Nation's Cities - April 4, 2011

April 4, 2011
NATION’S CITIES WEEKLY 5

EMERGING ISSUES
Big Think Books, Part Two: Cities and Destiny

by Bill Barnes
“Transportation is destiny.”
An aerotropolis is “an air-
port-integrated region, extend-
ing as far as sixty miles from
the inner cluster of hotels,
offices, distribution and logis-
tics facilities.” China “is build-
ing hundreds of airports and
dozens of aerotropli.” South
Korea, the Gulf Emirates and
India are also in the game.
A chapter about the Detroit
region reports on efforts under-
way to create an aerotroplis in
Southeast Michigan. It would
develop between the two big
existing airports in the region
(Willow Run and Detroit
Metro). Right now, what’s
there are “an interstate and a
hundred square miles of more-
or-less-empty land.” A new
airport-centered “downtown”
would essentially turn its back
on the existing metropolitan
area.
There’s no room in this
book for sentimentality about
people and places left behind
or about other strategies being
carried out; no concern for
community or democracy or
quality of life. Just speed and
access and supply chains and
success. It’s a world system
business strategy with a place-
based solution, what Richard
Florida in “The Great Reset”
calls a “spatial fix.”
The authors acknowledge
that this is rather chilling. But
they insist it’s necessary and a
Good Thing.
What else is destiny?

“Aerotropolis” spins out the
consequences of that prophecy.
Urban areas will re-orient —
and new cities are even now
being built — around airports
because air travel is the lat-
est logistical technology (think
harbors, river ports, canals,
railroads, cars) that determines
where and how urban areas
develop.

A lesson from the examples in these books might be that
adapting for future success is a long-term endeavor and
requires some luck in the choice of adaptation.
March 28 issue of Nation’s
Cities Weekly.)
Kotkin’s “The Next
Hundred Million” declares
that demography, not trans-
portation, is destiny. (Freud
said that biology is destiny, but
we won’t go there.)
Whatever destiny may be,
it seems that a convention
of Big Think wisdom is that
economic trends are the most
significant underlying factor
shaping cities. “Aerotropolis” is
the most explicit and extreme
in urging that cities adapt fully
to economic change: Kasarda
and Lindsay call for “cities
built in globalization’s image
— machines for living linked
in great chains and tasked with
specific functions.” As E.M.
Forster admonished us in a
wildly different context, “only
connect.”
Glaeser’s “Triumph of the
City” similarly urges cities to
adapt to the age of informa-
tion. Fitting cities into Thomas
Friedman’s “golden straitjack-
et” for policy in globalization’s
“flat” world, Glaser says, in a
nice twist on Friedman, the
world “isn’t flat, it’s paved.”
A lesson from the exam-
ples in these books might be
that adapting for future suc-
cess is a long-term endeavor
and requires some luck in the
choice of adaptation. So it’s
not clear how this focus on
“adaptation” and on “allowing
change” helps guide decisions.
To which burdensome trend
should cities adapt? Which fad-
dish change should they allow?

see page 7, column 1
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