Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next

Financial journalist Lindsay introduces readers to the ideas of academic and global management guru Kasarda, explicating and championing Kasarda's concept of the aerotropolis, urban design premised on the centrality of air transport, air routes, and airports. Lindsay reviews the uneven history of major American airports, designed "before we knew what they were for," while praising two recent aerotropli, Memphis and Louisville—"the cities that ‘shipping and handling' built"—whose revitalized economies and infrastructures were attendant on the rise of hometown global giants FedEx and UPS, respectively. Skyrocketing numbers of air travelers reinforce "Kasarda's Law of Connectivity": technologies circumventing physical distance, from the telegraph to the Internet, only fire our desire to travel ourselves. The inevitability of an airborne future rests on economic but also human imperatives. The prose is brisk and affable, but thorough almost to a fault, leading to some redundancy. The prognosis, meanwhile, lands squarely within a capitalist worldview and, thus, on the rosy side, in assessing, for example, the environmental sustainability of "Airworld." But our increasing dependence on air travel is real enough, and this is an eye-opening picture of that trend. (Mar.)