Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next
by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Penguin HK$195
Hong Kong people are well aware of the importance of airports. For generations we learned to shut our ears to the din over Kai Tak while a growing number of us traipsed the check-in aisles for days or even weeks at a time, long before George Clooney's Up in the Air character Ryan Bingham.
More of the world could follow in our tracks, say John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay in their collaboration Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next. They predict a burgeoning world of wired-up 'knowledge-worker' Binghams living in an interlinked network of increasingly densely populated 'aerotropolises' that are a 'combination of giant airport, planned city, shipping facility and business hub'.
Kasarda, a University of North Carolina business professor, first heard the word 'aerotropolis' used in the mid-1990s to describe an airport city earmarked for Zhuhai but was never built. His globe-trotting journalist-researcher Lindsay highlights how politics can get in the way of even the best projects. The construction of Hong Kong International Airport at Chek Lap Kok, he writes, was criticised by mainland politicians as a 'final binge by the colonial government to practically bankrupt the city ahead of the handover'. But, the authors say, in truth it was Hong Kong's last chance to install the infrastructure vital for its continued prominence.
The authors also reveal after only four pages of their 448-page opus that neighbouring cities are jealous of Hong Kong's infrastructure. New Songdo, a sparking US$35 billion new city next to Incheon Airport, is South Korea's 'earnest attempt to build an answer to Hong Kong', a green hub 'for companies working in China', a two-hour flight from Shanghai or Beijing.
Kasarda and Lindsay say the 'biggest build-out in human history' is about to 'reset the global pecking order' from West to East. Governments are 'poised to spend US$35 trillion on infrastructure in the next two decades', they add, with 27 megacities of more than 10 million people in 2025.
