City of dreams

In the second article in our series on commercial landside developments at airports, we look at the factors which determine the success of airport cities or `aerotropoli'.

An airport city is the "inside the fence" area of a large airport including on-airport businesses such as air cargo, logistics, offices, retail, and hotels.

Airport cities provide an anchor point for infrastructure projects and can more evenly distribute economic and social activity away from potentially congested and expensive city centres.  They also address common inner-city challenges and in doing so raise the attractiveness of the entire region.

However, airport cities are often an afterthought. Despite huge potential, the key barrier to their success is a supply-led approach. Masterplanning briefs regularly earmark surplus landside space as ‘commercial’, with no accompanying strategy. This opens development options up to uses such as infrastructure related cargo services or energy farms, office and conference facilities (see Circle Zurich above), social infrastructure (healthcare, education), passenger services or consumer services like retail, leisure, entertainment, and attractions. Naturally, all of these have very different requirements, and feasibility studies of sufficient detail are not routinely conducted, with limited consideration given to the existing provision in the wider catchment to determine gaps in the market that need filling.

We believe that three factors are key to the success of landside developments:

1. Identify demand
In addition to identifying the size of the target user market and subsequent demand as outlined in the first article of this series, it is vital to understand existing supply in the wider catchment that could compete with the landside development. How does the landside development meet demand by filling gaps in existing provision, from office space and conference facilities to destination shopping?

2. Leverage accessibility
Airports are by nature highly connected places with a lot of natural footfall. However the location of the landside development relative to passenger terminals is key to determine the levels of `incidental' footfall. To attract non-airport users, connectivity to the catchment needs to be understood. Often, airports have strong long-distance connectivity, but poor local access.

Travel time - not distance - is the determining factor here. Since airports have excellent infrastructure connectivity into the city, the ease of access can provide a key advantage for airport cities if a coherent mobility strategy is in place, and provide a differentiating factor compared to congested city centres. 

3. Align positioning
Whilst not unique to landside developments, ultimately the positioning needs to be aligned to demand and leverage any natural advantages of the location. Depending on the potential end-use, this could be a highly connected budget business park, or a sophisticated retail and leisure complex with an appealing tenant mix and a stunning architectural environment.

Devising the right strategy is one thing, bringing it to life another. To actually deliver the positioning to its maximum potential, alignment across the airport organisation (i.e. terminal and wider commercial / landside operation) is crucial to form a holistic vision, yet we still often come across siloed `commercial' vs `property' operations.

When done right rather than just built due to a supply of available airport land, we believe landside developments have huge potential to deliver much needed economic diversification for airports. They can also play an important role in enhancing the wider urban area when positioned to truly meet demand, in the form of business and conference facilities, social infrastructure like university campuses, or leisure, entertainment, and retail offerings.

The next article in our mini-series will take a closer look at the various different types of landside developments.

Christina Roseler