Committee on the Environment

Aerotropolis, A new urban form placing airports in the center with cities growing around them, connecting workers, suppliers, executives, and goods to the global marketplace. John Kasarda, inventor of the term and Raleigh based consultant.

First the airport came to the city and then the city came to the airport. To see how that happened, let's back up a bit: It was quite common for cities to have airports very close to their downtowns for ease of access. Munich had such an airport  that became infamous after a plane fell into its downtown in 1960 crashing into a church steeple and a streetcar into the process. San Diego operates an airport in its core city to this day, with 19 million annual passengers the busiest one runway airport in the country. Anyone having flown into San Diego knows how close downtown towers are during the approach and how easy it is to get into town after arrival which makes it easy on air travellers but creates significant noise impacts for those who live in the flight path even in desirable neighborhoods like South Park. Washington's National (Reagan) Airport is also a case of an airport in an urbanized area with an airplane that once missed and tragically fell into the Potomac.

Approach to San Diego airport,  proximity to downtown

By contrast, Dulles, the nation's first jet airport, was created on a whopping 10,000 acres a full 26 miles to the west of the Capital as an international gateway and grand gesture with its sweeping Eero Saarinen terminal design. The aerotropolis here could be Reston, a New Town model developed here as the more urban contemporary to the New Town of Columbia (see my blog article about Columbia). While Reston's downtown took decades to get off the ground, signature office buildings sprang up along the Dulles access road left and right and presented a form of corporate sprawl clearly attracted by the airport. Baltimore Washington International Airport (BWI, Thurgood Marshall), the regions other competitor airport, was always located a safe distance from Baltimore (and even more Washington), even when it was still called Friendship Airport and was just a small facility sitting in the middle of nowhere. Similarly, the Raleigh Durham airport RDU started as a small propeller and general aviation airport located in the middle of its two namesake cities in the middle of farmland and forest.

Many other US cities thought they...  more