ZHENGZHOU, China—If you have an iPhone, there’s a good chance it came from an enormous factory near the airport of this metropolis in China’s heartland.

Xinzheng International Airport outside of Zhengzhou is the focus of a special economic zone five times the size of Manhattan
Xinzheng International Airport outside of Zhengzhou is the focus of a special economic zone five times the size of Manhattan - Currently, 35 percent of the value of global trade is being shipped via aircraft. Building essential business infrastructure close to airports gives companies faster access to their suppliers and customers. It makes these enterprises, as well as the broader urban ecosystems in which they function, more versatile and efficient. The higher the value of the goods or services involved, the bigger the gains. The trend is already in high gear, and not just in China. In the Netherlands, the "Amsterdam Airport Area" is home to more than 1,000 multinational firms. South Korea has the Songdo International Business District, built on reclaimed land near Incheon International Airport. Hong Kong, currently the busiest air-cargo hub in the world, has established Sky City, a massive retail, exhibition, office, hotel, and entertainment center. In the United States, a sort of aerotropolis is developing in Texas outside the gates of Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. One development called Las Colinas is home to the headquarters of nine Fortune 1,000 companies. Another, called Southlake, is an upscale residential neighborhood intentionally integrated within the air-hub ecosystem. It’s become a hotspot for upper-tier corporate executives, professional athletes, media personalities and others who like living a ten-minute taxi ride from their next flight. “People who have to travel often for work want to live next to the airport,” says Mike Tesoriero, owner of Southlake Style Magazine. “There are many professional golfers and football players [here]; they travel often and they can catch their flights quickly and easily.” © John Kasarda

Since 2010, the land around the airport has changed from an agricultural area with rural villages into one of China’s most economically dynamic areas. It’s called the Zhengzhou Airport Economic Zone, or ZAEZ, and it’s exactly what it says it is: a massive industrial, commercial, and logistics hub purposely built with air transport at its core.

China has many special economic zones, but the ZAEZ is the first to be spatially and economically centered around an airport. It’s been an almost instant success, and has provided the blueprint for dozens more similar airport-centered cities across China.

Five times the size of Manhattan, the zone is a city within a city, located about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the historic core of Zhengzhou. The zone boasts eight industrial parks and a growing number of office and residential towers, and generates nearly US$6 billion in imports and exports each year—well over half the foreign trade of Henan Province.

The ZAEZ is a prime example of what John Kasarda calls an “aerotropolis.” Kasarda is the chief advisor to the ZAEZ, and, along with Greg Lindsay, the co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next. Not long ago this airport area was “relatively isolated, rural, there was nothing there,” Kasarda says. “This has all happened within the past five or six years. It's amazing. The amount of investment, the amount of exports, the amount of overall development.”

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“Due to high additional value, low weight, small volume, and high demand for transfer speed, biomedicine products highly rely on air freight,” says Gao Jianxin, general manager of the U.S.-China Medicine Development Center, a major biomedical R&D enterprise located in the ZAEZ. “Locations adjacent to hub airports are critical to the development of the biomedicine industry.”

The ZAEZ was developed by fiat. As China’s first and only state-level airport economic zone, it sits under the direct auspices of Beijing. Which is to say it has the full political and economic backing of the Communist Party, a very important determinant for success. When development on the ZAEZ began in 2010, the goal was to make it into the primary growth engine of China’s central plains region, and the people pulling the strings had to power to make this happen quickly.

“Generally, development in China is not primarily market-driven but pushed forward by local governments in anticipation of future demand,” explains Bauer. “Or indeed, in order to create future demand from scratch.”

China is now looking to replicate the success of the ZAEZ in dozens of other cities, such as Qingdao, Xi’an, and Nanjing, where airport areas are being built up to be commercial as well as logistical hubs.