Asia Looks to Airport Cities for "Competitive Success"
Addtime：2016-05-06 10:39
Our largest and most important population and economic centers were once centered around seaports, then, successively, around river ports, railroad junctions, and highways. It's called transport-oriented development, and its fifth wave may prove to be aviation. In the 21st century, some our most vibrant new urban developments are being built around hub airports, and some countries are hedging big bets that this is the way of the future.
"Airports will shape business location and urban development in the 21st century as much as highways did in the 20th century, railroads in the 19th, and seaports in the 18th," declared John Kasarda, the coauthor of Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next and an adviser to many airport-centered development projects around the world.
The new economic models that globalization and the internet have created mean that people and products need to be shipped in increasing quantities to more places faster and more efficiently, and aviation is increasingly being used to fill this demand. Over one-third of total global trade value is now being shipped by air.
"For business, being close to an airport is certainly a matter of convenience, even if the business does not use air cargo services frequently and uses it only for business trips," said Matthias Bauer, the associate director of urban design at Atkins Asia Pacific. "Nonetheless, any business will benefit from airport related infrastructure, namely highways and expressways, metro or light rail links, modern utilities, and so on."
Although, according to Kasarda, there is an inherent difference between how Asian and Western countries view and engage their airports.
"What I learned in Asia, in China in particular," he began, "is the philosophical difference between the way that the U.S. and Europe use their airports and the way the Middle East and Asia use their airports. We view them increasingly as nuisances and environmental threats, they view them as critical business infrastructure to be leveraged for competitive success."
By Wade Shepard, Forbes
Prev：Europe's Air Safety Agency to Study Aircraft-Drone Collision Risk
Next：China’s Home-Developed Airport Panorama Enhanced Surveillance System First Used