1. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviews Greg Lindsay, co-author (with John Kasarda) of the recently-released Aerotropolis.  (If you aren’t familiar with the thesis of the book, you might begin with Lindsay’s recent article in the Financial Times.)  The interview is quite interesting, and in places I agree fully with Lindsay’s comments.  For instance:

“I think the examples of Memphis and Louisville are fascinating, where the sheer economic force of FedEx and UPS basically willed them into being.

Those cities used to be river-trading towns—cotton and tobacco, respectively—before they became basically southern rustbelt towns. But then, in the 1970s and 80s, they were reborn as company towns of FedEx and UPS. In a sense, their economics—for better or for worse, and that’s very much up for debate—are held hostage by our e-commerce habits: every time we press the one-click button on Amazon, it leads to this gigantic logistical mechanism which, in turn, has led to the creation of these vast warehouse districts around the airports of these two cities.

One of the things I tried to touch on in the book is that even actions we think of as primarily virtual lead to the creation of gigantic physical systems and superstructures without us even knowing it.”

It also seems that Lindsay is quite reflective about the topic, as his critical comments on the relationship between aerotropolis and autocracy or his description of the aerotropolis as a weapon in a “war between cities” make clear, and there’s much to commend in the interview (both in the questions, and in the answers).

2. However, I’m not convinced that the aerotropolis as Lindsay describes it — a city which is “more closely tied to other cities via air than its own hinterlands” — really exists, or is even possible.  Matter matters, and only a little bit of matter and relatively few people (at great energy cost) can realistically be transported frequently by air [1].  Maybe 100 million Chinese tourists really will be flying abroad in 2020 — but even that massive quantity is only one out of every thirteen Chinese (on China’s current population), and those 100 million wouldn’t be people whose lives are characterized by air travel, but people whose lives occasionally — perhaps annually, perhaps bi-annually — feature air travel on special occasions.

3.More interesting than quibbling about the nature of aerotropolis, though, is Lindsay’s assertion that aerotropolis is crystallized globalization:

“The notion of the aerotropolis, then, is basically that air travel is what globalization looks like in urban form. It is about flows of people and goods and capital, and it implies that to be connected to a city on the far side of the world matters more than to be connected to your immediate region.”

It seems to me that the “aerotropolis” (particularly on the more restricted Kasarda definition) is more a symbol of globalization than it is the ultimate instantiation of globalization.  Sea shipping is (and was for centuries before the invention of flight) the dominant mode of global transport.  To get an indication of the difference in magnitude between sea and air shipping, just look at Shanghai, the world’s busiest cargo port by tonnage, and Memphis, the world’s busiest airport by tonnage: Memphis sees about three million tons a year; Shanghai sees around five hundred million tons a year.  This is not a statistical aberration.

[Yangshan Deepwater port, off the coast of Shanghai -- merely one of Shanghai's many container-handling facilities; image source.]

If you want to connect to the global economy you build a port.  (Karrie Jacobs: “Even Dubai, which seems to demonstrate how a good airport (and a state-owned airline) can make a city materialize from thin air, initially tested the economic value of a free-trade zone on the Persian Gulf by building a state-of-the-art shipping port.”)  Failing that, you build an inland port, to receive and distribute goods from a sea port.  Yes, if you want to connect to certain specific components of the global economy which require high-value and high-speed material transactions (the small auto-parts industry, for instance), you build an airport, but, just as with the movement of people, that’s a special case, not the baseline.

Even Air Cargo World (which has an obvious interest in air cargo boosterism) admits that sea shipping is hardly the way of the past:

Four years ago this month, Giovanni Bisignani, the director general and CEO of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), sounded the alarm to airfreight experts assembled at the IATA World Cargo Symposium in Mexico City.

“Ocean container shipping is becoming more competitive and taking business away,” Bisignani told the audience during his opening address. He then rattled off some startling numbers. Growth in the ocean sector from 2000 to 2005 more than doubled airfreight growth, and from 2006 to 2010, ocean freight was to outpace annual air cargo growth by nearly 2 percent.

“New container ships are faster and cheaper to operate,” he continued. “2006 ocean container freight rates were 20 percent in real terms below 2000 levels. Airfreight rates were only 8 percent lower. … We can expect more intense price competition”

…

Now that a resurgence is taking place in both the ocean and air cargo industries, shippers are starting to plan for the future. It’s been reported that shippers who once operated only in the sky and had  gone to the water are making the shift back to air cargo, but there isn’t enough evidence to suggest a trend is underway. A lot is happening in the shipping industry, and it’s difficult to say how many shippers are returning to the skies, just as it can’t be said that some shippers will remain sea-bound forever. As with most things, the issue isn’t clear cut.

“I have seen some conversion of sea to air, and we certainly saw it for a lot of 2010,” Shah says. “I don’t know if that trend is still continuing. It probably is, but it probably depends and the commodity, and it depends on the industry.”

If you’re looking for a physical instantiation of the ways that contemporary globalization is radically different than 19th-century globalization (and you’re not satisfied with the shipping container, which really is one of the most important innovations of the twentieth century), then I’d suggest that the tubes are a better place to start than the airports.

[Container shipping in the aerotropolis of Dubai -- like Shanghai, one of many terminals.]

4. I do wonder if there is an element of unintentional bias operating in the formulation of Lindsay and Karsada’s theses?  If you’re wealthy (or fortunate enough, like I am, to be middle-class in a country where the middle-class is wealthy by global standards), you might connect to the world by flying around it; but if you’re not, you probably connect to the world — experience globalization — through the products you participate in the manufacture, design, storage, marketing, or sales of, the products you purchase, and/or the raw materials that you participate (directly or indirectly) in the extraction of.  If your experience primarily falls into the former category — experiencing the world by traveling it in airplanes — it would be unsurprising if this biased you towards overestimating the significance of airports as drivers of urbanization, and underestimating the impact of the latter items on urbanization.

5. All that said, the existence of the aerotropolis, whatever its fate, future, and ultimate importance is, seems undeniable, and so I’m convinced that this is an important and fascinating phenomenon, well worth studying.

[In return, Greg Lindsay interviews BLDGBLOG.  Lindsay and Manaugh will be continuing these conversations at upcoming live events -- click through to BLDGBLOG's interview for details.  Elsewhere, Kazys Varnelis reacts -- with appropriate suspicion about the future prospects for jet-setting global citizens of the aerotropoli -- to commentary and chatter surrounding the release of Aerotropolis.]

Bouman: …Of course, there are at least three different layers of clients. First of all, there are the people with money who want a program to be accommodated by an architectural work – in other words, a client in the traditional sense. But I don’t think that there is a sufficient market for a magazine that would address that specific group.

There is also the client, in terms of the decision-maker. Maybe that person is not about to commission an architect to do something now, but they may ask an architect to do something in the future. And there are decision-makers throughout society – so this is a much larger group. If magazines can address this group of decision-makers specifically, then they already have a bigger reader base.

But, of course, there is also a group of clients that thinks, maybe in a more metaphorical way, about architecture as a way of fulfilling their dreams or serving their interests, in both a material way and in a more idealistic sense. And if our readership is this larger group of people – a very mixed group – then you could say that we already do address clients as the people who ask questions to architects – not just ask for buildings from architects, but who ask architects to engage with these issues. They ask architects to address larger social issues, rather than just supply built stuff. This is a redefinition of architecture, from delivering an object to a definition of architecture that challenges certain issues within a larger cultural strategy.

I think there could be a great dialogue between architects and this group of people. And this spirit and interpretation of the client is perhaps what we are addressing. Of course, the question comes up: is it still necessary to call this group clients and not just the public? But I think it is a nice way to put it: to see those people, this larger group of people engaged in cultural issues, as clients, who ask questions without an immediate budget, without pointing at a specific site, without asking you to accommodate a program. They ask general questions of architecture, and that helps us mobilize architecture beyond one specific purpose.

BLDGBLOG: So we need a new, or different, kind of architect now, in addition to a new way of interacting with clients?

Bouman: Yes – and that brings me to the role of the architect in responding to the client. This can no longer be the reactive way that most architects work with clients. In the first definition I gave of the client, the client is asking a question: Architect X or Architect Y, can you do something for me, because I need you? The output of architecture, in that sense, is very reactive. It can only be based on a program, a budget, a site, an existing location, etc. etc. – but there is always something coming first, before the architectural act.

In the other description I gave of the client, there is more of a shared interest – a common interest – with architects addressing a cultural or political issue from the angle of architecture. So there is a dialogue between different people with a common curiosity, and that can evolve into a completely different output of the architectural discipline. It gives architects a new role, I think, in the long-term, and this may even give architecture its future legitimacy.

Read the entire interview here.

If you’d like an overview of the work, BLDGBLOG and Edible Geography have written posts on the topic; I’d like to talk about Daniel Perlin‘s project.  Perlin, a New York-based DJ and sound artist, derived the inspiration for his project from a recent visit to China, where he saw systems set up (if I recall correctly, in a hotel lobby) that use infrared technology to screen for humans with abnormally high body temperatures (i.e. the sick).  The system is composed of a camera, an automated interpretative computer system, a screen on which the computer displays a live feed from the camera overlaid with data points tagging people in view with temperature readings, an attendant, and an alarm (heard by the attendant through an ear piece), all of which appears senseable at first pass, as it seems reasonable that one could use an infrared camera to measure body temperatures and thereby locate (and quarantine) those running fevers.   But Perlin noted a variety of ways in which the system can and does malfunction, from operator error (Perlin noted that the attendant was not, in fact, wearing the warning ear bud and so would have missed any warning tones the system generated) to mis-measurement.  This sets the system up for two kinds of failure: the inappropriate extension of quarantine (the system mistakenly identifies healthy people as sick and so actually participates in spreading disease, which Perlin, with good cause, described as the most horrific consequence of quarantine he could imagine) and a failure to protect the population (the system fails to identify and quarantine the sick).

Though Perlin’s project explores the former possibility, the latter fascinates me, as it reminds me of the concept of “security theater”, coined by Bruce Schneier to describe the ways in which the public apparatus of security (at airports, government buildings, schools, transit stations, etc.) exists primarily not to provide security, as those measures are demonstrably ineffective, but to provide a fearful public with the illusion of security.

Is there, then, a subset of quarantine practices that ought to be termed “quarantine theater”?  Practices which exist not to protect the public from contagion, but to illegitimately pacify the public?  As Schneier notes in a recent post on security theater, this has both sinister implications (the practices of quarantine theater might divert important resources away from effective quarantine practices, or produce a false sense of security leading the public to ignore simple but vital practices) and more benign implications (providing a sense of security is not necessarily a bad thing, even if it illusory, if it permits normal life to continue in the face of potential threat).

Of course, this raises the nasty possibility that some of the other participants’ projects or project topics (Front Studio‘s fascinating quarantined city-within-a-city, for instance, or, more extremely, deep geological waste repositories such as Onkalo in Finland, which Smudge Studio’s project explores) are themselves instances of quarantine theater, perhaps necessarily subject to the same sorts of systemic breakdowns.  I’d love to see a project which explores what would happen if, for instance, one combined Front Studio‘s key insight (that quarantine could be a distributed condition interspersed within the city) with Perlin’s key insight (that quarantine might be inherently failure-prone), and sought to design a quarantine that is both distributed and redundant.

[You'll find lots more on security theater in James Fallows's archives at the Atlantic, though you'll have to dig around within the "terrorism/security" tag]

Varnelis responds, arguing that Jones’ rhetorical adoption of Archigram inadvertently reveals an absence of critique in contemporary urbanism. The comments on Varnelis’s post, including those from Enrique (a456) and Geoff (bldgblog), are perceptive. I’d like to think that its possible to be both enthusiastic and critical, or at least that there’s room for both enthusiasts and critics. If one accepts Geoff’s description in which criticism describes problems and enthusiasm locates positives, then it seems rather obvious that both are necessary. So while the presence of only one but not the other is certainly problematic, I’d be more likely to describe architecture as suffering from a deficit of both done well (particularly if ‘enthusiasm’ is defined as something like a BLDGBLOG-ian, wide-ranging sense of wonder, rather than the mere acceptance/promotion of whatever seems exciting) than as being dominated by one or the other.

Things also respond, exploring the persistence of, well, things in the utopian data city. See also Millennium People’s comment on Things’s comment on Jones’s comment…

Lebbeus Woods’s recent post on utopia isn’t explicitly linked to this conversation, but Varnelis’s comment on the “decline of utopian thought” makes the connection obvious.