Manhattan Airport Spoof Is Reminder Of Aerotropolis Cities Being Built Elsewhere

A couple of years ago we enjoyed a Fast Company article predicting the rise of the cities built around the grand-daddy of transportation hubs – the airport. Instead of the trying to build airports away from populated areas, we may see them at the center of metropolis, Greg Lindsay argued. Last week PSFK was reminded of the article when a clever ‘stunt’ spread images of supposed plans to turn New York’s Central Park into an airport. A few blogs were duped by the Manhattan Airport proposal and a lot of conversation was created around the concept. In his original article on the concept of the aerotropolis, Lindsay wrote:

Hong Kong is premising its entire world-trade strategy on the primacy of the airport: Its Chek Lap Kok already has a mini-city stationed on a nearby island for its 45,000 workers, and SkyCity, a complex of office towers, convention centers, and hotels will soon be visible from its ticket counters. On the Chinese mainland, construction has begun on Beijing Capital Airport City, a $12 billion master-planned city of 400,000, and a massive airport expansion is coming to the city of Guangzhou, in the Pearl River Delta. Thirty-three miles to the south of Seoul, New Songdo City, billed as the most ambitious privately financed project in history, is taking shape in the Yellow Sea: The metropolis of 350,000 people, many of them expatriates living and working on-site for multinationals, is being built on a man-made peninsula the size of Boston.

Lindsay has followed up to the recent Manhattan Airport ‘news’ with a post on Fast Company’s site and said:

American airports are commonly seen abroad as symptoms of some deeper malaise. “Fly from Zurich’s ultramodern airport to La Guardia’s dump,” Thomas Friedman has challenged his readers repeatedly in The New York Times. “It is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.” The Financial Times’ John Gapper singled out New York’s international gateway: “If anyone doubts the problems of U.S. infrastructure, I suggest he or she take a flight to John F. Kennedy airport (braving the landing delay), ride a taxi on the pot-holed and congested Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and try to make a mobile phone call en route.”

The problem with this mess, in a nutshell, is global competitiveness. If a locale lacks functioning infrastructrure, the thinking goes, businesses will sooner or later leave. This argument is at the heart of the debate over London Heathrow’s planned third runway, which evoked screams of protest from residents and environmentalists. Prime Minister Gordon Brown was unmoved. “We have to respond to a clear business imperative and increase capacity at our airports,” he said. “Our prosperity depends on it.”

Think the concept of the aerotropolis will never happen? John over at Archidose points us to a nice examples of a city named Quito in Ecuador that is built around the airport.