A book that was seemingly written specifically for me (and anyone else who spends way too much time thinking about airports), Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, predicts that airport-centric insta-cities will be the next wave. Probably not going to happen outside of a few autocratic states, but it’s still a fun thought project. From the introduction of an interview with Lindsay at BLDG:

“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,’ as John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay explain in Aerotropolis; even today, it is the largest employer in the state of Georgia. 

As J.G. Ballard once wrote, and as is quoted on the frontispiece of Aerotropolis:

I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose fauborgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional center, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.

The remarkable claims of John Kasarda’s and Greg Lindsay’s new book are made evident by its subtitle: the aerotropolis, or airport-city, is nothing less than ‘the way we’ll live next.’ It is a new kind of human settlement, they suggest, one that ‘represents the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities.’ Through a kind of spatial transubstantiation, the aerotropolis turns abstract economic flows—disembodied currents of raw capital—into the shining city form of tomorrow.

The world of the aerotropolis is a world of instant cities—urbanization-on-demand—where nations like China and Saudi Arabia can simply ‘roll out cities’ one after the other. ‘Each will be built faster, better, and more cheaply than the ones that came before,’ Aerotropolis suggests: whole cities created by the warehousing demands of international shipping firms. In fact, they are “cities that shipping and handling built,’ Lindsay and Kasarda quip—urbanism in the age of Amazon Prime.” 

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