Abstract
As a city centered on its airport’s vast influence, the aerotropolis’s existence has an inherent tension: It is a stable city for people to stay put and dwell, with the notion of leaving at the foreground of urban life. As a conception, the aerotropolis requires investigation to reveal its significance for humankind and its place in an ontology of cities. When the aerotropolis is situated in such a manner, we see how it differs significantly from other kinds of cities throughout history that depend on travel, such as river and port cities. After unpacking these points, a view emerges illustrating how the cumulative effects of urban and aviation technologies have made the instrumental elements of the nonhuman world less significant to city life. In turn, defining the aerotropolis as a unique sort of city that shapes human experience in particular ways becomes a vital task for understanding how technology-human relations can progress.
1 Introduction
Cities are places we call home, where we often stay put. Airports are places designed to take us to locations far away. In turn, the idea of the aerotropolis, a city built around an airport, seems to present an inherent tension. Even if most residents are not leaving, the notion of people coming and going remains in the “collective foreground,” keeping the idea of the airport in some form of awareness. It is bound to impact everyday life in unique ways. Yet, not all cities with centrally positioned airports count as aerotropolises, and many residents might not want their cities to be branded as such. Despite this situation, some scholars writing in the urban planning and transportation literature are quick to call any city with a significant airport nearby an aerotropolis (Ekaputra & Simamora 2024, Pereira et al. 2023, Ndaguba et al. 2022, Chohan 2019). These are ordinary views of these kinds of locations.
While they remain accurate, such categorizations only provide the basic structural information about these places. Aligned with the ordinary view, an aerotropolis must meet specific conditions that set it apart from other urban centers to warrant its consideration as a distinct entity, securing its categorization within a basic ontology of cities. In the literature on this topic, several competing definitions that count as ordinary views exist, differing only in technical details. I do not take issue with those accounts. Although I am not very concerned with what they say, my issue is what they do not talk about.
To that end, I want to provide an account that uncovers the structure of human experience of living in an aerotropolis. Gaining such insights requires examining how technologies specific to the aerotropolis shape life. Philosophy of technology’s history shows how philosophers have engaged in this kind of work extensively, including Martin Heidegger (1971), Don Ihde (1990), Peter-Paul Verbeek (2005), and Philip Brey (2014). Although the point here is not merely to extend their thinking, the goal is to engage in the tradition of examining how the aerotropolis, as an advanced technology, is a unique environment that can influence the conditions of everyday existence in distinct ways. To see the aerotropolis in this manner requires an “extraordinary view.” It provides the basis of an ordinary view and extends it to include how residents experience the aerotropolis, which can bring ethical, social, and political dimensions into view (if such studies are desired). While not a methodology in the strict sense, the extraordinary view serves as a philosophical lens for examining dimensions that purely structural accounts discount.
This perspective focuses on what it means to experience urban life with the airport in the constant foreground of everyday affairs, rather than as an auxiliary element that might be ignored or serve as an unremarkable backdrop. Examining the aerotropolis shows how forms of human dwelling continue to advance alongside accumulating technological developments. If we take inspiration from Heidegger’s (1971) notion that building is a form of dwelling, we can think about how creating an aerotropolis helps shape our existence distinctly. In turn, we continue to advance in ways that showcase technology’s progress in aviation-related planning, but they remain centered on what it means to be a human living in one.
Although cities throughout history have had other modes of travel that defined them, it will be the burden of the present argument to show that this case differs. For instance, port and river cities involve travel and facilitate business, but the volume of passengers and the airport’s impact on the city’s character arguably outpace those of such cities, given that there are almost 9 billion passengers traveling annually (Airport Council International, 2024). However, the issue of the aerotropolis is also about more than just scale. Port and river cities were built for land or water travel, using vehicles designed for those travel ways. In contrast, the aerotropolis connects urban life to controlled airspace, which makes it markedly different. While airports are not overly unique as mobility hubs, aerotropolises are not merely docking stations for airplanes, like train depots. They are places where we can flourish, and this article makes this case.
2 The Aerotropolis as a Concept: the Ordinary View
Scholarly literature that defines the aerotropolis is not in short supply, nor are literature reviews that categorize various conceptions (Chohan, 2019; Ekaputra & Simamora, 2024; Ndaguba et al., 2022). When reviewing literature views on the term “aerotropolis,” one can gain at least two impressions. One is that, from a planning or interdisciplinary perspective, almost anything can count if the definition’s characteristics align with a population center that has an airport with significant traffic. Parsing through such accounts exhibits the wide scope and the competing nature of the aerotropolis as a concept. However, we need an account that can provide shared conceptual ground for conversations on aerotropolises, which represent the ordinary view.
In the literature, accounts of the aerotropolis focus on how the airport and its auxiliary elements exist, almost entirely divorced from the lived experiences of its inhabitants (e.g., Chohan, 2019). These positionings are essentially technical, describing the functioning of aircraft and the airport, along with supporting structures, and provide little to no insight into the urban condition. While these descriptions are not incorrect, what is of significance for this investigation is that they do not provide such insights into the human in the aerotropolis. In turn, they do not, in such ways, avail themselves to advanced study and inquiry.
In the transdisciplinary realm of the aerotropolis, which involves academic investigations and urban-planning business endeavors, John Kasarda’s name cannot be ignored, and he has devoted considerable attention to the concept (e.g., Kasarda, 2000, also see Kasarda & Lindsay, 2011). He has been a leader in developing both areas. In turn, his conception of the aerotropolis that he presents to the business world is an example of one such account that is a strong contender for an exemplar of the ordinary view (Aerotropolis Business Concepts, LLC., n.d., para 1):
An aerotropolis is a metropolitan subregion whose infrastructure, land-use, and economy are centered on an airport. Similar in shape to the traditional metropolis made up of a central city commercial core and its outlying commuter-linked suburbs, the aerotropolis consists of a multimodal airport-based commercial core (Airport City) and outlying corridors and clusters of aviation-linked businesses and associated residential developments that feed off each other and their accessibility to the airport.
The passage above indicates how transportation specialists might typically consider aerotropolises. The point is not that it presents false information. Rather, its scope is too reductive to tell us much about how these environments can reshape the urban condition, meaning how the city can shape the quality of residents’ experiences, both daily and over the long term. Let us examine it as it stands, followed by an exploration of what it can be. This approach will show us the benefits of the ordinary account of the aerotropolis.
Thinking about this passage, it begins by situating the aerotropolis as a kind of urban environment. Ontologically, this move provides the fundamental structure necessary to understand them as we do with other types of built environments, including but not limited to suburbs, exurbs, towns, villages, and ecovillages. Then, it qualifies the aerotropolis as a distinct kind, indicating the typical structure one might expect to find in such an environment. This is the ordinary view of the aerotropolis as a concept. If we stick with this account, we cannot fully grasp its significance for humankind. To move beyond it, we need to think about them as part of the broader ontology of cities. When we do, we gain insight into how they can benefit humanity as we continue to progress as an urban-dwelling species.
In turn, the following section provides a brief account of mode-based travel and the city, placing the aerotropolis not as the final progression of transportation technologies, but as one point of interest along a continuous stream of advancement. While it does not argue that they are the pinnacle of mobility progress, it does indicate that creating such kinds of cities with specific intentions is one way to expand the ontology of cities, suggesting that other means are available and that humankind can endeavor to create them. After unpacking some of this history, we can see how situating them in this manner can provide insight into what it means to live in such a technologically advanced and dependent environment. With this foundation in place, the attention turns to fleshing out the extraordinary view of the aerotropolis.
2.1 Situating the Aerotropolis
The history of port and river cities requires little explanation to account for their success and the roles of waterways and settlements. In their seminal book, Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next, Kasarda and Lindsey (2011) situate the aerotropolis against this backdrop, noting its substantial progress in human civilization. It does not take much formal study in the history of planning to see why coastal access and trade created the conditions for such places to thrive across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It makes sense that they would be well-established, enduring through numerous shifts in political, religious, and social structures. They account for some of the world’s most renowned cities. River cities are not exempt from similar conditions, and in select instances, they facilitate trade locally, regionally, and globally. Although some such cities depend less on their rivers for trade and travel, they remain celebrated natural landmarks, with varying degrees of cultural emphasis and significance. Whereas those rivers once played a prominent role in transporting people in and out of cities, today, more efficient and cost-effective modes of travel, such as rail and air cargo, make them less attractive options in commerce.
With air cargo being tied to commercial air travel in many instances, the rise of aerotropolises could be seen as an expected reality that has emerged. In turn, we can understand them as economically and socially impactful technologies that shape urban experience in prominent ways. However, simply meeting these criteria does not entail that they should be thought of as aerotropolises. Comparing Dallas to other cities with significant airports makes this point evident.
For instance, the primary difference between locations like Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) and Las Vegas is that DFW’s airport is an auxiliary feature that could easily blend into the background of daily life in such a sprawling metropolis. At this point, it might be useful to turn to Ihde’s (1990, 108) notion of “background relations” and technology to understand how an aerotropolis shapes residents’ lives. For instance, in the aerotropolis, numerous technologies operate with economic and social effects, mediating people’s lives in numerous ways. For locals, their day-to-day experience of the vast region might have little to do with the airport as an object in focus. The DFW airport operates as background mediation in residents’ lives.
This aspect is a significant consideration that justifies a city or region being counted as an aerotropolis. Bearing this point in mind, it might be challenging to classify Dallas (and its metropolitan area) as an aerotropolis, which runs counter to popular definitions (E.g., Carlson, 2013). In Las Vegas, the airport is directly in the middle of the urban environment, less than a few minutes’ drive from the world-famous Las Vegas Strip, the city's main economic corridor, which provides the means for economic support.
Singapore’s airport is a central hub for community engagement, drawing in residents to enjoy its features without even having a flight scheduled or picking up a visitor (Chutiphongdech & Vongsaro, 2021). Given the significant presence of the airports in Las Vegas and Singapore, there is no realistic possibility that the inhabitants of those cities could exist without them in any capacity. Moreover, it might be incredibly challenging to live life without knowledge of the airport tacitly operating in one’s mind, at least one could plausibly argue. In turn, we now see the conditions for categorizing the aerotropolis. The most significant one is that it plays an undeniable and central role in urban residents’ economic and social lives while also being a substantial, undeniable part of the urban landscape. If those airports suddenly ceased to exist, life as they know it would basically disappear. This aspect reveals a defining feature of the aerotropolis.
While the appearance of an aerotropolis will take a general form, with the airport in proximity to the city, it must remain a central artery for economic and social vitality. These conditions shape human experience. Even though they would apply to countless cities with airports, some cities meeting these conditions might avoid calling themselves aerotropolises for other reasons.
For instance, while cities such as Dallas satisfy those conditions, airports in those instances also have numerous other features that compete for the foreground. The idea is not that they would significantly change the course of daily life if they closed, but the central idea is that numerous other elements dilute the focus. The sheer number of different dimensions of cities like Dallas might also suggest that residents view framing their city as an aerotropolis as unwelcome. Dallas is a city with a rich and diverse culture, and its numerous landmarks and features, such as the Trinity River, historic neighborhoods, and other notable sites, give it a distinct character.
Focusing heavily on the airport, positioning Dallas as an aerotropolis, could overshadow the aspects that residents view as playing significant roles in giving their city a unique identity, reflective of their culture and history. Such labeling could be seen as a forced identity imposed by an external source. Locals might see the airport as trivial when juxtaposed with the totality of elements that compose its identity. Even though the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport is one of the United States’ largest and busiest of its kind, that reality might not matter at all to those calling Dallas home, even though some disagree (Carlson, 2013). The airport is a significant element, but calling it a dominant, defining feature might go too far if you ask lifelong residents about its significance.
Locations such as Singapore might very well be thought of as an aerotropolis because they help describe their homes in ways that are consistent with how they conceptualize them. Signapore’s airport is frequently ranked as the world’s best. It features amenities such as movie theaters and atriums that far exceed those typically found at airports. To Singapore’s residents, labeling the city as an aerotropolis might help underscore the airport’s significance in its identity. Exploring this notion is required to flesh out an extraordinary view of the aerotropolis. To engage in that enterprise, the following section moves in that direction.
It begins by expanding on the ordinary, thereby providing congruence between the two views. By making this move, we gain insights into what an aerotropolis is by bringing human-focused dynamics into our conception of it. As a highly advanced technology, the aerotropolis shapes urban identity in ways that go beyond other kinds of cities, including river and port cities, which also focus on travel as a significant aspect of their identities. The significance of examining aerotropolises in this manner is that it enhances our understanding of the aerotropolis and what it means for cities to progress by focusing on their technological dimensions and how they shape the urban condition. With this notion in mind, we can then see how responsibility for these environments comes into view, which can benefit their future design and perhaps improve their implementation.
2.2 The Extraordinary View of the Aerotropolis
While the ordinary view of the aerotropolis shows that airport-based cities exist as a distinct kind of environment, we can further expand it. One significant element is that in the aerotropolis, all technologies required for functionality become urban technologies, bearing in mind that they serve the city and its operations (Nagenborg, 2018). Another aspect is that such technologies have an accumulating effect in at least two ways. This notion entails that numerous technologies must work in unison for the aerotropolis to exist.
If we situate this view within the history of the philosophy of technology, it aligns with Hans Jonas’ (1984) argument that one reason modern technology differs from ancient technology is its accumulating effect. Technology “adds to itself,” so to speak. In turn, this condition, as part of his more robust and expansive criticism of how modern technology challenges canonical moral theory, exhibits that we cannot assess problematic situations in isolation. Rather, they require ethical examination as part of a broad backdrop of environmental, social, political, and historically situated technological considerations.Footnote 1 Going forward with this investigation, we will see how Jonas’ (1984) notion of technology’s accumulating effects remains inextricably bound to how we should accurately conceptualize the aerotropolis.
The second way is that each technology is applied in a way that not only serves as a means to an end in a particular operation, but it also plays a role in the much larger functionality of an aerotropolis. Each technology serves a purpose. However, when we see them function in unison, they contribute to a much more sophisticated outcome: non-stop air travel in the city. Even though each successful arrival and departure is the result of technological advances, strategic planning, and operations, the continuous nature of these events underscores the vital element that makes the aerotropolis function as we know it. Let us break this idea down to illustrate the kind of technologies that make this view come into focus.
Consider that technologies such as runways, airplanes, control towers, directional lights, and safety systems exist to support essential operational structures. Yet, in the broader context of the aerotropolis, they contribute to the functioning of those cities, providing the elements that keep planes arriving and departing and facilitate travel and commerce. This continuous operation is required for the aerotropolis to exist. Without aircraft continuously coming and going, we would be talking about a place that resembles a traditional city, but with a very large, awkward concrete structure at its center.
Recall that I mentioned that the aerotropolis resembles but differs from other cities in history that depend on waterways, such as rivers and oceans. Those kinds of places rely on land and water to facilitate travel and commerce, suggesting that the humans who settled and maintained those cities worked with existing land and waterways to secure the means for their cities to thrive. Travel played a significant role, but the means by which it was facilitated were, in many cases, permanent features of the landscape, with the focus being on land and or water exclusively. Yet, the aerotropolis remains centered on an artificial means of travel in the air, contingent on ongoing, sophisticated human activity. In turn, the land-and-water-based notions are largely removed as the primary foci, but the notion of movement holds steady. Accumulating technology is the dominant, ever-present force that connects the humans of the aerotropolis to the outside world while bringing people who live far away close to them. In a sense, then, they relate to distant people through the aerotropolis, which is also the base for their home.
With this point in mind, we see that the extraordinary view shows that their city is not merely a political built environment, but also the instrument that makes the kind of life lived there possible in the first place. If we examine this notion, it exhibits that we are also not conceptualizing the city as something that has (urban) technologies. Rather, we are engaging with a city that has accumulating technologies, as mentioned. However, while many have argued that cities or municipalities are inventions or technologies (e.g., Epting, 2021; Glaeser, 2011; Jonas, 1984), the aerotropolis accounts for the city as having accumulating technology. If we consider that numerous technologies advance with additional refinements, adjustments, and improvements, the aerotropolis aligns with such an account. One could make the case that it takes the notion of urban technology and adapts it to create a kind of technology that enables humans to live in ways that harness and maximize the use of air travel.
Thinking about aerotropolis residents’ experiences, however, it seems sound to claim that they do not experience multiple urban technologies one by one, but their experience is shaped by the reality of those technologies existing in concert. This point means that they form the everyday backdrop of their existence. Let us unpack this notion.
In their day-to-day lives, residents will commute to work, shop, run errands, and engage in the typical activities associated with city life. When we turn to established concepts of the aerotropolis, researchers note that these activities help define the aerotropolis as a place (Kasarda & Lindsay, 2011). The aerotropolis shapes many residents’ lives by providing commerce and by the terrain and accumulating technologies that give their city its unique urban form.
Las Vegas is one such example. While that town began with a focus on gambling and nightlife, it has since become a global destination, attracting travelers from around the world. For cities such as Las Vegas that rely on a perpetual influx of tourists to support the local economy, it is incredibly doubtful that other means of travel could sustain the regional economy. Even though a high-speed rail system will bring tourists from nearby places in California, numerous visitors arrive from around the world, which signals that the airport plays a vital role in defining Las Vegas not only as an entertainment capital but also as an aerotropolis. In turn, cities like Las Vegas can be seen not only as having “traditional” urban technologies such as transportation infrastructure, but also as having “accumulating” technologies, with an advanced airport that helps define the city’s functionality and appearance.
Moreover, the Las Vegas airport recently set new flight records, reaching almost 60 million visitors in a year (Clark County Department of Aviation, 2025). In turn, the region’s aviation management division is planning a second airport to accommodate growth just south of the famous Las Vegas Strip (Solis, 2025). Even though, thus far, we have thought of aerotropolises as having only one airport, the possibility of adding a second might challenge the very conception of the designations. However, the term remains applicable in its operational and aesthetic sense, suggesting that building a second airport would fit within the ontology. Still, it might test the limits of that categorization. The city, as an aerotropolis, will expand, and residents’ lives will have additional employment, homes, businesses, and their surrounding territories will shift from desert to concrete, an all too familiar scenario across all urbanizing environments. A change in the aerotropolis’s dynamics might significantly alter how residents experience life there.
Recalling the earlier point about river and port cities, which show how nonhuman entities facilitated travel, trade, and city life, stacking those cities alongside aerotropolises with advancing technologies shows the extent of human-technology advancement in air travel and its impact on urbanity. From riverboats and freight carriers that could transport people and goods regionally to aircraft that could bring people from distant lands within relatively short durations, technological advancement has made it possible for cities to be defined by mode almost entirely, and these technologies remain at the heart of how we conceptualize these places.
To this day, several cities continue to define themselves as “river cities” through nicknames, such as St. Louis, Missouri, and Jacksonville, Florida. City names like Port St. Lucie, Florida, and Port Arthur, Texas, reflect their significant linkage to the port as a key characteristic of their identities. While it is doubtful that aerotropolises will be eager to embrace “airport city” as their nickname, this reality does not mean that they should not be considered as such. People visit Las Vegas for the entertainment, not for its impressive airport. In turn, thinking about it as the “entertainment capital of the world” makes sense, whereas thinking about it as the “airport city of the world” sounds less convincing.
However, local residents’ views of their city can differ from outsiders’ (or tourists’) perspectives of the same location. In the planning and philosophy of the city literature, this situation has been described as a case of “identity of a region” versus “felt city identity.” The former references the environment, local culture, and people that can be employed through several disciplines and political actions, and helps us understand how that location is unique (Paasi, 2002). Felt city identity accounts for how all of a city’s material parts, such as infrastructure, parks, and transportation, along with its non-physical parts, such as policies and laws, and the residents, can make people feel over a considerable duration (Epting, 2024).
Tourists or travelers visiting or passing through the aerotropolis will be able to describe, based on their limited experience, how they view it. Due to this limited duration, they will still experience the city, but it will probably lack many of the elements that locals would describe in their accounts of felt city identity. Referring back to the case of Las Vegas makes this point clear. They will have a much different perception of the same region based on how they experience the city.
Tourists might describe hotels, casinos, bars, restaurants, shops, and other entertainment venues, which makes the nickname “Sin City” applicable. Locals might also identify with those elements, but they will be familiar with daycares, optometrists, healthcare, crime, extreme heat, and traffic. Even though this example could vary greatly regarding its particulars, it illustrates that an aerotropolis will affect visitors and locals differently. This notion applies to most touristic cities. Behind the scenes, however, is the airport. The famous Las Vegas Strip is what visitors know, the hallmark of its region identity. For tourists, The Strip is the city. This reason might explain why they might think that locals live in hotels (Epting & Beisecker, 2020). They might lack knowledge of a city behind the lights, and this notion applies to the airport that makes it possible. To them, the airport is just a means to an end, a way to enjoy the entertainment facilities. Still, their experience is shaped, in part, by the aerotropolis.
For locals, though, the airport makes the facilities accessible for tourists, which makes their experiences possible. Even though Las Vegas will always be known affectionately as “Sin City,” the “Entertainment Capital of the World,” and “Lost Wages,” it is doubtful that it will be known as “Aerotropolis of Sin.” Still, it is doubtful that locals could imagine what their experiences would be like without the airport in the city. Consider how local University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor Robert Lang (Binkovitz, 2016, para 6) puts it: “The airport runway practically lands in the Strip.”
Even if they are cognizant or unaware of the significance of the airport, locals’ experience of the city remains contingent on its existence. When it comes to direct encounters with the airport, locals do not need to visit it to be familiar with air travel. For example, from many locations in the city and neighboring towns, locals can watch a queue of airplanes waiting to land. In turn, the airport creates many kinds of experiences. Some are directly empirical, and others are indirect, such as roads shaped by the airport’s central location.
Yet, there are numerous indirect ways in which the airport shapes people's experience of the city. One such instance is through businesses. Turning once more to Las Vegas’ airport, approximately 10,000 taxi drivers operate in the metropolitan area, and, historically, taxis have been the primary mode for tourists to reach the Strip (Nevada Taxicab Authority, n.d.). Even though the debate is ongoing, some argue that the taxi industry has maintained sufficient influence to impede the development of rail service that could cover the relatively short distance from the airport to the entertainment district (Binkovitz, 2016). Even though other reasons exist that offer alternative explanations, one could hold that numerous urban areas were able to address the design challenges of installing rail service from an existing airport to the urban center, thereby challenging those narratives. In turn, it might seem that eliminating suspicion from skeptical minds remains impossible, even with logical counterarguments.
This situation exhibits how the airport, as a physical entity, will determine or influence the kind of auxiliary infrastructure and services that would change the experience of life in the metropolitan area. Such reasons underpin the claim that we need to illustrate the extraordinary view of the city as an aerotropolis, which shows the specific ways it can shape urban experiences for people there. That said, taxi drivers are one example of how the airport indirectly shapes not only the urban area through mobility infrastructure but also the city's experiences for locals and tourists alike. These notions would seem to have wide-scale applicability for similar aerotropolises. It seems reasonable to hold that each airport in an aerotropolis will reproduce effects that reflect local social, political, and environmental elements shaping residents’ experiences. Many of them are common in cities, meaning that the aerotropolis’s influence on people will not differ considerably, but it maintains the ability to do so. In regular cities, other elements will shape experience all the same.
The key distinction is in the entity or entities that shape those experiences. In this sense, examining the aerotropolis is significant because it illustrates how the accumulation of technologies centered on a transportation mode can create a unique kind of city. While other locations have “transit-oriented development,” the aerotropolis does not necessarily align with those kinds of cities. They are designed for local travel, and the aerotropolis exceeds it entirely. This point does not entail that aerotropolises’ urban cores cannot have transit-oriented development, but it would be an optional design independent of an aerotropolis’ configuration.
So far, the focus remains on ontological issues, meaning that attention has been on what makes the aerotropolis a unique habitat for being, which qualifies it as a place people call home. A separate but related enterprise should focus on the aerotropolis’s normative dimensions, meaning how they can help or harm various stakeholder groups. Future research should examine these outcomes to identify mitigation strategies and develop better ways to design and build aerotropolises. In turn, the following section explores the reasons why, this issue matters and gestures toward additional studies that will morally underpin them.
2.3 Future Pathways for the Ethicality of the Aerotropolis
The reality that the aerotropolis exists suggests that humankind has found ways to dwell that put long-distance travel at the center of our lives. Business and cultural experience can operate in lockstep with the expansion of these airport cities. Despite such advancement, the very notion of progress remains in peril when we bring harmful impacts into view. So far, these issues remain in the background, but their effects are real and can manifest in unfortunate ways that bring normativity into view. Perhaps the most pressing issue concerns public health and environmental justice related to pollution, specifically air quality, associated with having an airport in immediate proximity to the urban core.
Scientific studies indicate that living near airports can raise concerns for human health, leading to respiratory conditions and other health problems (Fajersztajn et al., 2019; Lin et al., 2008; Riley et al., 2021). If this notion carries significant weight, it could challenge any optimistic or championed standing of the aerotropolis as a suitable place for human habitation at all. If this is the case, the effort should be geared towards dismantling existing configurations with gusto. While this might be ideal, it is doubtful that those locations will engage in such efforts. However, simply because those instances will encounter pushback does not entail that they are doomed. Instead, future research could investigate how to retrofit existing airport cities to eliminate the harmful conditions associated with them.
Another area of concern is the challenges to sustainability. This point brings nonhuman stakeholders and future generations into the conversation, which is significant when we consider that there are serious interests in creating favorable conditions beyond the immediate concerns of travel and trade. If we give this notion significant thought, along with the environmental justice considerations mentioned above, we also have to address prioritization concerns among competing stakeholder groups.
Investigating and addressing these matters requires examining each aerotropolis to identify elements relevant to its impacts and to determine the unique circumstances that will affect stakeholders in that area. While researchers should be able to make meaningful statements about some ubiquitous conditions, it seems doubtful that those scenarios will be similar enough to the point that specific social, cultural, and environmental circumstances will not require detailed study. In turn, future research must remain interdisciplinary, bringing science, engineering, and philosophy together to identify problems and propose ethically grounded mitigation strategies that can maximize the promise of the aerotropolis while avoiding the known hazards.
3 Concluding Remarks
This article paid exclusive attention to the aerotropolis as a form of accumulating technology that brings global travel to the forefront of what it means to live in places that support it, focusing on how it holds the potential to shape residents’ experiences of those places. Although this topic concerns one possible way cities can progress, the reality is that cities can emerge in other, specific ways that add to the ontology of cities. In turn, it would be shortsighted to hold that the process ends with this advancement. If the aerotropolis can exist as one version of “future” cities, then possibilities remain that others could emerge as well. Future technologies, large and small, could change how people experience cities. If we favor positions holding that cities should support long-term human flourishing, then creating those kinds of places should remain firmly in view.
Transit-oriented development accounts for one approach to local travel, and urban mobility has undergone several changes over the last few decades that challenge established mobility practices and future endeavors (Epting, 2019). They include, but are not limited to, e-scooters, transportation network companies, automated taxis, and specialized underground tunnels. New modes of neighborhood electric vehicles are altering mobility dynamics in some instances. Although urban helicopters have had limited appeal, urban air mobility companies and regulators are dedicating time and attention to those vehicles (e.g., Epting, 2026).
The aerotropolis brings global travel to the city, and it seems impossible to imagine other modes achieving the same outcomes. However, it might be more realistic to focus on innovative models that can improve the harmful conditions associated with aerotropolis living. By dedicating advanced study to such matters, the desire to have cities integrate long-distance air travel into their structures might increase.Footnote 2 In time, such efforts might require philosophers to move from a “toward” to a full philosophy of the aerotropolis, fleshing out more aspects of their existences.
Data Availability
Not applicable.
Notes
While this essay has a narrow scope of inquiry, several other related topics will require investigation. One such topic is rootedness and the aerotropolis. For more information, see Weil and Eliot (2003).
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Epting, S. The Airport and the City: Toward a Philosophy of the Aerotropolis. Philos. Technol. 39, 182 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01185-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-026-01185-3