The Global Aerotropolis Rating Index (GARI): Rethink a City’s Global Competitive Advantages through the Aerotropolis Perspective

Under the general trend of globalization, in order to achieve the most reasonable level of enterprise cost and efficiency, multinational corporations such as Apple, Inditex, and Microsoft have more and more labor division and cooperation in different regions of the world. Faster, reliable, and more convenient point-to-point transportation of people and goods is a constant subject by multinational corporations around the world. Air transit is by far the only mean for travelers to transport safely and comfortably from one location to another worldwide within 24 hours. Because capacity and efficiency of the airport is the key for many multinational companies making strategic investment decisions, cities are increasingly carry out economic development plans around airports, and this development idea has supported the theory of Aerotropolis. With more and more cities join the race, it appears necessary to re-examine a city’s competitive advantages from the perspective of Aerotropolis, which may be defined as an urban economic district whose infrastructure, land use, and economy are centered on a major airport. The focus of this paper is to discuss a new global city rating system taking into consideration of the impact of airport and Aerotropolis developments. This rating system is named as “Global Aerotropolis Rating Index” (henceforth referred to as GARI). The GARI extracts and evaluates elements from the current mainstream studies on global cities by superimposing on the aviation impact factors and the “economy of speed” factors. The GARI revaluates the global cities’ performance and competitive advantages using 5 dimensions and 40 indicators, thus, more specific urban development goals and strategies could be proposed to these global cities through the Aerotropolis angle.