The Past Futures of Aerotropolis

Abstract

From the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in 1905 until the conclusion of World War II, the popular imagination of mechanical air travel offered a vision of cities and societies transformed by ubiquitous flight. In 1932, the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes predicted air travel would become as routine as a commuter train trip, with attendant implications for urbanism: “We can expect the old 5:15 to be a group of ten passenger planes arriving at minute intervals.”1 The airport was the building type that embodied and amplified the transformative possibilities of air travel for the city. During the interwar period a colorful cast of American architects, developers, and inventors proposed vast elevated landing platforms surmounting networks of skyscrapers and enormous mechanical contrivances to launch and land planes on rooftops. During that period, the airport was a barometer of both technoscientific progress and cultural fantasy, an infrastructural typology in creative flux. As the airport evolved, so too did the possibilities of the future city, and in many speculative visions the airport and city fused into a single metropolitan organism. In 1939, the designer Nicholas DeSantis coined an apt term for such an intimate integration of airport and city: the aerotropolis.2