Environmental perspectives on aeromobility and the development of experience spaces

Environmental perspectives on aeromobility and the development of experience spaces

Smink, C.K.
Lassen, C.

2010-10-28

In recent years a number of small and medium-sized European cities, which have a provincial airport located relatively close to the city invested in making cities to “experience destinations”. Several provincial airports and airlines – especially low-cost airlines – have seen an advantage in this strategy and used it as an essential part of expanding their business base. These “new” experience destinations and low-cost carriers have largely evolved through each other. In several cities around Europe where there had not really been something to be experienced so far, entirely new attractions and adventure opportunities have been created. However, using air traffic as an important tool in the production of experience is problematic. The threat to the global climate from airplane emissions has become more serious than the threat from emissions of vehicles, which travel at the same distances at surface level. The rapidly expanding air traffic worldwide contributes about 3% of the production of CO2 to the global climate. One other important consequence of this increase in air transport is that tourism now accounts for more than 60% of air travel and is therefore responsible for an important share of air emissions. In the paper we will show how aeromobility is used as a core element in the development of new urban strategies of experience and transformation of urban spaces and we will discuss different dilemmas with this strategy for the environment, both at the global and the local level. We will use the city of Billund (Denmark) as an example.

aeromobility
environmental impacts
new urban strategies and experience destination

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:1f7500a5-c428-4557-9301-9b3a7a5b5d99

Conference proceedings

conference paper

(c) 2010 Smink, C.K.; Lassen, C.