Rise of the Aerotropolis

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A terminal at Suvarnabhumi International Airport, the Bangkok aerotropolis set to open later this year.

Prefab communities abut the high-speed rail lines at Hong Kong International.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified one of the underwriters of New Songdo City as Gale Group. It has been updated to reflect the developer's correct name, Gale International.

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.

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 International.