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.

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."