Global air travel: toward concentration or dispersal?
Section snippets
Background to the research
The research is designed to establish the extent of change in the spatial development of transport networks at the national and continental scale. The heritage of this work lies in the models reviewed by Hoyle and Smith (1998), which draw their inspiration from the pioneering work of Taaffe, Morrill and Gould. These approaches have rarely been considered from the perspective of air transport. In one example, Rimmer (1991) produced a model predicting very large airports would be the next stage
The demand for air travel
Much urban research in the 1990s established that the globalisation of economic activity was felt in particular in a few very large cities with special roles in the world’s finance, banking and corporate activities. These places have been labelled “global cities”. Empirical results expressed initially by Keeling (1995) and subsequently by Smith and Timberlake (1998) confirm that the hierarchy of these global cities expressed in terms of their influence in global capitalism (Sassen, 2000)
An approach to research on air travel patterns
The approach to the research reported here was built on two foundations. The first identified changes in the share of a total of the passengers counted at the worlds busiest 100 airports classified into groups of cities and the second measured the connectivity of some of these airports to others in the world. The first approach involved two separate classifications. One used a classification of the world’s cities developed by a research group at Loughborough University and another used the
Passengers at global cities
The distribution of passengers in the categories identified by the GaWC classification of cities is displayed in Table 1, and the change in their passenger numbers is shown in Table 2. The first table shows that during the 1990s there was a small but steady shift in share of total passengers away from the dominant global cities in the alpha category, toward the next group in particular, as well as toward the third category of city. Significantly, the third category of city includes national
Implications
The shift in traffic detected here is likely to be related to changes in aircraft technology, a gradual de-regulation of air travel (induced in part through alliances and assisted by new small carriers) and changes in the production systems of firms in a range of industries. These changes represent another stage in the way globalisation is shaping the cities within the world economy. For transport geography, the information means that analytical frameworks need to look beyond continuation of
Acknowledgments
The author thanks John Bowen for an invitation to join a panel on Pacific Rim Air and Maritime Transport at the American Association of Geographers where an initial draft of this paper was discussed. Travel funds from the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne made it possible to attend the AAG meeting and also to purchase the data used here. Staff in the Research Division of the Airports Council International, Geneva were very helpful in the prompt
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