13 Towards an effect-based model for airports and cities Christian Salewski, Benedikt Boucsein and Anna Gasco Limitations of existing models for airports and cities Large airports are enormous built structures occupying vast areas of land. The core components of any airport are its runway system, technical facilities, termi- nal buildings, and buildings for supporting services such as maintenance, freight, security, boarding, and the landside access system of roads, parking, and rails. Adding to that are secondary, auxiliary, or enhancing functions such as shop- ping, hotels, conference centers, offices, and logistics. The central areas around the terminals of very large airports, often hubs or secondary hubs, can equal or surpass their mother cities’ central areas in size, as is the case in Amsterdam. (see Figure 13.1). By their sheer size alone, airports have a massive impact on the structure and form of the built environment. They shape the present urban and landscape struc- ture and give shape to their future development. They do so by conditioning a much larger area than its direct territory: areas affected by regulations and emis- sions, the tangle of landside access routes, or airport-related built structures that may be located far away from the runways. The Dutch historian, Koos Bosma, and the Russian sociologist, Anna Nikolaeva, have described Schiphol Airport accordingly “as a deep-pile carpet across which objects, information and people move. To extend the metaphor, an oddly shaped carpet with frayed edges that reach deep into the region and with an air column of about 10 kilometers on top of it” (Bosma and Nikolaeva 2013). Mapping that “carpet” is possible, but never final, since its form and size vary considerably depending on the factors taken into account. Although the great impact of large airports on the built environment is widely acknowledged, there is no agreed-on categorization of airport-related urbaniza- tion effects. Urbanization around large airports partly follows known patterns that can be found elsewhere in urban peripheries, in urban sprawl, and on urban edges. But large airports also produce their own urbanization patterns due to the specific nature of their effects. To learn more about these patterns, a comprehen- sive comparison is misleading; airports and their urban regions are always unique, shaped by long, specific histories of urban and airport development, topography, politics, and culture. In this chapter, we therefore chose a different