The Aerotropolis and Global Competitiveness

Happy New Year.

I just spent 10 days in Metro Denver and really enjoyed the seasonal cheer and winter weather.

For my first blog entry in 2008, I wanted to provide a link to an article in Fast Company magazine from the July/August 2007 issue written by Greg Lindsay titled "Rise of the Aerotropolis" (www.fastcompany.com/magazine/107/aerotropolis.html ).

"In the relatively obscure world of urban planning, [John] 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 (some might say bone-chilling)
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. Kasarda's research has laid bare the invisible
plexus of air-cargo networks that have shrunk the globe (much as railroads did
for the American West). " (Lindsay, Fast Company).

The importance of Denver International Airport (DIA) to Metro Denver's global competitiveness is an ongoing theme of this blog so I found this article very interesting. Lindsay does a nice job of describing the myriad economic benefits that flow from airport connections. He also summarizes the development of multibillion dollar "airport cities" in places like Hong Kong, Beijing, Soul, Bangkok and Dubai, pointing out that, for the most part, U.S. metro areas have not made new investments on the scale of these Asian cities.

He briefly mentions the decommissioning of Denver's Stapleton Airport as an example of how local politics in the U.S. hinder the expansion of existing U.S. airport facilities. Of course, I think he is misses the more important point that the closure of Stapleton coincided with the launch of DIA (http://www.flydenver.com/) as one of the few new airports built from the ground up in North America in the last 20 years and one of the few airports in the U.S. with space for runway and terminal expansion. At 54 square miles, DIA covers more land area than all of Manhattan or the City and County of San Francisco.

After reading this article, I am even more convinced that the upcoming expansions at DIA (FasTracks commuter rail to the Union Station, a new terminal, on-site hotel, expanded gates and a commuter jet facility) mentioned in my blog from July 30, 2007 (http://aviewoftherockies.blogspot.com/2007/07/dia-expansion-fullfilling-vision.html) are critically important investments in Denver's international competitiveness.

Another interesting topic covered by Lindsay was the plans for expanding Detroit Metro Airport (http://www.metroairport.com/) into a fully fledged Aerotropolis. Detroit has thousands of acres of woods and greenfields surrounding the airport making it one of the few U.S. airports beside DIA with ample room for expansion. I wonder if the expansion of Metro Airport posses a long term competitive threat to DIA?

Finally, see Figure 1 below taken from the Fast Company website which shows Detroit, Memphis, Dallas-Fort Worth, Ontario and Denver airports as "planned" or "rudimentary" Aerotropolis facilities in the U.S.

Figure 1: "The Aerotropolis Goes Global" from Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/107/aerotropolis.html)