Rise of the Aerotropolis

Enlarge

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 Thais and other governments across the developing world play the part of Apple or Linux in this metaphor. Their willingness to break with the past in pursuit of something truly new stems largely from their having so little to protect. Indeed, the imposition of an aerotropolis may be one of the only remaining ways some developing countries can restore order to their collapsing urban grids, a process made considerably easier by the relatively weak civil rights of their citizens. In Dubai, for example, the emirate's ruler and "CEO," Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, has been building an aerotropolis basically by fiat for at least the last decade. Essentially a finger of sand jutting into the Persian Gulf, Dubai is almost always approached from the air. It also happens to sit less than an eight-hour flight from half the world's population. The $33 billion Dubai World Central, probably the purest expression of the aerotropolis concept to date, will unwrap its first ring late next year--a logistics hub with more than three times the capacity of FedEx's in Memphis. Dubai Logistics City is to have its own access to the runways, a forest of warehouses and office space, "e-customs" processing for anyone operating within the zone, and enough on-site housing for 40,000 workers. Some 1.2 million square meters of factory and warehouse space will serve customers including Boeing, Caterpillar, Chanel, LVMH, Mitsubishi, Porsche, and Rolls-Royce. In the second ring, free-trade zones like Dubai Internet City are to host the regional outposts of titans such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. And in the outermost ring, prepackaged burbs such as Dubai Festival City will warehouse 77,000 residents, who will pass their days in one of the world's largest malls, on a Four Seasons–maintained golf course, or working in one of the on-site office towers that offer, according to its promotional Web site, "a thriving, dynamic centerpoint situated just two kilometers from the emirate's award-winning international airport."

I paid a visit to Dubai in February and found little more than a few apartment buildings, an Ikea, and a six-lane highway leading to the airport a mile or so away. The man in charge of selling this city to its future inhabitants was an affable Canadian mall-developer named Phil McArthur. At the end of my tour--which included all 18 holes on the golf course and watching Pakistani laborers getting bused back into the desert--I grilled him about whether anyone would want to live in "hillside villas" built into the sides of sand dunes. "I already live here," he said, shrugging. "But then again, I know what's coming, and when, so that makes me a little different from everyone else."

A Cure for What Ails Us?

John Kasarda obviously sees the aerotropolis as key to America's competitive agility, and a critical one at that. Implicit in his thinking is a coming world of exponential population increase and cutthroat competition for resources and profits. His vision may evoke everything Americans find terrifying about globalization--a civilization cast in quick-drying cement, packed with worker drones--but if you grant Kasarda's seemingly implacable logic, you have to ask: How willing or able are we to adapt? Ours is a country, after all, that allowed Denver's Stapleton to be abandoned outright after encroaching suburbs cut off its oxygen supply. Compare that with Suvarnabhumi, slated to become a self-contained province governed by the prime minister himself, and it's clear our squeamishness about dictating how and where our cities grow could ultimately come back to haunt us.

Nearly a decade ago, Kasarda met with World Bank officials in Bangkok to convince them of the broad social benefits an aerotropolis would bring. His sales pitch was ingenious: By helping to connect the city and the surrounding countryside to the rest of the world, Thailand would actually be furthering its own, seemingly unrelated goals for the region. It would improve the lot of women (by bringing in manufacturing jobs), help farmers and fishermen sell their orchids and tiger prawns overseas (by connecting them to foreign markets), and stem the flood of farmers into overcrowded cities such as Bangkok (by creating a new population center with a tremendous hunger for labor). Kasarda's plea got nowhere at the time, but his thinking eventually won the Thais over.

In January, Kasarda made a similar pitch to another hard-bitten city: Detroit. He had been asked to make his usual stump speech for a group of 60 or so University of Michigan architecture students who were about to undergo an annual urban-planning exercise known as a "charrette." Held every year by the dean of Michigan's architecture school, each charrette contemplates a different aspect of Detroit's ongoing attempt at urban renewal--which makes for plenty of ground to cover.