A record 630 delegates, speakers and exhibitors attended last week's 2011 Airport Cities World Conference in Memphis, an indication perhaps of how far the airport city and aerotropolis concepts have evolved in recent years.
The event received global media coverage, with traditional media newspaper and TV crews joined by online reporters, bloggers and commentators using social media sites such as twitter.
While the publication of Dr John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay's book Aerotropolis: The Way We Will Live Next has helped bring the concept to a wider audience, media coverage of the two-day event treated the airport city and aerotropolis models as established paths for airports to transform themselves into engines of economic development.
Newspapers, including the Memphis Business Journal, Orlando Sentinel and Commercial Appeal descended on the Peabody Hotel, while camera teams from My Fox and WMCTV and beamed coverage straight into Memphis homes.
Cameron Harper of abc's Memphis based network channel, abc24, said the conference was an "opportunity to show off what airport planners call quadra-model resources - planes, trucks, boats and trains. All of those resources come together on the banks of the Mississippi River in Memphis."
WMCTV reported Fred Smith, founder and CEO of FedEx as telling aviation leaders that cities like Memphis, where the layout, infrastructure, and economy are centred around an international airport, should be a magnet for time-sensitive manufacturing and distribution companies.
Keeping up a conference blog for the Memphis Daily News website, Bill Dries, gave an insight into the gala dinner as it took place at Graceland: "The airport executives, consultants and business leaders in town since Monday are very intense about their networking.
"Walk through a room where they are mingling and you will hear lots of talk about runways, infrastructure, millions of dollars for this and billions for that and always what another airport is doing somewhere else.
"But Beijing will surpass us in five years," one visitor said nonchalantly to another as Elvis's 1972 live television concert in Hawaii played on television screens around the banquet room in the plaza.
The intensity is also a function of the language barrier that exists in any gathering anywhere that includes people from 40 countries and all seven continents.
It is a reminder that the ease with which plans and Power Point presentations point out how to get from here to there on the other side of the world, there is still work to be done on what happens once you get there."
Writing in his blog for the Memphis Flyer, staff writer John Branston wrote: "There are three ways of looking at the past and future growth of cities: through the eyes of chief executives, through the eyes of demographers and scholars and through your own eyes.
"On Tuesday, I went to the Peabody for a taste of the Airport Cities World Conference and Exhibition to get the CEOs' view. Fred Smith of FedEx and Richard Anderson of Delta Airlines were onstage with John
Kasarda, a professor and author who coined the term "aerotropolis." Memphis is an aerotropolis city because of the airport cargo and passenger hubs.
The questions to Smith and Anderson from Kasarda and members of the audience were friendly. This was not Meet the Press. Anderson didn't talk about Delta's recently announced cutbacks in service in Memphis.
He said the future of passenger aviation holds continued consolidation, high fuel prices and higher fares, fewer trade barriers, and little if any growth in employment.
Still, he said, "I think the winners are cities like Memphis," because of companies like FedEx and Medtronic, which is "a gem." He praised Memphis International Airport for its investments in the ramps, runways, and terminal.
Meanwhile, Greg Principato, president of Airports Council International (ACI) North America, used the conference as an opportunity to highlight what he sees as a looming crisis of funding for airports, with the US government and airlines teaming up to strangle essential upgrades to airport infrastructure:
"When I thought about the idea behind the conference (maximizing economic growth and development around the airport), and thought about all the people attending from around the world (630 from every continent), and thought about all that is happening around the globe to promote aviation infrastructure development, and thought about how government and airlines hamper such investments in this country; I decided to say something different."
""ªwhat I wanted to do is point out that 5,000 years of human history show us that those who invest in transportation infrastructure grow and prosper and those who don't invest fail to grow and prosper. And, that right now, the United States belongs to that second group."
Meanwhile twitter was also a buzz with activity during over the two days with those attending in particular tweeting straight from the floor of the conference.
The Greater Memphis Chamber tweeted or re-tweeted several comments by Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson, including his view that the US government should prioritise NextGen over high speed rail because of the environmental and financial costs, and his belief that: "Memphis is the prime example of where an airport took the place of intermodal commerce trading."
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Links to Memphis coverage:
http://www.wmctv.com/story/14432835/fedexs-smith
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/topic/wreg-memphis-is-an-aerotropolis-city-story,0,1283700.story
http://www.wmctv.com/story/14425556/memphis-s
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/apr/12/airport-dreams/
