{"id":1964,"date":"2012-09-24T06:25:58","date_gmt":"2012-09-24T12:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1964"},"modified":"2012-10-12T14:42:02","modified_gmt":"2012-10-12T20:42:02","slug":"imagining-aerotropolis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/?p=1964","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Aerotropolis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Franco Minganti<\/p><\/div>\n

It was a pleasure to welcome Franco Minganti<\/a>, Professor of American Literature at the University of \u00a0Bologna, to my campus last week. Franco is the European-side Co-Director of a European Commission\/United States Department of Education curriculum development grant<\/a> awarded to the Universities of Denver and Bologna, along with our co-partners Portland State University and the University of Nottingham.\u00a0 <\/strong>The grant sponsors exchanges of faculty and students between the United States and Europe to study issues in global citizenship and urban sustainability. While visiting DU Franco participated in Italian language and literature classes, seminared with students in my Culture and The City<\/a> course, and gave a public lecture to students and faculty.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

DC-4 Passenger Plane Flying over Manhattan (1939)<\/p><\/div>\n

Franco\u2019s public lecture, titled “Icarus and Daedalus,” explored the relationship between flight, architectural design, and urban planning.\u00a0 He explained the intimate relationship that was forged between flight and urban design in the period between the World Wars.\u00a0 Flight in the inter-war period was framed as an urban experience. \u00a0Historical photographs from the period show how the city served as backdrop to, and a prop (no pun intended) for glorifying the activity of flying. \u00a0Images juxtaposing buildings and aircraft inspired architects and planners to go vertical, and fueled the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s \u201cskyscraper ethos.\u201d\u00a0 Franco noted that the work of Le Corbusier<\/a> was also instrumental in promoting verticality. Le Corbusier waxed poetic about how aerial photographs changed our perspective on the city and added a \u201cthird dimension\u201d to architecture (M. Christine Boyer<\/a> further develops this theme).\u00a0 The photos also inspired him to contemplate the effects that humans have on nature and landscape. Franco thus reaffirmed the truth of Dan Solomon\u2019s remarks at this year’s Congress for the New Urbanism (link to video is available here<\/a>) that there are \u201cmany Le Corbusiers\u201d other than the one we\u2019ve come to know via the prescriptive Athens Charter<\/a> or the sterile modernism of his many admirers and followers.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Skyscraper Airport for City of Tomorrow (Nicholas DeSantis, 1939)<\/p><\/div>\n

In the Q&A following Franco’s lecture a colleague noted that today\u2019s interest in aerotropolis<\/a> as advocated by John Kasarda<\/a> (including the serious interest being shown by politicians and developers here in Denver<\/a>) mirrors the Inter-War period\u2019s fascination with flight and urban planning.\u00a0 But it also inverts the relationship between cities and flight in a potentially unhealthy way. In the 1930s the airport was premised on the city.\u00a0 Airports were imagined to occupy the rooftops of buildings, as in Nicholas DeSantis\u2019s famous 1939 drawing for Popular Science<\/em>.\u00a0 Today, the advocates of aerotropolis premise the city on the airport. As Michael Powell notes in his New York Times<\/em> review<\/a> of Kasarda\u2019s book, aerotropolis not only contains a state-of-the-art airport but also:<\/p>\n

\u2026customized transportation links, fine restaurants, designer shopping, and nearby corporate suburbs connecting workers umbilically to the global marketplace. The aerotropolis\u2026represents not just a redesign of travel but a vital new economic paradigm.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Model for Incheon International Airport Business District, South Korea, by Fentriss Architects (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

This vision of aerotropolis means that travelers never need to visit historic downtowns, nor experience firsthand (and in all their messiness) the local cultures and heritages that comprise the city as it really exists. Instead, travelers can experience sanitized versions of culture and heritage as simulacra<\/a> within the aerotropolis.\u00a0 Networked aerotropoli also promise \u201cfrictionless travel\u201d akin to that supported by the high speed train systems already linking (or proposed to link) cities in Europe and elsewhere, usually over great public protest (Gary Hustwit\u2019s film \u201cUrbanized<\/a>\u201d features the controversy over Stuttgart 21<\/a>, and when I was in Bologna last spring graffiti condemning Treno Alta Velocit\u00e0<\/a> was everywhere). \u00a0Frictionless travel can have not only steep social and environmental costs, but it can diminish the experience of travel in \u201cinter-urban\u201d areas that are bound to go through some interesting changes as the planet rapidly urbanizes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Anti-TAV Graffiti, Piazza Giuseppe Verde, Bologna (D. Saitta)<\/p><\/div>\n

Michael Powell notes that the aerotropolitan vision of a more frictionless future lacks \u201csomething like a soul.\u201d \u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em> reviewer Wayne Curtis<\/a> echoes this sentiment, describing the vision as \u00a0\u201cdispiriting.\u201d\u00a0 Curtis goes on to suggest that Kasarda\u2019s popular book:<\/p>\n

\u2026will no doubt do for airport cities what Joel Garreau and his \u201cEdge City<\/a>\u201d did for suburban office parks and shopping malls two decades ago: It will re-locate the center.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, many of these\u00a0relocated centers are not holding<\/a>.\u00a0 Some are being retrofitted.\u00a0 In fact Edge City retrofitting could be the 21st<\/sup> century\u2019s version of 1960s style \u201curban renewal,\u201d meaning that we\u2019ll end up wondering what we were thinking when we built this stuff in the first place.\u00a0 Thus, advocates of aerotropolis in Denver and elsewhere should be careful what they wish for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was a pleasure to welcome Franco Minganti, Professor of American Literature at the University of \u00a0Bologna, to my campus last week. Franco is the European-side Co-Director of a European Commission\/United States Department of Education curriculum development grant awarded to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8,10,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-sustainability","category-urban-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1H2bI-vG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1964"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2134,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1964\/revisions\/2134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.interculturalurbanism.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}