ARE AIRPORT CITIES UGLY?

ARE AIRPORT CITIES UGLY? I posted on Annalisa’s experience of Paris yesterday. The kind of landscape she saw near the airports may be the wave of the future. Wayne Curtis had a review in the Wall Street Journal (March 2) of AEROTROPOLIS by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay. Curtis begins his review by pointing out what he sees when landing “at almost any airport”: “boxy warehouses, weedy parking lots, a dowdy strip mall…a stranded subdivision or two filled with sooty houses.” The authors describe the new airport region-cities as extending up to sixty miles from the airport. They describe Memphis as “an inland port for goods arriving from Asia.” The new “cities” have no local heritage, and the authors are quoted as saying about the cities: “Aesthetics aren’t high on anyone’s list.” The subtitle of their book is: “The Way We’ll Live Next.” There are lots of new aerotropolis cities planned around the world, including over 100 in China. I have posted several times, including here, on the aesthetics of industrialization and logistics, The review makes me hesitate about my openness to the aesthetics of logistics and warehouses. Railroad yards were never considered desirable parts of town.