“If you’ve never had the experience of moving into your own city, you should try it sometime,” Stan Gale said with a chuckle, waving at the towers climbing around us on all sides—condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Gale, chairman and managing partner of Gale International, had borrowed $35 billion from Korea’s banks and partnered with its biggest steel company to build a city from scratch the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. He’d cut the ribbon only days before, although his creation won’t be finished until 2015.

Songdo isn’t so much a Korean city as a Western one floating just offshore from Seoul. It was chartered as an “international business district”—a hub for companies working in China. Worried about being squeezed by its neighbors, Songdo is Korea’s earnest attempt to build an answer to Hong Kong. To make expatriates feel at home, its malls are modeled after those in Beverly Hills, and Jack Nicklaus designed the golf course. But its most salient feature is shrouded in a perpetual haze on the other end of a 12-mile-long bridge that is one of the world’s longest. That’s the home of Incheon International Airport, which opened in 2001 on another man-made island and instantly became one of the world’s busiest hubs.

“They tracked us down, wanted us to build a city in the ocean, and no one else was interested,” Gale told me, still dazed. “Their vision scared everyone else away. It wasn’t until I saw the airport that I understood where they wanted to go with this.” Where they wanted to go was China. His sales pitch to prospective tenants is simple: move here, and you’re only a two-hour flight away from Shanghai or Beijing, and four hours away at most from cities you’ve never heard of, like Changsha. Chairman Mao’s hometown happens to be larger than Atlanta or Singapore. Nearly a billion people are just a day trip away. When Stan Gale looks at a departure board, he sees a treasure map. And when he gazes upon his creation, he sees dozens of potential new cities, each next to a dot on that map. These cities-to-be even have a name, which Gale pronounces for me with a flourish, an “aerotropolis.”

It isn’t his word. The man who taught it to him is John Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has made a name for himself with his radical (and some might say bone-chilling) vision of the future: rather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, Kasarda believes we will build this century’s cities around them. Why? Because people once chose to live in a city for the wealth of connections it offered socially, financially, intellectually, and so forth. But in the era of globalization, we choose cities that have access to other cities, linked by fiber-optic cables and jet aircraft. Stan Gale is simply taking this idea to its logical conclusion, building a network of instant aerotropoli joined by their airports.

Many aerotropoli have evolved out of the cities we already call home. The edge cities of Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, in Virginia—the most affluent counties in the nation—were the product of nearby Dulles International Airport. Orange County’s airport has more Class A office space nearby than all of downtown Los Angeles. And the notion of “Dallas–Fort Worth” didn’t exist until the airport bearing that name opened between them, causing the rival cities to merge.

To create more instant cities similar to Songdo, Kasarda has drafted a set of blueprints replete with “air trains” connecting prefab neighborhoods and business districts. They range in size from a few thousand residents to a few million. Aerotropoli designed according his principles are under way across Africa, China, India, and the Middle East and on the fringes of cities as desperate as Detroit and as old as Amsterdam. But Songdo didn’t set out to be like any of these. It was commissioned as a weapon.

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