While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University of North Carolina's business school, may be a peculiar sort of Johnson, but Lindsay, a business journalist, is nonetheless his committed Boswell. A Boswell who, in search of his subject's zeitgeist wisdom, once mounted a three-week exploration of 'Airworld' - as Kasarda calls it - by jetting from terminal to terminal around the globe but never exiting through the door marked 'arrivals'. Why? Because it is Lindsay's belief that Kasarda is the most important urban theorist alive today, a man who has fully anticipated the shape the future city must have and who has moved to make it a reality.

LRB 28 April 2011 | PDF Download