the enormous effects modern aviation has on cities and countries around the world. It is a unique resource.” —Frederick W. Smith, Chairman and CEO, FedEx Corporation

Library Journal

Kasarda (Kenan Distinguished Professor of Strategy & Entrepreneurship, Kenan-Flagler Business Sch., Univ. of North Carolina) developed the "aerotropolis" concept—a combination of a giant airport, planned city, business hub, and shipping center—for cities in China, the Netherlands, Africa, and the United States, among other locations. In the 20th century, airports were generally built on the city's periphery. With increased air travel, the need for overnight shipping, and expanded global business networks, however, the pattern is changing. Kasarda and journalist Lindsay present not only the theories but the nitty-gritty stories of how the concept was put into practice, the people involved, and an examination of the factors leading to the transformation of these cities. The text includes an extensive bibliography for further reading and research. VERDICT This thoughtful study of the aviation-centric city plan and its impact on city planning, globalization, and world trade, among other factors, should be read by business students and faculty, practitioners, and interested lay readers. Highly recommended.—Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Jamaica, NY

Kirkus Reviews

Where are the flying cars we were promised back in the 1930s? They're just around the corner—sort of, write Kasarda (Business/Univ. of North Carolina) and journalist Lindsay in this fascinating study.

In their current configurations, airports are usually banished to distant places far from the city center—e.g., Dulles International outside Washington, D.C., which was once way out in the sticks, or the new airport in Shanghai, connected to downtown by bullet trains. In the near term, cities will migrate closer to airfields. The toll-road corridor leading to Dulles, for instance, is now an ultramodern, international business zone, peopled by those who may have never traveled beyond Fairfax County by other conveyance but roam the world in airplanes. In the longer-term future, write the authors, "we will build this century's cities around [airports]"—our most efficient way of organizing transportation nodes toward a global future. By this logic, customers around the world are more important than those in one's backyard, while we annihilate distances in a constant war against international competition to be first and fastest to market. Thus the "aerotropolis," traces of which can be seen in new airports in Korea, anti-examples of which abound in gridlock-bound places such as Heathrow and JFK. Kasarda and Lindsay take rather roundabout journeys to get to some of their points, chatting away about how Zappos and Amazon do business, and larding their discussion with factoids that don't always have an immediate bearing on the point at hand (for instance, that Facebook users collectively spend the equivalent of 2,700 years each day on the site). Yet their case studies of failures, successes and known unknowns are music to a logistician's ears: Why, for instance, should so much air traffic now pass through the Persian Gulf? Because the emirates are blank slates for the experiment, and, as one Abu Dhabi–based technologist says, "because we can fly nineteen hours nonstop now, we're able to reach any city in the world from here."

The brave new world is on the way, and it's coming in by air.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next is a simple idea -- you can fit it on the back of your boarding pass. The cities of tomorrow, it argues, will be umbilically connected to airports; one enormous urban womb will result, from whence the global economy will be nourished, and will flourish. Those who fail to recognize it will be shut out.

This is the shuttle-flight thesis which John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay have engineered into a 767 of a book that weaves together the Silk Road, fatty tuna, Lipitor, Kenyan flower farmers, mangoes, riots against Thailand's Prime Minister Thaksin, and medical tourism.

The book gets off the ground quickly, with the story of an aerotropolis in Korea called New Songdo, "the most ambitious instant city since Brasilia appeared 50 years ago." But while Brasilia was "grandiose, monstrously overscale" New Songdo -- which is being built around Incheon International Airport -- will be green, smart (a silicon necklace of chips will run it) and willfully aesthetic.

This isn't a one-off curiosity. It's the future. India needs to build 500 airports by the end of the decade. China needs 500 cities as big as New Songdo. That's an unprecedented level of infrastructure development that will reverse the geography that has persisted since the beginning of aviation. No longer will airports be pushed as far from the central city as possible. The airport and the city will be one.

The authors call this "the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities." They also call it the "urban incarnation of the physical Internet." They believe -- and make a reasonably strong case -- that economic prosperity is linked to the emergent synthesis of time and space that the aerotropolis represents -- and that China and the Emirates are the sparkling examples of it. The authors cite a mantra that Dutch planners use:

The airport leaves the city. The city follows the airport. The airport becomes a city.

Kasarda is an academic consultant, a new breed who crosses tenure with retainer. He is a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina; he also gets hired by governments who require laptopped mercenaries in the global competitiveness wars. Lindsay is a journalist, and in a curious literary conceit it is his voice that narrates the book. Which means Kasarda is referred to in the third-person, although he is listed first author. "Kasarda's mother tongue is academic jargon leavened by the argot of business bestsellers," Lindsay writes. Very odd.

Like airport routes, Aerotropolis runs on a hub-and-spoke system. From its conceptual locus it connects us to networked chapters that roll out individual routes to the grand destination. In "A Tale of Three Cities" the NIMBY-mindedness of Los Angeles and Chicago is contrasted with the history of Dulles airport, which silently became "America's wealthiest invisible city." Meanwhile, the book wonders if the dysfunctional calamity called LAX is fatal: "Will it be too late to prevent LA from descending into flyover country?"

Other chapters circle from an analysis of the "cool chain" and just-in-time delivery, to the surprising sustainability of jet transport, to the very real possibility that the aerotropolis may save Detroit by turning it into an outsourced manufacturing center for China.

"Welcome Home to the Airport" is a provocative chapter that describes the decade-long cycle of airport construction and population shifts in Denver, where Stapleton Airport, which "strangled on its own success" was closed, and a new larger one was built much further away. Kasarda and Lindsay nimbly detail the transformative shift in the local political, economic, and sociological context that made this possible. Nobody wanted to live near Stapleton -- essentially a brownfield -- but Denver's new aerotropolis is "purely residential" with planned communities like "Reunion" springing up from nowhere. (If new communities sound like they're named by the people who brand drugs, it's because they are.) And in an ironic twist, Stapleton itself is being redeveloped as a New Urbanist model, complete with faux Brooklyn brownstones.

Aerotropolis, like many recent theme park books Freakonomics, The Tipping Point) is adept at the rapid camera zoom. Reading it can be like the experience of looking out the sweating rectangle of a window as your plane takes off, the world recedes, and your view quickly widens.

So consider a chapter that starts close-up, at a football game in Texas where a Tongan war dance is underway. Tongan students in Odessa? Then it widens to reveal that there are, in fact, 4,000 Tongans who live in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metropolex area. Zoom back again, and we learn their families got there 30 years ago when they got jobs building the airport. Keep pulling back and DFW becomes part of a larger canvas of airport hubs. Eventually we see the whole picture -- from Tongan students to beginnings of the aerotropolis, to the structural reason for layovers, to the success of ExxonMobil, to George Clooney in Up in the Air.

Aerotropolis is prediction wrapped in manifesto. Kasarda and Lindsay are evangelists of the jetstream; they believe the world is fundamentally changing, and they have little patience for those who stand in the way. This lack of balance undermines, but doesn't impeach, their thesis.

So they spend little time reflecting on the social damage that results when strong states achieve aerotropilan nirvana by imposing urban planning solutions on disenfranchised populations. They unilaterally dismiss those who oppose new airport construction as short-sighted. And they attempt to bust the local farming conceit, using experts to make the case that food should be grown "where it grows best" and that "growing food that's good for us matters a lot more than the mileage." Locavore? Not so fast. Whether you're in Brooklyn or in Brazzaville, eating local isn't necessarily sustainable.

This is a big and often wobbly book; like a giant jet heading down the runway, it does its share of shaking and rattling. But once it gets airborne, the flying is largely smooth and the views are a dazzlement. High-Def visions of the future always run the risk of a smug certainty, and Aerotropolis does suffer from that barreling conviction. But it is ably researched and creatively constructed, a prismatic display of the future of the global economy through a sharp and revealing new lens. It makes the mind travel.

--Adam Hanft