Airports in Cities and Regions - KIT Scientific Publishing

Prelude
Airport and City: An ambiguous relationship
Thomas Sieverts
1 The fundamental dilemma:
Will air-traffic shrink or will it grow?
Thinking about the relation between airport and city, one immediately falls into a
fundamental dilemma: Will air-traffic drastically shrink in future, because of
possible damages of the atmosphere, rising prizes and shortage of fuel? Or will air-
traffic, on the contrary, drastically grow because of new inventions in the field of
emission free-air-technology? This fundamental uncertainty cannot be avoided.
Under this condition I shall try to develop two contrasting perspectives. In the first
perspective – assuming drastic shrinkage of air-traffic – I shall try to compare the
history of the infrastructure ‘airport’ with historically older infrastructure-systems,
like the water-transport, the highway-system and the railways, looking for a basic
pattern of comparable development. In the second perspective – assuming a new
emission free-air-technology leading to a drastic growth of air-traffic – I shall try to
speculate about a new, futuristic conception of an airport-city-system, which could
open promising new potentials concerning global development and global
government. In the conclusions I shall accept the fundamental uncertainty. Under
this condition I shall try to formulate general recommendations for the small slice of
time between the facts of history and the futuristic speculation over a time to come.
2 The typical process in the development of transportinfrastructure
from servant to master
Cities have always developed in a mutual interplay with their infrastructures: We
speak of port-cities, highway-cities, railway-cities and now airport-cities. In each of
these cases the development of the specific traffic-infrastructures over time proves a
comparative pattern: They all transformed from a modest, but crucial servant to the
city to become a dominant master of city-development, contributing to the city’s
wealth, but also accompanied with many negative side-effects. In other words: They
transformed from a ‘maker’ to a ‘breaker’ of the city. Just a few illustrative examples:
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