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.

Despite a fondness for Olympian pronouncements, Kasarda is neither a Le Corbusier nor a Robert Moses (to name just two men who wanted to mold cityscapes in their own images). He sheepishly concedes that his visions of monstrous highways and multimodal cargo hubs would make Jane Jacobs--the late patron saint of human-scale cities--toss and turn in her grave. But Kasarda has moved beyond the comfy, retro dictates of the New Urbanists. He isn't concerned with "the way we live now" but with the naked realities of how we do business now.

Is the United States prepared for those realities? The closest thing to an aerotropolis in America today is Memphis International, home for 25 years to FedEx. Memphis has been the busiest cargo airport in the world now for 14 years running, a fact visitors learn before they've even left baggage claim. Ninety-four percent of that title is owed to FedEx, whose nightly "sort" is still one of the logistical wonders of the world: 200 planes descend in a swarm, disgorging more than a million packages and overnight letters that must pass through the interlaced conveyor belts and chutes of the "primary matrix" before being reloaded and shipped out.

Since its first sort in 1973, FedEx has become the largest private employer in a metropolitan area of close to 1 million people. The University of Memphis concluded in a study two years ago that the airport (and essentially FedEx) was directly and indirectly responsible for more than $20 billion in annual output and for 166,000 jobs--one of every four in the region. Only 30,000 or so of those are on FedEx's payroll; the rest have flourished within the ecosystem of warehouses, trucking firms, factories, and offices nestled within its footprint.

On completion, the $33 billion Dubai World Central will be the size of O'Hare and Heathrow combined, with three times the cargo capacity of the FedEx hub in Memphis. DWC will house 750,000, making it almost as large as Stockholm.

To calculate the value of setting up shop in Memphis, just compare its informal FedEx drop-off deadlines with your own: Midnight or even 1 a.m. versus 9 p.m. on the East Coast and as early as 4 p.m. out West. That's a lot of extra production. Jo Ferreira, FedEx's managing director of hub-area business development, routinely juggles the requests of as many as 40 to 50 companies jockeying for space around Memphis and smaller hubs like Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Oakland. "Proximity matters more and more to them," she says, and Memphis offers an ideal combination of inexpensive, semiskilled labor, acres of turnkey warehouse space, and the junction of three states all fighting for their business. "But the biggest driver," Ferreira says, "is the growing urge that when we want something, we want it now. And as soon as one company relocates here or to any of our hubs, the next thing that happens is that three or four of its competitors come calling."

But while Memphis might qualify as a proto-aerotropolis--with the FedEx hub providing just enough gravity to keep its customers from spinning out of orbit into Mississippi or Arkansas--few other American cities are even remotely ready to build their own analogues. The zoning is too haphazard, the NIMBY-ism too rampant, the love of the strip mall and ranch house too profound. In other words, there's a reason Kasarda could get his vision built in Bangkok but not Atlanta. And that could be dangerous in the long run: "Individual companies don't compete," he says. "Supply chains compete. Networks and systems compete." People forget that FedEx started in Little Rock, Arkansas, but the airport there couldn't keep up--so FedEx founder Fred Smith looked around until he found one that could.

Kasarda is fond of quoting the biologist Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's insight that growth creates form, but form limits growth. The challenge facing our airports today is the same confronting any company that has at last bumped up against the limits of its growth and is contemplating some creative destruction. Much like Microsoft and its dilemma about what to do with Windows, our airports are the operating system underlying a network that endlessly crisscrosses the globe. And like the software giant, they are bound to maintain backward compatibility with everything that has come to flourish around them. But whereas Microsoft only has to worry about its third-party developers, urban planners attempting to retrofit an aerotropolis will be forced to choose between optimization and saving people's homes. The consequences of each decision are equally stark: Either risk building competitive disadvantage into the very fabric of cities, or begin unwinding the fabric itself.