GLOBALISATION: EAMON RYANreviews Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live NextBy John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay Allen Lane, 480pp. £14.99
WE LIVE IN a just-in-time globalised world. Even before the arrival of the internet the modern jet had created an instant age, where the fast flow of goods and people was needed for economic success. While, by weight, only 1 per cent of our goods are carried by air, such traffic accounts for a third of the value of world trade. That trade is rising by 10 per cent each year, with the recent recession causing only a blip in the upward curve.
Over the past 30 years the cost of flying has halved and the number of passengers has increased fourfold. Last year there were some two billion air passengers, three- quarters of whom were tourists. The remainder were a new breed of migrant businesspeople, as portrayed by George Clooney in the recent film Up in the Air.
John Kasarda is an American academic who believes our future will involve much more air travel. He has developed a concept called the aerotropolis. The word describes a city that is centred on its airport, working as a node in a global network, streamlined and refined for corporate needs. He has worked with a number of countries and regions that are putting this concept into practice. His ideas have found an easier home with more authoritarian regimes, because, when it comes to building airports, democracy and complex planning systems are, as he says, “inefficient”.
Greg Lindsay is a business journalist who has expanded an initial article on Kasarda into a volume that would take a return trip to the US to read. It has the air of a self-help book for cities looking to improve their fortunes. The language suggests business PowerPoint-speak, and, for me, the homage to commerce jars. However, what comes out of his extensive travels to research the book is a wide-ranging and, I think, accurate assessment of what is happening on the new trade routes across our planet.
It shows how FedEx and UPS have transformed their air-transport bases in Memphis and Louisville into centres for the new web-based economy. It shows how global hubs, such as Heathrow, O’Hare and JFK airports, are creaking as they run out of runway, and how the emirates have enabled a new Silk Route between east and west. It shows how Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport allows a rose grown in Kenya to go through a Dutch auction before it is sent on and sold as a Mother’s Day gift on the west coast of the US, and how Hong Kong is in a battle to remain the trading capital of the Pearl River Delta, where Shenzhen and Guangzhou are only the outriders for new Chinese mega-cities we have never even heard of.
The book is honest in recognising that a financial crisis, a peak in oil production and climate change are the three future constraints to the relentless expansion of air travel. It is in the east that the financial viability of what is being planned comes most into question. The 11th Chinese five-year plan anticipated that China would build 100 new airports between 2006 and 2020. Forty have already been built, but such is the scale of this infrastructure programme that one wonders if China will be able to avoid a construction and property bubble that would put our own problems in the shade.
As oil production peaks and declines, where will we get the five million barrels of kerosene currently burned up each day? Some experts are already saying that once oil rises above $135 a barrel the current airline economic model starts to fail. Lindsay seems to think the solution to this and the climate-change problem will come from next-generation biofuels, such as algae. I don’t see any of those solutions on the horizon yet. Even if they do appear we are still likely to be trading down from the remarkable energy density that cheap oil has provided.
What does this mean for Ireland? As a country with the first free-trade zone around an airport and with the largest European low-fares airline, we have an interest in what happens next. Although it is a transit spoke from London rather than a hub in its own right, Dublin already meets the characteristics set out by the sociologist Saskia Sassen to qualify as a global city. If we want to keep that status we will need to build the Dublin metro. According to Kasarda, airports and cities without such high-speed rail links, and good dense planning around them, are going to be the ones that fall behind.
If traffic does increase we will no doubt soon be back to the question of whether another runway will be needed at Dublin airport. To answer that question we might look to Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, who is cited in this book as being the alternative to Kasarda's thinking. He believes cities need technology, talent and tolerance to grow. With such qualities we may not need to be an international air hub but could instead sell ourselves as a destination where people eventually catch up with the real world.
For the sake of our economy we need to restore connectivity to locations such as Silicon Valley, which was lost in recent years. With our new road network, however, few places on the island are not relatively close to Shannon or Dublin airport. Perhaps a balanced development between the two locations would suit us best. Such balance is also needed in working out how globalisation should proceed if it is not to crash and burn. This book provides a good primer on what is happening in air travel. Only time will tell what comes next.
Eamon Ryan is a former Green Party TD and minister for communications, energy and natural resources
