Jerome81 Member Username: Jerome81
Post Number: 1399 Registered: 11-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:22 pm: | |
Saw something on Channel 4 about this DTW-Willow Run "airport city". This seems like the stupidest damn idea I've ever heard. Am I missing something? |
Bobj Member Username: Bobj
Post Number: 2057 Registered: 11-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:23 pm: | |
What is it?? |
Iheartthed Member Username: Iheartthed
Post Number: 710 Registered: 04-2006
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:25 pm: | |
I was wondering where the discussion about this was... |
Udmphikapbob Member Username: Udmphikapbob
Post Number: 343 Registered: 07-2004
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:30 pm: | |
This has been brewing for a few years now...some background from a story in FastCompany magazine:
quote: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?
quote: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 "charrette." 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. Upon emerging three days later, three student teams presented master plans that offered everything from full-fledged logistics hubs around Willow Run to a grand boulevard running through a greenbelt of mixed-use neighborhoods and office parks designed in the high style of Silicon Valley. The aerotropolis, they concluded, could stem the massive brain drain from local universities and the entire region. It could anchor a new city, with 100,000 new residents, in Wayne County's western suburbs. Kasarda was ecstatic: "This could turn around all of southeastern Michigan!" And his hosts became his newest converts. Three months later, Mulu Birru, Wayne County's economic development guru, presented a "best of" compilation of the students' designs to his boss, Wayne County executive Robert Ficano, along with a "nonbinding memorandum of understanding" for building the aerotropolis--a plea to the governor to grant them the cash and the planning powers necessary to bring Detroit and adjoining communities to the table. Birru, who worked a minor miracle by helping to turn Pittsburgh around, sees a Detroit aerotropolis as a haven for "green" architecture and a magnet for auto suppliers, biotech firms, ethanol plants, and just about any other technology-intensive business you can think of. In fact, auto-parts outfits such as Visteon, Magna, and the Chinese entrant Century Automotive have either built or are eyeing new campuses in the aerotropolis zone. (Many auto components today are lightweight and digital, and thus easily shipped by air.) After our meeting, Birru's deputy and I drive off for another aerotropolis-site inspection, wending our way through the parking lot of Visteon Village, home to some 3,000 auto-parts workers and nearly as self-contained as the 19th-century New England mill town it resembles. We take the back roads to the future grounds of the Pinnacle Aeropark, a parcel of open land just south of Detroit's airport that will serve as a prototype for the aerotropolis when ground is broken next year. At one point, we pull over next to a field of dandelions less than a mile from the runways. These thousand acres are set to become the Entertainment Center, a Magna-supported vision that could have been a leftover sketch from Suvarnabhumi. Hotels, a casino, a performing-arts center, retail, and even a horse-racing track (Magna's entertainment division happens to own Pimlico) would all sit here, cheek by jowl. When you stand there, the airport peeking out from behind the overpass suddenly seems an optimistic symbol. It makes as much sense--and probably more--for the people of Detroit to orbit a new global portal as it does for them to cling to some frayed and decrepit version of Jane Jacobs's ideal. It's an opportunity for the city to start fresh, to recast itself in our networked economy's own image. It's a chance that Detroit, of all places, can ill afford to miss. The rest of us had better take good notes. and the UM design charrette mentioned: http://www.tcaup.umich.edu/cha rrette/aerotropolis06.html |
Tetsua Member Username: Tetsua
Post Number: 1177 Registered: 01-2004
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:34 pm: | |
quote:Developing the area around Detroit Metro Airport and Willow Run Airport into an “aerotropolis” or “airport city” to serve as a global logistics hub to move people, products and information and to provide thousands of jobs. http://www.crainsdetroit.com/a pps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20077 0503003 |
Udmphikapbob Member Username: Udmphikapbob
Post Number: 344 Registered: 07-2004
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:36 pm: | |
MEDC link: http://www.michigan.org/medc/s martzones/szsum/pinnacleaeropa rk/index.asp First developer signs on last summer: http://www.thenewsherald.com/s tories/080406/loc_20060804002. shtml Search "Pinnacle Aeropark" to see some of the legal hurdles they are facing and have faced. It seems like it will be a reality, on some level. How much remains to be seen. Makes more sense to me than further developing northern Oakland and Macomb Counties. Build around the infrastructure we already support - and develop some high-speed transit with the City of Detroit. |
Sg9018 Member Username: Sg9018
Post Number: 10 Registered: 10-2006
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:38 pm: | |
Here a Detroit News story about Airport City, http://www.detnews.com/apps/pb cs.dll/article?AID=/20070504/B IZ/705040397 Airport city is about using DTW-Willow Run airports as hub for logistics and cargo businesses. This project may add thousands of new companies for the metro area. |
Rb336 Member Username: Rb336
Post Number: 38 Registered: 02-2007
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:45 pm: | |
Stuart Frankel had plans for something called "Pinnacle Aeropark" which was supposed to have something like 25,000 sq ft of office and 500,000 sq ft of warehouse/distribution. I don't know if this is part of that plan or something else. |
Parkguy Member Username: Parkguy
Post Number: 13 Registered: 04-2007
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 4:59 pm: | |
Logistics would be the core of it, but any international trade or tech businesses would be a perfect fit. The world-wide links via Metro, since it is one of the major airports in the world, along with its location along the biggest NAFTA route, makes it a perfect location for this kind of thing. The big hurdle, as I understand it, is the patchwork of jurisdictions and planning authorities that would have to be coordinated (and we know how well that has worked in this region). Apparently, there will be some referenda and some legislation in Lansing to move this ahead, possibly on a regional level. |
Detroitnerd Member Username: Detroitnerd
Post Number: 884 Registered: 07-2004
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 5:00 pm: | |
Trains, planes and (fewer) automobiles How Airport City could help a beleaguered region take off by Keith Schneider March 1, 2026: Gathering speed on the immensely popular light rail line from downtown Detroit to Metro Airport is a car full of executives on their way to Manila. It's a beautiful sky-blue day. As the train leaves the station stop in Taylor, passengers gain an eye-level view of the Detroit area's newly built, ultra-modern and world-renowned Airport City. This is the eastern edge of a 25,000-acre stretch of western Wayne County that not long ago was a congested mismatch of aging neighborhoods, cracked parking lots, traffic-clogged highways and featureless warehouses stretching from Dearborn Heights to Willow Run Airport. A generation later this part of southeast Michigan is entirely engaging, fresh and globally significant. An astonishing display of stone and steel and glass, straight lines and beckoning angles, unveils itself to passengers, a modern metropolis with 450,000 residents and 350,000 jobs. Like Silicon Valley of another era, Detroit's Airport City brims with deep pools of entrepreneurial and technical talent supplying an array of product laboratories, technology manufacturers, suppliers, global distributors and corporate offices unrivaled in the Midwest. http://www.metrotimes.com/edit orial/story.asp?id=8957 |
Lmichigan Member Username: Lmichigan
Post Number: 5460 Registered: 10-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 5:15 pm: | |
I think this sounds like a good idea, but I think that a rapid transit link to connect the people to the jobs is enough, or the potential can't fully be realized. Otherwise, this will be another huge development that will simply causing a housing boom in the areas directly around it, and it won't really be all that regional. |
Parkguy Member Username: Parkguy
Post Number: 16 Registered: 04-2007
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 6:10 pm: | |
From Wikipedia: An aerotropolis (pl. aerotropolises or aerotropoli) is a new type of urban form comprising aviation-intensive businesses and related enterprises extending up to 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) outward from major airports... Aerotropolises typically attract industries related to time-sensitive manufacturing, e-commerce fulfillment, telecommunications and logistics; hotels, retail outlets, entertainment complexes and exhibition centers; and offices for business people who travel frequently by air or engage in global commerce. Clusters of business parks, logistics parks, industrial parks, distribution centers, information technology complexes and wholesale merchandise marts locate around the airport and along the transportation corridors radiating from them. According to the entry, Detroit already has one! I think I like "Aerotropolis" better than "Airport City." It sounds too much like "Paradise City" or "DEEtroit City," or "Spatula City," (for you Wierd Al fans). |
Bearinabox Member Username: Bearinabox
Post Number: 182 Registered: 04-2006
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 6:22 pm: | |
Smacks of urban renewal and master-planned communities to me. I agree with Jerome's original post. |
Lmichigan Member Username: Lmichigan
Post Number: 5463 Registered: 10-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 6:44 pm: | |
The land that this is being developed on is largely empty, so I wouldn't call it urban renewal, at all. Master-planned logistics center? Sure; but what's wrong with that? A huge problem with this region is that there aren't enough carefully planned developments. |
Gravitymachine Member Username: Gravitymachine
Post Number: 1632 Registered: 05-2005
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 7:15 pm: | |
I know it's being pushed heavily by Ficano (wayne county exec). my meager connection to it all is that a photo i took was used in some of the county made literature on the subject |
Jerome81 Member Username: Jerome81
Post Number: 1401 Registered: 11-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 8:12 pm: | |
Why do we need to create (and it really is create cause there ain't much out there right now anyway) this type of thing? Wouldn't it be easier to build the airport near the industry than create the city around the airport? Beyond the absurdness of building essentially a new city from the ground up (where there is no population increases), can they possibly accomodate the massive predicted increase in air traffic? Every fly into Chicago or New York during peak periods? Think how far apart OHare and Midway or JFK and LaGuardia are, and if winds/weather changes it causes headaches at both airports cause there isn't enough space to put all the planes for arrival and departure. Now, put those two airports a couple miles apart and what is going to happen? I think this is just a stupid idea. Sounds like some development that has big, grand plans, but in reality will end up having a ton of empty, un-leased space with a few little places to live, stay and shop in the area. Well, huh, that sounds pretty much like that area right now. I still think it sounds so incredibly stupid. Bring the airports to the businesses or the businesses to the airports, ok. But this idea of an airport city is so stupid I can't even grasp it. |
Jerome81 Member Username: Jerome81
Post Number: 1402 Registered: 11-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 8:14 pm: | |
Edit to above post: How is this going to be any different than the businesses/lifestyles of today? People live away from business zones and commute. People don't like to be near airports. Why do they think that if they build a city around an airport that for some reason people are suddenly going to want to live and work in the same place (and next to 2 big airports at that). It will at best just become another industrial park. The companies that are interested will go there, the workers will all commute from Detroit or Ann Arbor, and that will be that. And if it does come to that, how is it really any different that what is done today? |
Irish_mafia Member Username: Irish_mafia
Post Number: 888 Registered: 10-2003
| Posted on Friday, May 04, 2007 - 11:22 pm: | |
I am in (at least a component) of this industry. This is exactly what this region needs. We own the geography, the infrastructure, existing customer base and a clearly identified target of new potential customers, technological and educational support, international transportation expertise and strong capital supported operations that are already located here. Are we an Aerotropolis now? Perhaps in a minor way. Certainly not in the dominant way in which we could really own this market. This could be a key component as you look at Detroit evolution: 1) Agriculture and key military logistics and defense area to: 2) Major Ship Builder in the country 3) Major Stove Builder in the country 4) Major Automotive manufacturer in the country 5) Major Distribution Hub in the country (which really brings us back to number 1... which further incentivizes companies to locate here to create the "next" manufacturing operation like numbers 2. 3 and 4. |
Lmichigan Member Username: Lmichigan
Post Number: 5464 Registered: 10-2003
| Posted on Saturday, May 05, 2007 - 12:17 am: | |
These are the exact kind of developments we should be taking on, in Michigan; the ones that accentuate our strengths. As has been said, Metro/Willow Run has the infrastructure, and it's under-utilized. I view this no differently than the ambitious TechTown in Midtown which everyone loved. If you got it, developed it, and flaunt it. |
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