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（引言）As competition shrinks the globe, the world is building giant airport-cities. They look monstrous to American eyes-and that could be a problem. Interviews by_ Greg Lindsay Photography by_ Nikolas Keonig
现在整个世界都在建造巨大的航空都市。
香港已经建造了一个容纳4.5万名工人的迷你城市，作为其整个对外贸易的重要战略举措之一。北京首都机场的航空城计划也已经开始，这项投资高达120亿美元的航空城建成以后，将吸纳40万人就业和居住，类似的还有广州的白云机场。韩国也不甘落后，韩国最大的钢铁制造集团和美国的房地产投资商Gale集团共同投资200亿美元，正在距首尔33公里远的地方建造一座容纳35万人的航空城，他们中的大部分人将为跨国公司工作。
对于未来城市的模样， 北卡罗莱纳大学Kenan-Flagler商学院的Kasarda教授认为，我们最终将以机场为中心建造城市而不是像现在这样，把机场放置于城市的边缘。Kasarda教授一直以前卫甚至有些激进的预测而著称，但他的看法是有理由的，在过去的三十年中，由飞机运送货物的价值增长了1,395%，现在全球生产的产品中，价值40%的产品都是通过空中运输的。
航空都市的出现是全球化的潮流正重新塑造着城市面目的结果，不管我们是否喜欢全球化，不可否认的是在地球另一边的消费者的反应比你的邻居对你的意见要重要得多，在竞争的压力下，不断削减成本，提高效率成为企业的常态。那么缩短距离就相当于节约时间，从而意味着效率的提高。
历史上，城市往往最先出现在江、河或海的交汇处，换句话说城市是交通运输的中心，是交通工具决定了城市的形态，今天，喷气式飞机加速了航空都市的出现，以前房地产中的名言：位置，位置，位置（location, location, location），变成了方便，方便、方便（accessibility, accessibility, accessibility），空间不再重要，重要的是时间和成本。
The name wasn’t terribly auspicious: Nong Ngu Hao, the “Cobra Swamp.” But the location, a mammoth piece of ground in the sparsely settled landscape between Bangkok and the southern coast, was nearly perfect. Thailand’s leader at the time, the visionary-if-dictatorial field marshal Sarit Thanarat, had chosen this spot to build his country’s bridge to the 21st century.
To the jaundiced American eye, such a project might appear to be the terminal metastasis of the sprawl represented by O’Hare, LAX, or JFK. But to dismiss it as the product of Asia’s infatuation with all things mega would be to miss the carefully calibrated machinery underneath. It’s a machine U.S. companies ignore at their peril at this time of escalating global trade and frictionless competition. It even has a name, the “aerotropolis,” and a creator, John Kasarda.
In the relatively obscure world of urban planning, Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, has made a name for himself over the past decade with his radical (some might say bone-chilling) vision of the future: Rather than banish airports to the edges of cities and then do our best to avoid them, he argues, we should move them to the center and build our cities around them. Kasarda’s research has laid bare the invisible plexus of air-cargo networks that have shrunk the globe (much as railroads did for the American West). And his conclusions are expressible as a series of simple numbers: Over the past 30 years, Kasarda will tell you, global GDP has risen 154%, and the value of world trade has grown 355%. But the value of air cargo has climbed an astonishing 1,395%. Today, 40% of the total economic value of all goods produced in the world, barely comprising 1% of the total weight, is shipped by air (and that goes for more than 50% of total U.S. exports, which are valued at $554 billion). Raw materials and bulkier stuff still take the slow boats, but virtually everything we associate with our postindustrial, value-added economy - microelectronics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, Louis Vuitton handbags, sushi-grade tuna - travels via jumbo jet. We may think of the 1960s as the jet-set era, but the supremacy of (soft) airpower has only now begun to reshape our ideas about how cities should look, how they should function. “They’re now effectively a part of global production systems,” Kasarda says, “And without that connectivity, you’re out of the game.”
Those statistics lay out much of the story line of the coming age of global competition, and it’s a story being written by many of our most formidable current and future rivals. Hong Kong is premising its entire world-trade strategy on the primacy of the airport: Its Chek Lap Kok already has a mini-city stationed on a nearby island for its 45,000 workers, and SkyCity, a complex of office towers, convention centers, and hotels will soon be visible from its ticket counters. On the Chinese mainland, construction has begun on Beijing Capital Airport City, a $12 billion master-planned city of 400,000, and a massive airport expansion is coming to the city of Guangzhou, in the Pearl River Delta. Thirty-three miles to the south of Seoul, New Songdo City, billed as the most ambitious privately financed project in history, is taking shape in the Yellow Sea: The metropolis of 350,000 people, many of them expatriates living and working on-site for multinationals, is being built on a man-made peninsula the size of Boston. The estimated $20 billion cost is being underwritten by Korea’s largest steel producer and by the real-estate developers from the U.S.-based Gale Group.
The same process is taking place elsewhere in the world as well. Several cities in India will see their airports dramatically scaled up in the coming years. The endless building spree in Dubai includes construction of the world’s largest aerotropolis - Dubai World Central - which will begin opening in stages as early as next year. (By the time it’s completed, DWC will have more than twice the capacity of Frankfurt’s airport and a permanent population of 750,000, all at an estimated cost of $33 billion.) In Amsterdam, office space next door to Schiphol Airport costs more per square foot than an open loft on one of the city’s picturesque 17th-century canals.
The aerotropolis represents the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities. Whether we consider globalization to be good or simply inevitable, it holds these truths to be self-evident: that customers on the far side of the world may matter more than those next door; that costs must continually be wrung from every process; that greater efficiency is paramount, followed closely by agility; and that distance equals time, which equals friction. To cope with these demands, we’re already taken to living much of our lives in the digital world. But for every laptop order that zips to Penang via email, a real 747 must wing its way back with the laptop itself in its hold. If the airport is the mechanism making that possible, everything else - factories, offices, homes, schools - will be built in relation to it. “This is the union of urban planning, airport planning, and business strategy,” Kasarda says. “And the whole will be something altogether different than the sum of its parts.”
A WELL-OILED MACHINE
Historically, cities have sprung up at the junctions of oceans and rivers (New Orleans) or railroad networks (Chicago), which made the docks or the blocks around the central station the choicest real estate in town. But “cities are always shaped by the state-of-the-art transportation devices present at the time of their founding,” observes Joel Garreau, author of Edge City and chronicler of American sprawl. “The state of the art today is the automobile, the jet plane, and the networked computer. Because of the airport, it’s possible to imagine a world capital in a place that was once an absolute backwater - a Los Angeles or a Dallas appearing in an utterly improbable location, including Bangkok.”
The budding city surrounding Suvarnabhumi illustrates Kasarda’s claim that “the three essential rules of real estate have changed from ‘location, location, location’ to ‘accessibility, accessibility, accessibility.’ There’s a new metric. It’s no longer space; it’s time and cost. And if you look closely at the aerotropolis, what appears to be sprawl is slowly evolving into a reticulated system aimed at reducing both.” In his sketches for Suvarnabhumi, the outermost rings extend nearly 20 miles into the countryside from the runways. There, giant clusters of apartment towers and bungalows will take shape; the former will house Thais working the assembly lines and cargo hubs in the inner rings, the latter the expatriate armies imported by the various multinationals expected to set up shop around the airport. (No fewer than 10 golf courses are planned to keep the expats happy, not to mention shopping malls, movie theaters, and schools that seem airlifted straight from southern California.)
Moving in from the residential rings, the next layer will likely be occupied by the manicured campuses of those same multi-nationals - the back offices, R&D labs, and regional headquarters of the Dells and Motorolas that have been persuaded to relocate. Here, one will also find the hotels, merchandise marts, convention centers - anything and everything to sustain the knowledge workers laboring in the shadow of the airport. In the innermost rings, essentially abutting the runway fences, will be the free-trade zones, factories, warehouses, and logistics hubs designed for the FedEx/DHL/UPS combine - the just-in-time manufacturers and suppliers for whom time and distance from the belly of the 747 equals, quite literally, cost. New six-lane highways will link the inner and outer rings, with semitrailers barreling down dedicated “aerolanes” while residents stroll along prefab boulevards. A high-speed rail link costing more than a half-billion dollars will connect Suvarnabhumi to Bangkok.
Is the United States prepared for those realities? The closest thing to an aerotropolis in America today is Memphis International, home for 25 years to FedEx. Memphis has been the busiest cargo airport in the world now for 14 years running, a fact visitors learn before they’re even left baggage claim. Ninety-four percent of that title is owed to FedEx, whose nightly “sort” is still one of the logistical wonders of the world: 200 planes descend in a swarm, disgorging more than a million packages and overnight letters that must pass through the interlaced conveyor belts and chutes of the “primary matrix” before being reloaded and shipped out.
But while Memphis might qualify as a proto-aerotropolis-with the FedEx hub providing just enough gravity to keep its customers from spinning out of orbit into Mississippi or Arkansas - few other American cities are even remotely ready to build their own analogues. The zoning is too haphazard, the NIMBY-ism too rampant, the love of the strip mall and ranch house too profound. In other words, there’s a reason Kasarda could get his vision built in Bangkok but not Atlanta. And that could be dangerous in the long run: “Individual companies don’tcompete,”he says. “Supply chains compete. Networks and systems compete.” People forget that FedEx started in Little Rock, Arkansas, but the airport there couldn’t keep up-so FedEx founder Fred Smith looked around until he found one that could.
Kasarda is fond of quoting the biologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s insight that growth creates form, but form limits growth. The challenge facing our airports today is the same confronting any company that has at last bumped up against the limits of its growth and is contemplating some creative destruction. Much like Microsoft and its dilemma about what to do with Windows, our airports are the operating system underlying a network that endlessly crisscrosses the globe. And like the software giant, they are bound to maintain backward compatibility with everything that has come to flourish around them. But whereas Microsoft only has to worry about its third-party developers, urban planners attempting to retrofit an aerotropolis will be forced to choose between optimization and saving people’s homes. The consequences of each decision are equally stark: Either risk building competitive disadvantage into the very fabric of cities, or begin unwinding the fabric itself.
A CURE FOR WHAT AILS US?
John Kasarda obviously sees the aerotropolis as key to America’s competitive agility, and a critical one at that. Implicit in his thinking is a coming world of exponential population increase and cutthroat competition for resources and profits. His vision may evoke everything Americans find terrifying about globalization - a civilization cast in quick-drying cement, packed with worker drones - but if you grant Kasarda’s seemingly implacable logic, you have to ask: How willing or able are we to adapt? Ours is a country, after all, that allowed Denver’s Stapleton to be abandoned outright after encroaching suburbs cut off its oxygen supply. Compare that with Suvarnabhumi, slated to become a self-contained province governed by the prime minister himself, and it’s clear our squeamishness about dictating how and where our cities grow could ultimately come back to haunt us.
Nearly a decade ago, Kasarda met with World Bank officials in Bangkok to convince them of the broad social benefits an aerotropolis would bring. His sales pitch was ingenious: By helping to connect the city and the surrounding countryside to the rest of the world, Thailand would actually be furthering its own, seemingly unrelated goals for the region. It would improve the lot of women (by bringing in manufacturing jobs), help farmers and fishermen sell their orchids and tiger prawns overseas (by connecting them to foreign markets), and stem the flood of farmers into overcrowded cities such as Bangkok (by creating a new population center with a tremendous hunger for labor). Kasarda’s plea got nowhere at the time, but his thinking eventually won the Thais over.
In January, Kasarda made a similar pitch to another hard-bitten city: Detroit. He had been asked to make his usual stump speech for a group of 60 or so University of Michigan architecture students who were about to undergo an annual urban-planning exercise known as a “harrette.” Held every year by the dean of Michigan’s architecture school, each charrette contemplates a different aspect of Detroit’s ongoing attempt at urban renewal - which makes for plenty of ground to cover.This year’s installment opened with the possibility of a Detroit aerotropolis as its premise. Nearly unique among major U.S. cities, Detroit has 25,000 acres of woods and open fields surrounding its main airport, a hub for Northwest Airlines. Just seven miles to the west-a straight shot along I-94-is a second, smaller airport, Willow Run, which caters to the chartered cargo and corporate jets of the Big Three automakers and their assorted suppliers. If one were to link the airfields with the highway, and with mass transit stretching to downtown Detroit, the spine for an aerotropolis would be in place.
LANGUAGE TIPS
Aerotropolis航空都市
Auspicious预示成功的
Cobra眼镜蛇
Swamp 沼泽
Dictatorial独裁的
Jaundiced 不信任的
Sprawl凌乱的分布
Infatuation迷恋
Calibrate测量口径
Frictionless有摩擦的
Banish驱逐
Bulkier宽大的
Formidable可怕的
Expatriate居住海外者
Peninsula 半岛
Chronicler编年史
Reticulated网状的
Manicured设计美观的
Boulevard大街，大道
Disgorge吞吐
Analogue相似物
Haphazard随意的
Ail是痛苦
Exponential指数的
现在整个世界都在建造巨大的航空都市。
香港已经建造了一个容纳4.5万名工人的迷你城市，作为其整个对外贸易的重要战略举措之一。北京首都机场的航空城计划也已经开始，这项投资高达120亿美元的航空城建成以后，将吸纳40万人就业和居住，类似的还有广州的白云机场。韩国也不甘落后，韩国最大的钢铁制造集团和美国的房地产投资商Gale集团共同投资200亿美元，正在距首尔33公里远的地方建造一座容纳35万人的航空城，他们中的大部分人将为跨国公司工作。
对于未来城市的模样， 北卡罗莱纳大学Kenan-Flagler商学院的Kasarda教授认为，我们最终将以机场为中心建造城市而不是像现在这样，把机场放置于城市的边缘。Kasarda教授一直以前卫甚至有些激进的预测而著称，但他的看法是有理由的，在过去的三十年中，由飞机运送货物的价值增长了1,395%，现在全球生产的产品中，价值40%的产品都是通过空中运输的。
航空都市的出现是全球化的潮流正重新塑造着城市面目的结果，不管我们是否喜欢全球化，不可否认的是在地球另一边的消费者的反应比你的邻居对你的意见要重要得多，在竞争的压力下，不断削减成本，提高效率成为企业的常态。那么缩短距离就相当于节约时间，从而意味着效率的提高。
历史上，城市往往最先出现在江、河或海的交汇处，换句话说城市是交通运输的中心，是交通工具决定了城市的形态，今天，喷气式飞机加速了航空都市的出现，以前房地产中的名言：位置，位置，位置（location, location, location），变成了方便，方便、方便（accessibility, accessibility, accessibility），空间不再重要，重要的是时间和成本。
The name wasn’t terribly auspicious: Nong Ngu Hao, the “Cobra Swamp.” But the location, a mammoth piece of ground in the sparsely settled landscape between Bangkok and the southern coast, was nearly perfect. Thailand’s leader at the time, the visionary-if-dictatorial field marshal Sarit Thanarat, had chosen this spot to build his country’s bridge to the 21st century.
To the jaundiced American eye, such a project might appear to be the terminal metastasis of the sprawl represented by O’Hare, LAX, or JFK. But to dismiss it as the product of Asia’s infatuation with all things mega would be to miss the carefully calibrated machinery underneath. It’s a machine U.S. companies ignore at their peril at this time of escalating global trade and frictionless competition. It even has a name, the “aerotropolis,” and a creator, John Kasarda.
In the relatively obscure world of urban planning, Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, has made a name for himself over the past decade with his radical (some might say bone-chilling) vision of the future: Rather than banish airports to the edges of cities and then do our best to avoid them, he argues, we should move them to the center and build our cities around them. Kasarda’s research has laid bare the invisible plexus of air-cargo networks that have shrunk the globe (much as railroads did for the American West). And his conclusions are expressible as a series of simple numbers: Over the past 30 years, Kasarda will tell you, global GDP has risen 154%, and the value of world trade has grown 355%. But the value of air cargo has climbed an astonishing 1,395%. Today, 40% of the total economic value of all goods produced in the world, barely comprising 1% of the total weight, is shipped by air (and that goes for more than 50% of total U.S. exports, which are valued at $554 billion). Raw materials and bulkier stuff still take the slow boats, but virtually everything we associate with our postindustrial, value-added economy - microelectronics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, Louis Vuitton handbags, sushi-grade tuna - travels via jumbo jet. We may think of the 1960s as the jet-set era, but the supremacy of (soft) airpower has only now begun to reshape our ideas about how cities should look, how they should function. “They’re now effectively a part of global production systems,” Kasarda says, “And without that connectivity, you’re out of the game.”
Those statistics lay out much of the story line of the coming age of global competition, and it’s a story being written by many of our most formidable current and future rivals. Hong Kong is premising its entire world-trade strategy on the primacy of the airport: Its Chek Lap Kok already has a mini-city stationed on a nearby island for its 45,000 workers, and SkyCity, a complex of office towers, convention centers, and hotels will soon be visible from its ticket counters. On the Chinese mainland, construction has begun on Beijing Capital Airport City, a $12 billion master-planned city of 400,000, and a massive airport expansion is coming to the city of Guangzhou, in the Pearl River Delta. Thirty-three miles to the south of Seoul, New Songdo City, billed as the most ambitious privately financed project in history, is taking shape in the Yellow Sea: The metropolis of 350,000 people, many of them expatriates living and working on-site for multinationals, is being built on a man-made peninsula the size of Boston. The estimated $20 billion cost is being underwritten by Korea’s largest steel producer and by the real-estate developers from the U.S.-based Gale Group.
The same process is taking place elsewhere in the world as well. Several cities in India will see their airports dramatically scaled up in the coming years. The endless building spree in Dubai includes construction of the world’s largest aerotropolis - Dubai World Central - which will begin opening in stages as early as next year. (By the time it’s completed, DWC will have more than twice the capacity of Frankfurt’s airport and a permanent population of 750,000, all at an estimated cost of $33 billion.) In Amsterdam, office space next door to Schiphol Airport costs more per square foot than an open loft on one of the city’s picturesque 17th-century canals.
The aerotropolis represents the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities. Whether we consider globalization to be good or simply inevitable, it holds these truths to be self-evident: that customers on the far side of the world may matter more than those next door; that costs must continually be wrung from every process; that greater efficiency is paramount, followed closely by agility; and that distance equals time, which equals friction. To cope with these demands, we’re already taken to living much of our lives in the digital world. But for every laptop order that zips to Penang via email, a real 747 must wing its way back with the laptop itself in its hold. If the airport is the mechanism making that possible, everything else - factories, offices, homes, schools - will be built in relation to it. “This is the union of urban planning, airport planning, and business strategy,” Kasarda says. “And the whole will be something altogether different than the sum of its parts.”
A WELL-OILED MACHINE
Historically, cities have sprung up at the junctions of oceans and rivers (New Orleans) or railroad networks (Chicago), which made the docks or the blocks around the central station the choicest real estate in town. But “cities are always shaped by the state-of-the-art transportation devices present at the time of their founding,” observes Joel Garreau, author of Edge City and chronicler of American sprawl. “The state of the art today is the automobile, the jet plane, and the networked computer. Because of the airport, it’s possible to imagine a world capital in a place that was once an absolute backwater - a Los Angeles or a Dallas appearing in an utterly improbable location, including Bangkok.”
The budding city surrounding Suvarnabhumi illustrates Kasarda’s claim that “the three essential rules of real estate have changed from ‘location, location, location’ to ‘accessibility, accessibility, accessibility.’ There’s a new metric. It’s no longer space; it’s time and cost. And if you look closely at the aerotropolis, what appears to be sprawl is slowly evolving into a reticulated system aimed at reducing both.” In his sketches for Suvarnabhumi, the outermost rings extend nearly 20 miles into the countryside from the runways. There, giant clusters of apartment towers and bungalows will take shape; the former will house Thais working the assembly lines and cargo hubs in the inner rings, the latter the expatriate armies imported by the various multinationals expected to set up shop around the airport. (No fewer than 10 golf courses are planned to keep the expats happy, not to mention shopping malls, movie theaters, and schools that seem airlifted straight from southern California.)
Moving in from the residential rings, the next layer will likely be occupied by the manicured campuses of those same multi-nationals - the back offices, R&D labs, and regional headquarters of the Dells and Motorolas that have been persuaded to relocate. Here, one will also find the hotels, merchandise marts, convention centers - anything and everything to sustain the knowledge workers laboring in the shadow of the airport. In the innermost rings, essentially abutting the runway fences, will be the free-trade zones, factories, warehouses, and logistics hubs designed for the FedEx/DHL/UPS combine - the just-in-time manufacturers and suppliers for whom time and distance from the belly of the 747 equals, quite literally, cost. New six-lane highways will link the inner and outer rings, with semitrailers barreling down dedicated “aerolanes” while residents stroll along prefab boulevards. A high-speed rail link costing more than a half-billion dollars will connect Suvarnabhumi to Bangkok.
Is the United States prepared for those realities? The closest thing to an aerotropolis in America today is Memphis International, home for 25 years to FedEx. Memphis has been the busiest cargo airport in the world now for 14 years running, a fact visitors learn before they’re even left baggage claim. Ninety-four percent of that title is owed to FedEx, whose nightly “sort” is still one of the logistical wonders of the world: 200 planes descend in a swarm, disgorging more than a million packages and overnight letters that must pass through the interlaced conveyor belts and chutes of the “primary matrix” before being reloaded and shipped out.
But while Memphis might qualify as a proto-aerotropolis-with the FedEx hub providing just enough gravity to keep its customers from spinning out of orbit into Mississippi or Arkansas - few other American cities are even remotely ready to build their own analogues. The zoning is too haphazard, the NIMBY-ism too rampant, the love of the strip mall and ranch house too profound. In other words, there’s a reason Kasarda could get his vision built in Bangkok but not Atlanta. And that could be dangerous in the long run: “Individual companies don’tcompete,”he says. “Supply chains compete. Networks and systems compete.” People forget that FedEx started in Little Rock, Arkansas, but the airport there couldn’t keep up-so FedEx founder Fred Smith looked around until he found one that could.
Kasarda is fond of quoting the biologist Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s insight that growth creates form, but form limits growth. The challenge facing our airports today is the same confronting any company that has at last bumped up against the limits of its growth and is contemplating some creative destruction. Much like Microsoft and its dilemma about what to do with Windows, our airports are the operating system underlying a network that endlessly crisscrosses the globe. And like the software giant, they are bound to maintain backward compatibility with everything that has come to flourish around them. But whereas Microsoft only has to worry about its third-party developers, urban planners attempting to retrofit an aerotropolis will be forced to choose between optimization and saving people’s homes. The consequences of each decision are equally stark: Either risk building competitive disadvantage into the very fabric of cities, or begin unwinding the fabric itself.
A CURE FOR WHAT AILS US?
John Kasarda obviously sees the aerotropolis as key to America’s competitive agility, and a critical one at that. Implicit in his thinking is a coming world of exponential population increase and cutthroat competition for resources and profits. His vision may evoke everything Americans find terrifying about globalization - a civilization cast in quick-drying cement, packed with worker drones - but if you grant Kasarda’s seemingly implacable logic, you have to ask: How willing or able are we to adapt? Ours is a country, after all, that allowed Denver’s Stapleton to be abandoned outright after encroaching suburbs cut off its oxygen supply. Compare that with Suvarnabhumi, slated to become a self-contained province governed by the prime minister himself, and it’s clear our squeamishness about dictating how and where our cities grow could ultimately come back to haunt us.
Nearly a decade ago, Kasarda met with World Bank officials in Bangkok to convince them of the broad social benefits an aerotropolis would bring. His sales pitch was ingenious: By helping to connect the city and the surrounding countryside to the rest of the world, Thailand would actually be furthering its own, seemingly unrelated goals for the region. It would improve the lot of women (by bringing in manufacturing jobs), help farmers and fishermen sell their orchids and tiger prawns overseas (by connecting them to foreign markets), and stem the flood of farmers into overcrowded cities such as Bangkok (by creating a new population center with a tremendous hunger for labor). Kasarda’s plea got nowhere at the time, but his thinking eventually won the Thais over.
In January, Kasarda made a similar pitch to another hard-bitten city: Detroit. He had been asked to make his usual stump speech for a group of 60 or so University of Michigan architecture students who were about to undergo an annual urban-planning exercise known as a “harrette.” Held every year by the dean of Michigan’s architecture school, each charrette contemplates a different aspect of Detroit’s ongoing attempt at urban renewal - which makes for plenty of ground to cover.This year’s installment opened with the possibility of a Detroit aerotropolis as its premise. Nearly unique among major U.S. cities, Detroit has 25,000 acres of woods and open fields surrounding its main airport, a hub for Northwest Airlines. Just seven miles to the west-a straight shot along I-94-is a second, smaller airport, Willow Run, which caters to the chartered cargo and corporate jets of the Big Three automakers and their assorted suppliers. If one were to link the airfields with the highway, and with mass transit stretching to downtown Detroit, the spine for an aerotropolis would be in place.
LANGUAGE TIPS
Aerotropolis航空都市
Auspicious预示成功的
Cobra眼镜蛇
Swamp 沼泽
Dictatorial独裁的
Jaundiced 不信任的
Sprawl凌乱的分布
Infatuation迷恋
Calibrate测量口径
Frictionless有摩擦的
Banish驱逐
Bulkier宽大的
Formidable可怕的
Expatriate居住海外者
Peninsula 半岛
Chronicler编年史
Reticulated网状的
Manicured设计美观的
Boulevard大街，大道
Disgorge吞吐
Analogue相似物
Haphazard随意的
Ail是痛苦
Exponential指数的