Aerotropolis

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Allen Lane, RRP£14.99, 480 pages

John Kasarda, the man with the ideas behind this sprawling and provocative book, grew up in a Pennsylvanian coal-mining town that went bankrupt after a disastrous mine collapse in 1959. He was in his teens at the time, and it taught him an early lesson in how places can shape people, rather than the other way around. Today, he is a business professor who spends much of his life telling governments about the one thing he thinks they can build that will help secure their prosperity in an era of intense global competition: an airport.

Or rather, an aerotropolis: a city deliberately built around an airport, with concentric rings of air transport-dependent businesses, homes and shopping malls, all criss-crossed by “aerolanes” and “aerotrains”, highways and trains. Aerotropoli are, Kasarda believes, “the logic of globalisation made flesh”: cities designed to service the needs of companies that need to be close to global air hubs to keep up; places more connected to Chinese factories or Kenyan flower growers, than to a neighbouring town. They operate in a world dictated by competition between complex supply chains, rather than individual companies alone.

Left to his own academic devices, Kasarda and the aerotropolis might have remained obscure. But in 2006, Greg Lindsay, a New York journalist wrote about them for Fast Company business magazine. A book deal followed. And so we have Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, a Boswellian collaboration in which Kasarda, though listed as co-author, is in fact the subject of a book written and reported by Lindsay.

This can occasionally create a confused point of view, not least when it comes to the question: does anyone really want to live in an airport city? And what of those who don’t? Generally, the book is on the side of the airport. Opponents of attempts to expand Los Angeles airport are dismissed as “nimbys and wannabes”. Environmentalists are committing “social and economic suicide”, Kasarda is quoted as saying. But at other times, Lindsay writes of his neighbours in Brooklyn who have lobbied for the flight paths to LaGuardia airport to be moved because “the approaching plane swoops so low you can clearly read the ‘Delta’ painted on the side”. He also details a university study of workers near Dallas-Fort Worth airport examining how much benzene, a chemical found in jet fuel, is “collecting in their blood”.

That aside, Lindsay sets out Kasarda’s arguments for the aerotropolis with a persuasive mix of data and exhaustive reporting on how the forces of global competition are re-shaping companies and cities worldwide. Companies such as Lenovo, the personal computer group, has a chief executive in Singapore, a chairman in North Carolina, and executives linked by Skype calls and e-mail. Amsterdam is already home to an aerotropolis that offers evidence of Kasarda’s central argument: more and more jobs depend on shipping light but valuable goods – from iPhones to pharmaceuticals – by air.

No wonder the cities rushing fastest to embrace the aerotropolis concept are struggling ones in wealthy countries, such as Detroit, and aspiring ones in emerging markets such as China. In India, dozens of aerotropoli were planned after Kasarda was summoned to Delhi to explain the concept; “Kasarda found himself writing editorials in the Indian press encouraging everyone to calm down”, Lindsay writes.

All of which underlines the most interesting idea raised by this book. Past transport innovations – ships, trains and then cars – helped create many of our greatest cities, but in a world made flat by globalisation, their successors will be the ones that embrace the jet and the aerotropolis. Their residents may not think this is the way they want to live next, but they may not have much choice.

Pilita Clark is the FT’s aerospace correspondent