Aerotropolis: Future City A conversation with Greg Lindsay Greg Lindsay is a journalist, urbanist, and speaker. He is a visiting scholar at New York STR Greg Lindsay explores the University, a senior fellow of the World EAM financialization of Policy Institute, since the beginning of the twenty- and a research 03 affiliate of the New first century, which is normalizing England Complex architecture and has driven him to Systems Institute take interest in the informal forms (NECSI). of urban growth. Running counter to the new, overly technological, urban utopias, he feels that our future resides in what calls “smart slums”, an intermediate form composed of Stream informal and negotiated spaces. We are exploring today’s global urban Thanks to digital technologies, they condition, and we would like your opinion are made porous and adaptable in on the major changes in urbanism since a dynamic process which enables the 2000s. them to maintain the intensity that is the real source of wealth in cities. Greg Lindsay Considering that the form of cities I guess I would start with my per- is shaped by transportation, he sonal experience. I moved to New also delves into the concept of the York in 1999 and have mostly lived “aerotropolis”: new cities shaped by in Michael Bloomberg’s New York and created for air transport, which since then. The entire notion of the he describes as the embodiment of “triumph of the city” is predicat- . ed upon a city like New York—the great global cities of finance, pro- fessional services, consumption, and the creative class, of which there are maybe a dozen. The meant to create density are being replaced by needle-like condo towers along 57th Street built for the express purpose of exchanging rubles and ri- yals into dollars. Someone once referred to Qatar as a London property hold- ing group formerly known for being a nation, which isn’t far from the truth.

264 streaM [Architecture] 265 I also think a lot about informal settlements, which are the true I like to say that the aerotropolis is globalization made flesh in urban form of this century—or at least its first half, when the the form of cities—the physical conduits through which people, world’s urban population looks set to double, and urban land , and capital flow. McKinsey just published a study claim- cover will triple. Not all slums are hopeless cases, and the ing only six cities straddle the major flows—Dubai, London, solution to slums isn’t to wipe them clean, but to upgrade them. Hong Kong, New York, Singapore, and Tokyo. Three are essen- Understanding the dynamics of a successful slum and how to tially city-states; all are major air hubs. Dubai is building Expo replicate them is ultimately more important, and more applica- 2020 around its new , while Apple and Foxconn have ble, than aspiring to be one of the shining, financialized cities moved iPhone production from the coast to Zhengzhou, an inland on the hill. city massively expanding its airport. Strange economic geogra- phy produces even stranger urban forms, like the Delhi-Mumbai Stream Industrial Corridor, where India’s new prime minister would like In recent years you’ve worked on the concept of the “aerotropolis.” Could to build a dozen new cities from scratch, complete with seven you explain why? international —India’s attempt to build a globally com- petitive hub overnight. Or Songdo International Greg Lindsay District in South Korea—a built on landfill I was drawn to the idea because transportation is what shapes in the Yellow Sea, only fifteen minutes from Seoul’s airport via the form of cities. The Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti one of the world’s longest bridges. It’s the incarnation of Korea’s looked at the growth of Athens and Berlin over time, and un- promises to open its to Western investment after the derstood that it was our ability to move—and to move quick- Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998; it was designed as the city in ly—that defined the scope of these cities. He proposed that which foreign multinationals and their English-speaking work- humans aren’t bound by distance, but by time—thirty minutes force would locate. Live on the edge of nowhere to fly anywhere from the core to the fringe, and thirty minutes to return—what across Northeast Asia, or so the sales pitch went. has since been called Marchetti’s constant. All urban de- velopment is transit-oriented development. Amsterdam is a Stream city of canals arrayed around its seventeenth-century docks, The idea of the smart city also challenges the role of technology. How while midtown New York sprang into existence around Grand does it change our relationship with space and time in the urban space? Central Terminal thanks to the efforts of the New York Central railroad, which controlled the development rights. The sky- Greg Lindsay scraper was invented in Chicago across the street from the It does, and that’s why I’m interested in the office, because Illinois Central rail yards. workspace will be one of the first things transformed by the combination of the city, the smart phone, and social I reasoned that if this trend continued, networks. For years there was the assertion, made by sooner or later air —the only form Marshall McLuhan and repeated by George Gilder, that of transportation to operate on a global communication technologies would kill the city. We would scale in anything close to real-time— scatter to the countryside and commune only via telep- would start spawning its own form of resence. Of course, the opposite has been true. If the car urbanism: the “aerotropolis.” What was the centrifugal force propelling outward from cities, started as accidental sprawl morphed the countervailing centripetal one is the information being into galactic-sized urban agglomerations overlaid on top of cities, increasing our ability to see them, around airports like Dubai’s. And now use them, and also to find each other. globalization’s have-nots are building them from scratch. Cities are social networks compressed in space and time, and when you add networks on top of them— Dubai, for example, doesn’t exist in current form without the Emirates discoverable via mobile phone—the combination airline, and by extension, the airport(s). Rather than proving that the is tremendously powerful, as we’ve seen in Cairo’s world is flat—whatever that actually means—the steady, but uneven Tahrir Square, Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park, and even growth in air travel over the last few decades underscores the fact that New York’s Zucotti Park during Occupy. Dan Hill calls there are only a handful of supremely important hubs and many more it “piazza plus social media.” If it’s true, as Google spokes. insists, that our phones have replaced our cars as symbolic extensions of ourselves, then we will want to

266 streaM [Architecture] Aerotropolis: Future City Infrastructure Greg Lindsay 267 flock to the environments where information density is at its highest and most accessible, which happens to be Stream dense, walkable cities. Just follow the proximity-based It’s all about relationships. hookup apps—Grindr and Tinder are at their best in cities. Greg Lindsay Yes, cities are all about mapping our relationships onto physical space. The reason I find the office interesting is because What’s different this time is that we now have dowsing rods in our pockets of what the looming death of the office has to say that render these relationships increasingly visible. And once they are, about cities and slums. I mentioned understanding you can analyze them and act on them. Formerly illegible relationships successful slums earlier. The Mumbai-based archi- are becoming searchable and negotiable. The entire “sharing economy” tecture collective CRIT has argued that what makes is really a slum economy writ large: everything is an asset; everyone is an cities and slums successful is their degree of “blur,” informal laborer. i.e. their permeability between public and private space. The office represents private space at its Stream most brittle, expensive, and isolated. Slums have a In opposition to the idea of a smart city like Songdo, we are high degree of blur but are starved of public recog- looking at Rio de Janeiro, with its slums, and a more metabolic, nition and resources. It’s what lies between that is informal urbanism. the most powerful, and CRIT found Jane Jacobs was right when she said, “new ideas require old build- Greg Lindsay ings.” Yes, but Rio is also the city where IBM built a special control room Occupy Montreal, October 2011 for the mayor, complete with technicians in white jumpsuits, like The future of creative work doesn’t lie in the a James Bond villain’s lair. What started as a weather prediction office, but in more permeable, more in- system slowly morphed into an operations center where the mayor tense, less formal spaces. If Internet-driven could bring all of his department heads literally under one roof, con- workflows mean I no longer have to sit next solidating executive authority without having to vote on it. Technol- to someone to work with them, the question ogy almost imperceptibly changed Rio’s model—IBM’s then becomes: who should I be sitting next hardware literally rewired it. What will it be used for next? Inevita- to? And where? Our phones can help with bly, its surveillance capabilities will be turned to favela pacification, Cairo’s Tahrir Square, February 2011 that too. Imagine Airbnb moves into office if they haven’t already. space and merges with LinkedIn—don’t laugh, they have a powerful investor in The next frontier after that is mapping. Just as common—suddenly, the entire city is your there are conflicting mental maps, there will office. Instead of software-as-a-, you soon be incompatible technological maps, have the city-as-a-service. courtesy of Google’s personalization. Have you read The City and the City by China Miéville? Of course, in that case, the danger is The idea is that there are two cities occupying Airbnb or whoever taking a 10 per- the same space, but the citizens of each are New York’s Zucotti Park, September 2011 cent cut of every interaction forever. If conditioned to only see one. Being “in breach” Uber is serious about creating the only of their separate realities is a capital crime. It’s “digital mesh” cities ever need, then a metaphor for the divides within every city, they’re a utility and should be regu- whether along class or racial lines, and anoth- lated as such—or cities should start er very real danger of these technologies is their own. These are public goods, and that they will be hard-coded into how we see should be treated that way—not that the world. What good does it do someone to they will. have the entire city at their service if they’re

Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park, 2013 denied access? Or—more banal, but almost worse—are only granted access to the free tiers of reality, with the best parks limited to premium access?

268 streaM [Architecture] Aerotropolis: Future City Infrastructure Greg Lindsay 269 Stream Do you think Detroit is becoming an aerotropolis?

Greg Lindsay They would like to be. What’s interesting about Detroit—among many, many other things—is how it vividly illustrates the widening gap between economic geography and political geography. The airport authority, multiple , and several counties would very much like for Detroit’s airport to become the center of an aerotropolis, creating a new urban growth separate from the core. On the opposite side of the city, multiple counties are actively preying on the city’s employers, trying to lure them to the suburbs. Someone called it “eco- nomic cannibalism,” and they’re right. Metropoli- tan Detroit is trying to eat itself.

What bothers me about “Detroit” is that there are really three Detroits. There is the symbolic city of the Detroit Three (formerly the Big Three until, you know, Toyota); the municipality of Detroit, which is bankrupt and shedding residents by the day; and metro Detroit, which is five million people and still growing, at least in terms of sprawl if not people. The prob- lem with the “shrinking city” paradigm endorsed for Detroit and other struggling cities is that the suburban fringe isn’t about to start shrinking. The city needs to start growing again—it needs to reverse the vicious circle it’s caught in.

This is a city that is 82 percent black, where 60 percent of residents live in poverty, and where there is one job for every four residents. It is bankrupt. The city is turning off streetlights and threatening to cut off water to 3,000 resi- dents per week, because half its are delinquent. There are 78,000 abandoned homes, 42,000 of which are in foreclosure. Those houses are empty, but they represent a tremendous resource—there’s a reason the city has started recycling them, rather than just demolishing them.

Suvarnabhumi Airport, Thailand.

270 streaM [Architecture] 271 So, what if we took that a step further? What if we ignored the fact those abandoned homes have owners or are in foreclosure? What if homeless locals and new arrivals were to occupy them, retrofit them, and turn them into some- thing completely new? What if a possible solution to some of what is ailing Detroit is to create more of the blur CRIT saw in Mumbai? Can we recreate the energies found in that city’s slums—where they have vastly fewer resources—in a place like Detroit? And can we recreate new paths to home ownership for urban homesteaders, new forms of zoning for local manufacturers, and new immigration policies to help resettle Detroit with entrepreneurs? That’s our plan at the World Policy Institute, anyway. My partner Kavitha Rajagopalan and I call it the Emergent Cities Project.

Stream Basically, you are promoting a dose of informality over planning?

Greg Lindsay A strong dose! Studying instant cities like Songdo so closely has driven me in the oppo- site direction—what emerges when you remove all constraints? But, in many ways they’re just flipsides of the same problem. Songdo is a city originally financed by Lehman Brothers and designed to be a spirit catcher for foreign direct investment. My worry about what we’re advocating for Detroit is that it will be taken as an excuse to further starve residents of resourc- es in the name of “innovation.” David Harvey has a saying, something along the lines of “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” It is even easier to imagine the end of Detroit.

Edward H. McNamara Terminal, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (DTW).

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