Nowheresville? Build an airport, the rest will come

According to Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda's new book Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, Dubai is - or at least was, until the crash happened and the bling came to a jangling halt - the new centre of the world. It stands at the heart of a triangle joining Europe, Asia and Africa. Its rulers, and the entrepreneurs who feed upon them, like to speak of a new Spice Route.

The idea is nothing new. But the execution and the sheer scale would have been literally unimagineable 50 years ago.

Cities have always grown up around trade, and trade has always grown up around transport. Once, what counted was local geography: a crossroads, a river, a seaport, a bridge, or an oasis.

But commercial geography has changed. Now it's not local but global that matters, measured not in distance but in time. Time, at 35,000ft. In our multinational, out-sourced, just-in-time world where the customer wants it now, flowers picked in Kenya this morning can be on a fashionable Clerkenwell dinner-table - via Amsterdam, home to the biggest warehouse on the planet - tomorrow by drinks-time.

Enter the rootless, footloose men with an eye for the main chance. Enter the mad optimism, the thousand-fold leverage, the enterprise zone, the hordes of temporary migrant workers, the wad of banknotes in the brown paper bag. Enter the purpose-built aerotropolis.

The aerotropolis, like the airport at its heart, can go anywhere. Given enough runways, tax-breaks and infrastructure, the middle of nowhere can be the centre of the world. Who needs roads across the desert when the businesses can come to the airport? Build the runways and put the warehouses next to them; then, a little further out, the assembly and packaging plants, then the factories, then the fancifully named cities.

Dubai plans Commercial City, Golf City, Aviation City, Exhibition City and, almost as an afterthought, Residential City. Abu Dhabi and Qatar are building Degree Districts, with clones of world-renowned universities, imported pre-built from their parent organisations.

Dubai's aerotropolis infrastructure budget alone is larger than the entire American budget for the reconstruction of Iraq. And the scale of aerotropolis plans is both global and staggering. South Korea's Daewoo has acquired a third of Madagascar for nothing, offering a profit-share with the government. Saudi is building plantations in Malis, Senegal, Sudan and Ethiopia. Gabon has signed billion-dollar deals with India. Kenya is after land in Qatar and since 2006 a land-mass bigger than France has gone up for sale. China is building hundreds of aerotropoli in places which are, in old terms, nowhere. India is in on the act. Africa will be coming along in their wake.

Anyone who thinks of cities as one of humankind's greatest achievements will be left desolated by these pre-fab agglomerations, suburbs of nowhere with no centre, no history, and no culture. Human aspiration replaced by the bar-code.

It seems, too, like a nightmare for the Greens and global warming activists. But is it?
  
You may feel guilty about buying those African roses for your honey-pie but the carbon footprint of flying them in is, Kasards and Lindsay argue, far smaller than the carbon cost of heating the equivalent northern European greenhouses. In Africa, the sun's warmth is free. And aviation overall contributes less than two per cent of the world's carbon output.

But here in Europe, we've missed the boat. It took as long to listen to objections to Heathrow T5 as to build Beijing's new airport from raw ground. Heathrow was last week named as even worse than Calcutta, 99th in the airport league tables. It's not a surprise; Heathrow's hemmed in by an ancient city, hedged round by unplanned, organic growth, operated by a debt-ridden Spanish vanity buyout, and handcuffed by the enemy of efficiency, democracy.

The spread of civil rebellion in the Arab world, the explosion in oil prices, the inevitable decline in oil production: these will all impinge on the Aerotropolis World. But it's here to stay. If Dubai fails, it fails; night falls, the dogs bark and the caravan moves on, in a Pratt & Whitney roar and a blur of kerosene.

But we've missed the boat. It's not just geography that's against us, out on the north-western extremity of Europe. Short-termism, serpentine planning, under-investment and our national tendency to purse our lips and shake our heads: these have done for us. No aerotropolis here. Which, in an odd way, makes one proud to be British.

• Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next by Greg Lindsay and John Kasarda, published by Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1-846-14100-3 ·