Aerotropolis
The Way We'll Live Next
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5.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This brilliant and eye-opening look at the new phenomenon called the aerotropolis gives us a glimpse of the way we will live in the near future—and the way we will do business too.
Not so long ago, airports were built near cities, and roads connected the one to the other. This pattern—the city in the center, the airport on the periphery— shaped life in the twentieth century, from the central city to exurban sprawl. Today, the ubiquity of jet travel, round-the-clock workdays, overnight shipping, and global business networks has turned the pattern inside out. Soon the airport will be at the center and the city will be built around it, the better to keep workers, suppliers, executives, and goods in touch with the global market.
This is the aerotropolis: a combination of giant airport, planned city, shipping facility, and business hub. The aerotropolis approach to urban living is now reshaping life in Seoul and Amsterdam, in China and India, in Dallas and Washington, D.C. The aerotropolis is the frontier of the next phase of globalization, whether we like it or not.
John D. Kasarda defined the term "aerotropolis," and he is now sought after worldwide as an adviser. Working with Kasarda's ideas and research, the gifted journalist Greg Lindsay gives us a vivid, at times disquieting look at these instant cities in the making, the challenges they present to our environment and our usual ways of life, and the opportunities they offer to those who can exploit them creatively. Aerotropolis is news from the near future—news we urgently need if we are to understand the changing world and our place in it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Financial journalist Lindsay introduces readers to the ideas of academic and global management guru Kasarda, explicating and championing Kasarda's concept of the aerotropolis, urban design premised on the centrality of air transport, air routes, and airports. Lindsay reviews the uneven history of major American airports, designed "before we knew what they were for," while praising two recent aerotropli, Memphis and Louisville "the cities that shipping and handling' built" whose revitalized economies and infrastructures were attendant on the rise of hometown global giants FedEx and UPS, respectively. Skyrocketing numbers of air travelers reinforce "Kasarda's Law of Connectivity": technologies circumventing physical distance, from the telegraph to the Internet, only fire our desire to travel ourselves. The inevitability of an airborne future rests on economic but also human imperatives. The prose is brisk and affable, but thorough almost to a fault, leading to some redundancy. The prognosis, meanwhile, lands squarely within a capitalist worldview and, thus, on the rosy side, in assessing, for example, the environmental sustainability of "Airworld." But our increasing dependence on air travel is real enough, and this is an eye-opening picture of that trend.
