Global air travel: toward concentration or dispersal?

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Abstract

The geography of airline passenger movement through the major cities of the world has changed between 1990 and 2000. The change has been at the expense of the very large global cities and major hubs in favour of a group of next largest cities. It has been detected by comparing the shares of total passenger movement through cities in two separate ways, and by exploring changes in the connectivity between cities over a similar time period. The new pattern reflects the use of new aircraft technology, changes in the location of demand for air travel associated with a broadening in the global linkages between cities, new regulatory arrangements and airline corporate strategies. The implications are that the pressures for airport planning will be felt in a new set of cities, although because the share of passenger traffic through the very large global cities is still high they will remain a major focus for airport planning and management action in the immediate future.

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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