To The Best Of Our Knowledge

This week’s episode of Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To The Best Of Our Knowledge” is devoted to airports, featuring Alain de Botton (A Week at the Airport), Christopher Schaberg (The Textual Life of Airports), Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports,“and myself, talking about Aerotropolis. You can listen to or download my ten-minute segment here, and the transcript follows:

Jim Fleming: Did you know that Memphis, Tennessee bills itself as “America’s Aerotropolis”?  Chances are, you’ve never even heard the word “aerotropolis,” but it"s a word that Greg Lindsay is very familiar with.  He’s the co-author, along with John Kasarda, of the book. “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.”  Greg Lindsay tells Steve Paulson what exactly an aerotropolis is.

Greg Lindsay: An aerotropolis, as conceived by my co-author, John Kasarda, who sort of popularized the phrase, is literally a city built around an airport, usually by intention.  He discovered the word in China where they’ve been building dozens of these, but it’s basically as he imagines it, a city built around the terminals and around the airfield, starting with sort of cargo rings and expanding out into offices and beyond, but in practice as I like to think of it, you know there are many cities that could qualify for the label “aerotropolis.”  It’s any city which uses its airport and air travel to connect itself to communities on the other side of the world more closely than the cities in its own region.  I look to places like Dubai, which is really sort of in the middle of nowhere unless you air travel, in which case it’s in the center of the world.

Steve Paulson: So what makes Dubai an aerotropolis?

Lindsay: Well, Dubai is really an airline with an emirate attached to it.  I mean Dubai literally was a city of 20,000 people 20 or 30 years ago and they leveraged their airline, Emirates, which is now the world’s fastest growing and largest long haul carrier, to basically become this sort of hub for the middle of the world and Dubai has really connected people who historically lived along the Silk Road as they called it then, and reconnected Africa to Asia and beyond, and so Dubai, which is really off the major trade routes and has no real oil wealth of its own anymore, has really sort of tried to forge itself as this ultimate hub, business hub, entertainment hub, tourism hub, for the entire middle of the world. 

Paulson: And how many people live in Dubai now?

Lindsay: Dubai just crossed the two million mark for the first time and you know, many people wrote off the city after the real estate bubble burst, as sort of disappearing into the dust bin of history, but what’s interesting is that Dubai has leveraged its airport and its airline to really bring in Chinese investors, Indian investors, and a lot of Iranians are buying second homes in Dubai right now in light of all the uncertainty, and so they leveraged their airline and their airport in ways I think most Americans never would have realized.

Paulson: So you’re saying this is a city of two million people that basically only exists, or certainly only exists at the magnitude that it now has because of its airport?

Lindsay: Absolutely.  I think Dubai was alien to us because we don’t imagine the scale at which it operates.  Within a five hour flight of Dubai, or an eight hour flight I think it is, is something like five billion people and so basically much of the overbuilding that they did was not a result of craziness or lack of attention.  I think a lot of it was intentional.  A lot of it was built for people who would never live full time in Dubai.  It is a city designed for people who live only for the fleeting moments of their lives passing through on their way to somewhere else, a city of second, third, fourth, fifth homes, Saudis who go there on weekends, Russians who go there on shopping expeditions and Indians who set up companies there, of African traders passing through on their way to China.  It is really the sort of 21st century poor city entrepot that really sort of has the strange glamour and debauchery of Macau of the 19th century or San Francisco during the gold rush. 

Paulson: So it sounds like there’s something about this particular moment in history that we’re living in right now that demands an aerotropolis.  I mean this wouldn’t have happened 50 years ago.

Lindsay: When I started researching the book, the premise I had is that if we live in an area of globalization, a word we throw around without really attaching a definition to it, then basically we would have to travel on a global scale.  I mean the internet is one thing and email is great, but sooner or later we have to meet face to face and we have to ship our iPhones halfway around the world, and if you put enough people and enough money through these places, through these airports, then sooner or later you’re going to see these strange side effects happening.  You’re going to see something sprout around it, and it turned out to be these strange cities.  Dubai exists because globalization has happened, in large part because of 9-11, in which case America revoked a lot of visas for air travelers which caused them to start changing their focus to China and beyond, and that led to this huge growth in air travel in the Middle East and in Asia.  So, this is really sort of I’d like to think where globalization is really sort of made flesh in the form of airports in the form of cities.  We really sort of see these unintended effects of the world finding itself and reconnecting to itself, that we literally didn’t imagine 10 or 11 years ago.

Paulson: It sounds like you’re saying that this is the new kind of city.  The aerotropolis is the city of the 21st century which suggests that we will start to see many more cities popping up around the world including in the United States, built around airports.

Lindsay: Well, it boils down to the fact that we think in America that basically the great age of building out cities is over, I mean because of the end of our own housing bubble, but when you look at the statistics, basically half the world’s population lives in a city right now, 3.5 billion of 7 billion people, but over the next 40 years, we’re going to see urban populations double to 7 billion people out of 9 billion people on the planet, and we’re going to see urban land cover.  All the ground that is covered with a city or a suburb or a slum is going to triple in the next 40 years, which means two things.  One, we’ve not even begun to start building cities, and two, what we’ll build in the next 40 years is likely to be the most we’ll ever build ever again because of declining fertility rates, the human population will eventually decline.  So, you’re basically seeing these cities in the middle of China or the middle of India or the Middle East or Africa are all desperate to connect themselves to the global economy and if you’re a landlocked nation, or if western China, that ultimately means you need a very strong airport to tie into that, and so if you’re building a place from scratch, you might as well build it around an airport, just like you once built it around the railroad station or around the harbor.

Paulson: Isn’t this a pretty depressing vision of what our future cities are going to look like though?  I mean if these are basically vehicles for delivering goods or delivering people to go on to some business trip, rather than creating vibrant cultures, that’s maybe not the city I want to live in.

Lindsay: Well, fortunately you and I have the choice that we don’t have to live in some of these cities.  I think the places that are really embracing the aerotropolis model are the places that are feeling that panic of sudden urbanization.  It’s places like China, which is going to urbanize 400 million people in the west, moving them out of villages and into cities, finding them jobs, they’re the ones building this, or a place like Dubai, which again, 20,000 native inhabitants, a little bit of oil money, and they were desperate to basically deal themselves into the global economy as they knew it, and you know, most of the people who live in Dubai are ex-patriots who are choosing to live there to generate wealth to forge a name for themselves, something other than sort of living in a place where they grew up.  Then of course, there’s India which is building a dozen cities from scratch, two million people apiece as part of the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, and the simple reason is that they need to add a Chicago a year for the next 20 years to handle all these people.  So yeah, I think the scale of this urban crisis, what’‘s driving it is really different than we can imagine here in the U.S.

Paulson: Now these kinds of aerotropolises, which seem to be very different from most of the airports that we know in the United States.  For instance, LAX in Los Angeles, is nothing like what you’ve just been describing.

Lindsay: Well, an aerotropolis in its core, at least from an American perspective, is the premise that you should take an airport and you should actively plan for it to become a business hub or to accommodate all this office space.  In America we build almost all of our airports before we knew what they were for and LAX is a classic example of that.  When they chose the site of LAX in 1929, it was a bean field 15 miles from downtown and the people who selected it complained that it was too far away.  Then you fast forward just 30 or 40 years and you already have this encroachment on the airport, you already have the first noise lawsuits starting, and today LAX is hopelessly trapped, surrounded by offices and Inglewood and a massive oil refinery on the southern edge, to the point where you can’t expand it and when they proposed building into the ocean, of course, environmentalists with good reason, fought that one to the death, and so LAX is this sort of major hub.  It is entrepot for anyone across Asia.  If you live anywhere between Malibu and the Mexican border and you want to fly to Asia, LAX is your only option and it can’t expand, so we’ve sort of painted ourselves into a little corner when it comes to many of our airports. 

In other cases, we’ve surrounded them with auto plants and cement factories, some of the most horribly noisy uses we can think of because we thought of airports as these terrible nuisances that we never wanted to see.  We tried to banish them to the edges of our cities and hoped that they would stay there.  Of course, the city always sort of encroached upon it, whether we consciously knew it or not, there was some reason to be near the airport, so most of our airport planning is just terrible, it’s haphazard and now it’s incredibly expensive.  I do think that America needs to rethink our relationship with our airports.  We need to do a better job of accommodating them somehow, rather than thinking that we can banish them and never have to think about them again.

Paulson: Now it would seem that there is a huge shadow that hangs over this whole new kind of airport city and the economy that it’s built on.  It’s highly dependent on oil and we know oil is a non-renewable resource.  Presumably at some point, it’s going to run out, not to mention the problems we might have with climate change, raises the question of whether it’s really wise to build cities that so obviously depend on oil consumption for air travel.

Lindsay: That’s part of the larger question of whether it’s wise to build a civilization on oil on a global scale, which is exactly what we’ve done for the last 50 years.  It’s interesting when it comes to air travel and oil.  There’s a long run and a short run answer in the problem with this.  In the short run, what’s interesting is that time has continued to increase in value and cost ahead of oil and by that, I meant the fact that despite oil prices going to well over $100 a barrel, you’re still seeing double digit growth in air travel in places like India, China and the Middle East.  All these places with a rapidly growing middle class who are finally discovering the value of their time and their ability to project their talents across these huge regions, and so you see that there’s a great sort of rule of thumb that even though oil prices destroy demand through high fares, rising incomes create it even faster. 

We’re in this sort of weird paradoxical situation right now in the United States where air travel is sort of very flat, where we can’t afford to fly, not because the prices of tickets are going up, we can’t afford to fly because we can’t afford to fill our SUVs.  We’re watching our disposable incomes be destroyed by basically the fact that we have to drive to work every day, and then when it comes to goods, what’s interesting is people have said that sooner or later it wont be economical to ship an iPhone around the world.  Well, that’s not quite true because what’s interesting is that the reason that we started outsourcing all of these things to Asia is not because it was really cheap to fly from the other side of the world.  It’s because the value of those goods has gone up so much over time that the percentage of what it costs to fly it has fallen, so if you have a $500 iPhone, the cost of what it takes to ship it via FedEx from China is a tiny percentage of the total cost you’re willing to pay for it, so that makes all the other advantages of building in China so much greater. 

Paulson: Your book features two epigraphs, one from the British writer, J. G. Ballard, who says, “I suspect the airport will be the true city of the 21st century.” and the second is from the Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, who said, “A city made for speed is made for success.”  I’m curious about why you picked those two quotations.

Lindsay:  I picked both of those quotations so as you start to read the book, you see them as a flashing red light or perhaps a flashing yellow light, a caution or a stop before proceeding forward, that you think about the contents therein and the Utopian promises contained.  J. G. Ballard, of course, everything you read of his is dripping with venomous satire.  I knew of course he didn’t mean that on some level, but I do think that Ballard thought that was in fact, the future.  He was right about it even though he wanted to be wrong, and Le Corbusier, of course, the ultimate seduction of that.  Following Le Corbusier’s principles, we made some of the worst urban mistakes we could ever make, and so I think anyone should be extremely cautious about building the city from scratch, or thinking that it can be built from scratch.  Of course, the great paradox is that we need to build cities from scratch that have never been built before.  We are entering a phase of building that is unmatched and so what are we supposed to do?  It’s this horrible sort of paradox.  We don’t know how to build a perfect city overnight and yet we’re being forced to.

Fleming: Greg Lindsay’s the co-author along with John Kasarda, of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.”  He spoke with Steve Paulson.  Incidentally Lindsay says that the U.S. has already built its own aerotropolis, O’Hare, and the golden corridor running through the northwest suburbs of Chicago.