Aerotropolis

American airports will become “pop-up cities with no claim to local heritage or culture and bleached of any genuine sense of place,” writes Wayne Curtis in a Wall Street Journal review of Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay (3/2/11).

The argument goes that “economic vitality has moved from ocean harbors to river ports to railroad hubs to highway interchanges, and now, to airports.” The concept is that an airport can be “a city unto itself … basically an airport-integrated region, extending as far as sixty miles from the inner cluster of hotel, offices, distribution and logistics facilities.”

It’s a vision that is already taking shape in “emerging airport cities, including near Memphis, Denver, Detroit, Dubai, Bangkok and some of the 100 new aerotropoli … planned for China within the decade.

“Memphis, for instance, has become ‘an inland port for goods arriving from Asia, thanks to FedEx and the two million packages that transit its complex every day’.” Such airports essentially are “routers for goods and people, or as the authors put it, ‘factories for connectivity.’”

Whether this is “worth the greenhouse gases” it produces is another question. Then there’s the matter of whether “people will want to live near airports.” The authors admit that airports are “noisy and filthy,” but argue that the aerotropolis is more about efficiency than aesthetics, and suggest that those who don’t go along will be left behind.

At The Fights

“Though fighting has provoked a lot of great writing, not much of it has actually been about fighting,” writes Tim Marchman in the Wall Street Journal (2/19/11). Tim makes the observation in a review of At the Fights, a collection of essays about boxers and boxing, edited by George Kimball and John Schulian.

In every case, the stories are more about the fighters — who they are or what they represent, than what they actually did in the ring. This pattern stretches all the way back to the 1910 “Fight of the Century” between heavyweights Jack Johnson and James Jeffries.

That fight wasn’t about boxing at all — Jeffries had been retired for six years at the time. It was about Jeffries’s wish to “reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race.” Joe Louis’s triumph over Max Schmeling was similarly charged with racial politics, as was Floyd Patterson versus Sonny Liston, which James Baldwin reduced “to a simple contest between a striving integrationist and a nightmarish thug.”

And then there’s Muhammad Ali, whom Mark Kram described as “a splendidly plumed bird who wrote on the wind a singular kind of poetry of the body.” The decline of such prose coincided with the rise of “broadcast technology, which not only made the description of fights redundant but brought viewers into the ring, revealing boxers as less mythic figures than working athletes.”

Everyone’s a Winner

Joel Best explores America’s “congratulatory culture” in Everyone’s a Winner, writes Sam Schulman in the Wall Street Journal (2/16/11). The book’s premise is that, in “contemporary suburban life,” Americans are experiencing “a proliferation of prizes that seems to arise from a desperate desire to exclude fewer and fewer people from the winner’s podium.”

These range from “my kid the honor-roll student” bumperstickers to “employee of the month” awards, but also extend into “the broader cultural realm.” For example, the number of “Best Picture” Oscar nominations “have recently doubled from five to 10” and the Grammys now give out more than 100 awards. The term “hero” is meanwhile “ever more broadly applied — not to just soldiers but to firemen, cancer patients and even community volunteers.”

Then there are “communities of shared interest,” that “routinely host friendly competitions, award prizes and put on congratulation-filled ceremonies,” and the proliferation of “best of” lists.

Is this healthy? Joel thinks it gives us “a sense of belonging, of having a place among others.” But Sam points out that we used to have “that sense — family, neighborhood, church — without handing out all those prizes.”