As we wear our poppies, we remember how 93 years ago on the 11th November, the heavy guns of World War I fell silent. We remember the sacrifice, the squalor and the hardship; the death and destruction - and if you are like me you re-make your own personal vow of "never again". It's certainly a time to pause and think, and yes, also to mourn the continuing loss of life in conflicts across the globe. But we should think not just about the past, but about the future too.
For me, a geographer by training and a housing specialist by experience, there are some fascinating things to ponder. 93 years from now - heading in the future direction - what will our society be like and for whose benefit will it be organised? How much will the fabric and structures of our cities and towns have changed? Will our economy prove to have been sustainable or will some new economic order have been established? Medically, will we have the creation of artificial life and have taken away any need to die?
And perhaps the most useful question of all: why does this thinking about alternative futures matter? My view is that it matters because you are more likely to get to something different and better if you can envisage what that is and to "start with the end in mind." So when somebody gave me the heads up that Aerotropolis by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay was the next big thinking about how we might all live in the future, I thought I'd better take a look.
It's a thick book of nearly 500 pages so I can't begin to do it justice here, but its message is clear from the start. It is (you might have guessed it from the name) a passionate exposition of the city as airport, extolling it as the only logical thing for developing countries to base their economic growth around. And it goes some way to suggest that developed world cities that do not look to the skies for inspiration will be missing out. Peak oil is no worry in the rolling out of acres of flat black tarmac, of freight depots, hotels, convention centres and connecting transit systems – airlines will adapt long before the black gold runs out.
The book's central logic is this: we are ever more interconnected and that interconnectivity spurs people not to travel less, but to travel more and by the fastest and most convenient manner possible – the plane. As an interesting aside did you know that the total time taken to put up one day's posts on Facebook amounts to 23 billion minutes (about 44,000 years)? At the same time, we are global in our purchasing arrangements – whether for components that need assembling or finished products for the consumer. We all search, find what we want, order, and expect it to be delivered to our door the next day or soon after. And what moves all these physical things that complement the fastest broadband of the internet – it is of course the plane.
This week also saw the global population pass 7 billion, incredibly this comes just 12 years after we passed 6 billion and we have estimates as high as 20 billion for the end of the century. History shows us that economic growth is likely to be in those places with a young and expanding population. Combine that with the theories behind Aerotropolis and you would conclude that growth is going to be even stronger in the heartlands of these new mega-transit airports. And if that's the recipe for global success in the next 50 years, cities in the UK don't seem that well placed to profit – which doesn't bode well for those who live in them now.
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And perhaps the most useful question of all: why does this thinking about alternative futures matter? My view is that it matters because you are more likely to get to something different and better if you can envisage what that is and to "start with the end in mind." So when somebody gave me the heads up that Aerotropolis by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay was the next big thinking about how we might all live in the future, I thought I'd better take a look.
It's a thick book of nearly 500 pages so I can't begin to do it justice here, but its message is clear from the start. It is (you might have guessed it from the name) a passionate exposition of the city as airport, extolling it as the only logical thing for developing countries to base their economic growth around. And it goes some way to suggest that developed world cities that do not look to the skies for inspiration will be missing out. Peak oil is no worry in the rolling out of acres of flat black tarmac, of freight depots, hotels, convention centres and connecting transit systems – airlines will adapt long before the black gold runs out.
The book's central logic is this: we are ever more interconnected and that interconnectivity spurs people not to travel less, but to travel more and by the fastest and most convenient manner possible – the plane. As an interesting aside did you know that the total time taken to put up one day's posts on Facebook amounts to 23 billion minutes (about 44,000 years)? At the same time, we are global in our purchasing arrangements – whether for components that need assembling or finished products for the consumer. We all search, find what we want, order, and expect it to be delivered to our door the next day or soon after. And what moves all these physical things that complement the fastest broadband of the internet – it is of course the plane.
This week also saw the global population pass 7 billion, incredibly this comes just 12 years after we passed 6 billion and we have estimates as high as 20 billion for the end of the century. History shows us that economic growth is likely to be in those places with a young and expanding population. Combine that with the theories behind Aerotropolis and you would conclude that growth is going to be even stronger in the heartlands of these new mega-transit airports. And if that's the recipe for global success in the next 50 years, cities in the UK don't seem that well placed to profit – which doesn't bode well for those who live in them now.
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