The Rise of the 'Aerotropolis' - Are the US and Europe Prepared?

Bangkok's $4 billion Suvanabhumi International Airport located on a mammoth piece of ground in the sparsely settled landscape between Bangkok and the southern coast, has finally opened at the end of September.

Suvarnabhumi is the largest terminal in the world, designed by German celebrity architect Helmut Jahn (photo).  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.

To the jaundiced American eye, such a project might appear to be the terminal metastasis of the sprawl represented by O'Hare, LAX and JFK, writes Greg Lindsay in a Fast Company article. 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.

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 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. Ksarda researched air-cargo networks that have shrunk the globe. Over the past 30 years, Ksarda claims, air cargo has climbed 1,395%. Today, 40% of total economic value of all goods produced in the world is shipped by air. World air cargo traffic is expected to triple from 2000 to 2020 (international air express 3 times faster). The supremacy of airpower has begun to reshape our ideas about how cities should look, how they should function.

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.

Are the United States and Europe prepared for those realities? [Get the full story ¦ Fast Company]

Photos: Holcim Foundation