The Week In Reviews

More mentions of the book have appeared in the past week. A sampling:

1. Reviewing the book for Barnes & Noble, Adam Hanft – a longtime contributor to Inc., Fast Company, and NPR’s Marketplace – concludes:  “This is a big and often wobbly book; like a giant jet heading down the runway, it does its share of shaking and rattling. But once it gets airborne, the flying is largely smooth and the views are a dazzlement. High-Def visions of the future always run the risk of a smug certainty, and Aerotropolis does suffer from that barreling conviction. But it is ably researched and creatively constructed, a prismatic display of the future of the global economy through a sharp and revealing new lens. It makes the mind travel.”

2. Video game designer, critic, and Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost posted a long and very thoughtful review, reaching an interesting conclusion: “As I finished reading Aerotropolis, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d rather have played it’s cover instead. I’d rather have had a visceral but systemic sense of how this century’s cities might optimally work according to Kasarda’s vision than a romp through a dozen stories that support it. Perhaps our age isn’t Instant so much as it is Connected. True, connections imply flows, and those flows are getting increasingly rapid. But connections also require entities, both things that regulate flows and the things that flow between them. And those things and connections include not only people and parcels, freight and food, but also the couplings between social conditions and material objects and financial systems and industrial processes and on and on…Aerotropolis underscores the fact that the story of the twenty-first century will not be one of stories, at all, but of systems instead. The airport city is just one example, yoked to so many others like airliners to a hub. Living effectively under such conditions requires more than just new logistical and industrial infrastructures–it also demands new conceptual infrastructures, new ways of discussing and debating these new ways of living.”

3. The Wandering Aramean, Seth Miller, admits he’s “scared” by the corporate, competitive logic of these cities: “Not all of these aerotropolii will be successful. There are simply too many competing to offer the same services in concentrated regional centers. Some will almost certainly succeed and it will provide a boon to the local economy of the winners. Right up until the competitor down the road offers up cheaper, faster and better services a couple years later. Moving the factories is an expensive undertaking, with short-term effects on to the balance sheet of the company in question and with potentially devastating long-term repercussions to the aerotropolis that loses the business. The book is an interesting read and definitely worth checking out, both from a global economics and a aerophile perspective. And I actually believe that most of the predictions of growth are likely to come true; all current evidence certainly supports them. I just fear for the fallout that comes with those developments and its impact on the global economy. For someone to win big in these efforts someone else is likely to lose badly.”

4. Edge Perspectives’ John Hagel writes about the book in the context of experience design: “Designing for flows becomes the core of system design.  The emphasis also shifts from design of static systems to design of evolving systems. Rather than optimizing for the present, the challenge becomes designing in ways that accelerate evolution. What would it mean to design the systems we live and work in to continually evolve our ability to experience more and more flow, especially the flow of people and ideas? Aerotropolis, an intriguing new book by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, suggests that increasingly our cities will be designed around massive airport facilities that help to maximize the flow of people from city to city and reduce the risk of cities turning inward as they grow in scale.”

5. The National, the state-funded newspaper of Abu Dhabi, describes the book’s vision as “bleak” (which is hilarious when you consider most Americans find the UAE pretty bleak) but concedes “the case that emerges looks soild. Indisputable, even,” especially the “thoughtful” chapter on Dubai and the hubs of the Gulf’s big three airlines.

6. The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University, noted darkly (and satirically) that “If Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were to become its own country, its annual workforce and user base would make it the twelfth most populous nation on Earth. The 12th most populous nation on earth is a sadistic land, dominated by a legitimized Big Brother who seeks to protect us from an alleged onslaught of murderous terrorists. It is a land where the rich and the poor are segregated from the moment the main terminal doors open, where the class system is laid bare and actually denoted by signs.” Truly the way we shall live next.

7. The Los Angeles Times, The Week (subscription required) and New York Post were also kind enough to mention it. “The book conveys the excitement of the engineers, developers and problem solvers working to shorten the commute for businessmen and women and the goods they set in motion around the world,” the LA Times said in its review. “The aerotropolis is a time machine,” Lindsay writes, and “time is the ultimate finite commodity.”