Nordicum - Real Estate Annual Finland 2016 | Page 57

Photo: by Finavia / Photographer Hannu Vallas /
Lentokuava Vallas Oy

Earn Your Wings
In trying times, can Airport Cities help the economy to take off?

I

n building the Growth Corridors of the
future, one sometimes neglects to note
the importance of air traffic. While multimodality as a concept – and more significantly, in practice – is being perfected, airports are emerging as powerful hubs that
drive growth around the world.
Airport cities guru, Dr. John Kasarda,
has talked about “the rise of the aerotropolis” and the increasing economic importance
of airports for years. According to Kasarda,
airport cities have developed along different paths.
A portion of airport cities were planned
from the start, but most of them, however,
evolved in a largely organic manner responding to airport land availability, improved surface transportation access and growing air
traveller consumer demands. Additional
drivers in this change have been airport
revenue needs, new business practices, and
site-specific commercial real estate opportunities.

Winning Wingspan
”Regardless of the process, airports continue
to transform from primarily air transport
infrastructure to multimodal, multi-functional enterprises generating considerable
commercial development within and well
beyond their boundaries,” Kasarda believes.
More and more, we are witnessing the trend
where virtually all of the commercial func-

Get Connected
tions of a modern metropolitan centre can
be found on (or near) most major air gateways, fundamentally changing them from
‘city airports’ to ‘airport cities’.
The economic impact of airports
is a crucial component of modern economies. According to an Airports Council International EUROPE (ACI) study,
European airports and associated aviation activity create and facilitate a total of
almost 12.5 million jobs, or €675 billion in
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) each year
– that’s just over 4 % of the entire European economy.

Rare Air
The ACI study notes that while a large part
of airports’ economic impact is associated
with those that work within the sector and its
wider supply chains, it is the broader “catalytic impacts” which set aviation apart from
other industries. These are the wider economic activities which occur beyond the aviation sector, but which are facilitated and
supported by the connectivity that aviation
delivers between localities, countries and
world regions.
This means that tourists can spend
money in previously unreachable locations; businesses can produce goods to be
consumed in far corners of the world; investors can set up new offices, call centres and
factories exactly where they are needed.

The ACI study looked at macro-economic
data from 40 Euro