Laura Cipriani FLOAT I N G AIRPORTS Recent episodes have demonstrated the fragility of airport nodes in the face of extreme weather events. But what does that mean for the future? Can we envision a new alliance between architecture, landscape architecture and water? The disciplines of urbanism, architecture and landscape planning will become of central importance in the choices to be made. 74 What will the airport of the future look like? “Floating airports” are based on a view of water that does not see it as a threat but as an element to adapt to by “floating”. 75 AUGUST 29 2005 Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, USA OCTOBER 3 2008 Chicago O’Hare International Airport, USA AUGUST 4 2009 Louisville International Airport, USA AUGUST 22 2009 Delhi International Airport Limited, INDIA SEPTEMBER 16 2009 Palermo Falcone Borsellino Airport, ITALY SEPTEMBER 29 2009 Pago Pago International Airport, American Samoa MARCH 16 2010 Norwood Memorial Airport, USA APRIL 4 2010 Norwood Memorial Airport, USA JULY 23 2010 General Mitchell International Airport, USA DECEMBER 21 2010 76 Corona Municipal Airport, USA JANUARY 12 2011 Brisbane Airport, AUSTRALIA JANUARY 22 2011 Rockhampton Airport, AUSTRALIA MARCH 2 2011 Ancona Raffaello Sanzio Airport, ITALY MARCH 11 2011 Sendai Airport, JAPAN MARCH 31 2011 Whitsunday Coast Airport, AUSTRALIA MARCH 31 2011 Koh Samui Airport, THAILAND APRIL 16 2011 Harrisburg International Airport, USA MAY 10 2011 General DeWitt Spain Airport, USA JUNE 6 2011 Firenze Amerigo Vespucci Airport, ITALY JUNE 12 2011 Eppley Airfield, USA AUGUST 29 2011 Teterboro Airport, USA SEPTEMBER 15 2011 Delhi International Airport Limited, INDIA OCTOBER 25 2011 Don Muang Airport, THAILAND OCTOBER 25 2011 Dublin Airport, IRELAND NOVEMBER 4 2011 Genoa Cristoforo Colombo Airport, ITALY NOVEMBER 6 2011 Bari Palese Airport, ITALY NOVEMBER 7 2011 Elba Island Airport, ITALY NOVEMBER 28 2011 Chennai Airport, INDIA MARCH 8 2012 Catania Fontanarossa Airport, ITALY AUGUST 13 2012 Canefield Airport, DOMINICA AUGUST 30 2012 New Orleans Lakefront Airport, USA SEPTEMBER 26 2012 Ronald Reagan Washinton National Airport, USA SEPTEMBER 29, 2012 Valencia Airport, SPAIN OCTOBER 29 2012 La Guardia Airport, New York USA John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) NOVEMBER 17 2012 Malaga Airport, SPAIN NOVEMBER 30, 2012 Sonoma Valley Airport, USA JANUARY 13 2013 Jakarta airport, INDONESIA The diagram lists airports that, according to international press sources, were temporarily Corona Municipal Airport, USA declared inoperative due to water damage – among them mayor airports across the world. JANUARY 9 2005 The diagram also gives an overview of the threat of sea level rise to airports. It distinguishes Malè International Airport, MALDIVES between the risk of flooding by tsunami, hurricane, rainstorm or river overflow. DECEMBER 26 2004 FLOODED AIRPORTS Bloomsburg Municipal Airport, USA Source data: Newspapers and magazines, 2004-2013. Diagram by L. Cipriani. FLOODED AIRPORTS RAINSTORM OVERFLOW HURRICANE TSUNAMI SEPTEMBER 19 2004 Recent empirical evidence and scientiic data suggest that climate change is happening with now irreversible dynamics. Numerous efects will have consequences for the territory, for cities and for infrastructure itself, not the least important being airports, considering the fundamental role air transport plays in today’s world. he airport of the future will necessarily be re-shaped and transformed in a changing climate. Airports are, in fact, highly vulnerable infrastructures requiring precise adaptation and mitigation strategies at various levels. Recurrent loods, rising seas, desertiication, land impoverishment and more generally extreme meteorological events can temporarily or permanently compromise mobility networks and spaces. Three Principal Issues Within this complex situation, three principal issues must be clariied. he irst concerns the uncertainty and variability of scientiic predictions on future climate change. We know that during the next few years and decades the sea level will rise, extreme events will become even more frequent and intense, and temperature changes, increased precipitation and drought cycles will afect various parts of the planet. Despite a widely shared awareness of the climate change underway, we do not know, however, when and with what intensity it will occur in the coming years. Moreover, the data currently available indicate that the dynamics of climate transformation are much more rapid than initially predicted. he second concern focuses on the fact that the efects of climate change are particularly insidious for transport infrastructure, which typically have a long life cycle. he life span of ports, bridges, roads, railways and airports usually vary from a minimum of 30 to a maximum of 200 years. Much of the infrastructure existing today or currently being designed will still be in use by 2030 or 2050 when climate change could have a much greater efect than at present. he third issue therefore concerns the degree of uncertainty that infrastructure in general must confront before, during and ater its life cycle; the focus here is on how to limit the economic, social and environmental damage. It has been calculated that the annual inancial losses deriving from extreme meteorological phenomena have increased appreciably from a few billion dollars in 1980 to about 200 billion in 2010. Flooded Airport Urbanism Design or re-design of the territory and infrastructure elements must therefore be redeined. In the foreseeable future, the disciplines of urban and landscape planning will become of central importance in the choices to be made regarding both new infrastructure sites and the adaptation of existing infrastructure to the changed environmental conditions, with “sot green measures” to be implemented alongside traditional engineering choices (“hard measures”). But if the climate will inevitably change the design process, what will the airport of the future be like? Can we imagine an airport infrastructure adaptable to the changing climate and landscape? Today many airports in the world are located along the coast or on plains at high risk from looding. Exceptional precipitation and loods, not to mention tornadoes, hurricanes and tsunamis, can all cause infrastructure to become partially or totally unusable. La Guardia at New York, Don Muang at Bangkok, Sendai in Japan and Brisbane in Australia are just some of the airports that had to be temporarily closed in recent years due to a range of extreme weather events. Historic records of meteorological events afecting New York show a string of hurricanes over the years hitting the city and the state, and already in the past making the airports of La Guardia and J. F. Kennedy inoperative. he administrative authorities of the regions regularly afected are almost always aware of the type and scale of potential risks for urbanised areas. But oten when extreme meteorological phenomena occur, there is a clear lack of coordination among the institutions and authorities involved. In many cases, the damage extends to the entire mobility network. Not just airports, but also underground and above-ground railways and roads are looded by water, with such circumstances causing various degrees of disruption and devastation. Exposure and Vulnerability hose most exposed to these phenomena are the infrastructure and populations of Southeast Asia, the archipelagos consisting of atolls, and the regions lining the Gulf of Mexico. But also countries such as the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Egypt, other regions of the United States, Papua New Guinea and Australia are afected by these events. As stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientiic forum formed in 1988 to study climate change, the seriousness of the impacts of extreme weather events depends greatly on exposure and vulnerability. Both man-made and natural risks are, in fact, interpreted as consequent to the stresses and pressures afecting a given area (dangerousness), the quantity and type of elements (presence of people, services, environmental resources, infrastructure, economic, social or cultural elements) potentially afected (exposure) and the propensity for damage of those elements (vulnerability). Given a similar event, diferent landscape systems may sufer widely diverging degrees of damage, according to the quantity and characteristics of the local elements exposed. Everything that is apparently unexpected can oten, in fact, be partially planned. he planners must therefore adopt a case-by-case strategy for the landscape, which will involve short, medium and long-term scenarios. 77 Floating Airport Urbanism Fertile Ground While, on one hand, water threatens the operation of airports in particular climate conditions, there is a small number of airports around the world that have been deined correctly or incorrectly as “loating airports”. Although they actually stand on artiicial islands, Kansai International Airport (at Osaka in Japan) and Hong Kong International Airport have become symbols of technological adaptation to nature. Some of these structures were initially designed as refuelling bases for transoceanic crossings, then converted into airports with the goal of distancing air traic movements from the mainland in order to reduce acoustic and environmental impacts. No genuine loating airports have yet been built, they have merely been studied by engineering science. Even so, the existing artiicial island structures have become emblematic of a new union between architecture, landscape and water. “Real” loating airports must not be imagined literally as a banal technical and technological solution, but rather viewed iguratively as a new way of interacting with the given circumstances of coastal regions. Defensive measures cannot be the only solution to oppose water, as sooner or later nature will get the better. We are currently witnessing a radical paradigm change in the way the subject is approached. Water is no longer seen as a threat to be protected against, instead it is viewed as an element that stimulates adaptation to living with it and on it, by “loating”. Although the overall picture of climatic/weather phenomena in an urban context is complex, and the various elements require study at regional scales, airport systems and structures can be brought into a framework of global strategies and precise adaptation measures on various scales. According to the deinition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in natural and “human” systems, adaptation is “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its efects, in order to moderate harm or exploit beneicial opportunities”. Adaptation (in terms of scale, usually involving regional and local circumstances) must not exclude mitigation, the latter being understood as an “anthropogenic intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.” Together they can signiicantly reduce the risks deriving from climate change. To prepare the territory and construct resilient infrastructure and cities largely means identifying suitable prevention measures on the various scales of action to help mitigate the efects deriving from the rigidity of urban and infrastructural systems. Short, medium and long-term scenarios and large-scale strategic planning are the irst necessary steps to the construction of resilient airports – a strategy that has to be combined with efective design tactics. In airports, for example, runways, terminal roofs, roads and large areas of hard standing prevent rainwater from percolating into the subsoil, also contributing to water pollution given the high concentrations of heavy metals, oil, grease and antifreeze liquid. In addition, rainwater runs of these impervious surfaces rapidly, looding pipes and canals, contributing to erosion and accumulating pollution as it lows. In response to this “runof ” problem, numerous architectural and landscape solutions have been developed to slow down the rate of low and absorb this excess water. Water management techniques compensate for peaks caused by the excessively impervious surfaces (runways, structures, car parks, etc.); they also increase eiciency and save water. Green roofs can improve permeability (which also reduces noise); bioswales or rain gardens can be used to collect rainwater in vegetated ditches in place of surface waterways or underground storm sewers. Settlement tanks or wetlands can be constructed upstream of the airport area if not inside the airport itself, where water bodies must be meticulously covered to avoid birdstrike with aircrat. Porous asphalt allows rainwater to percolate at least into the subsoil under the runways. In an era dominated by uncertainty about tomorrow and by a race towards real or presumed sustainability, infrastructure must be re-planned, not just to accommodate today’s technological functions or contingent needs, but also with a view to possible future recycling, generating a method for re-inventing the landscape, which may thereby become fertile ground for the unexpected. A Concept of Resilience Certain cities have always had to adapt to and live with water, giving rise to a genuine “loating urbanism”. Take for example an amphibious city such as Venice, certain cities in the Netherlands, the loating gardens of Myanmar, or numerous examples of pile dwellings from the Alps to the Padana Plain in Italy. here are also examples of loating airports built from the late 1970s, largely in East Asia and Southeast Asia – in Japan, apart from Kansai International, Chubu Centrair International, Kobe Kitakyushu and Tokyo Haneda International; in China, in addition to Hong Kong International, Macau International. hese structures seem to be an expression of the concept of resilience, at least in theory. Applied here to the urban context, resilience is a notion that has been borrowed from studies on how ecological systems react to stress and disturbance caused by external factors. Far from being truly resilient, the concept of loating airport can instead be used as a symbol to give space to water in urban structures. From an ecological point of view, C. S. Holling, one of the founders of ecological economics, was the irst to talk about the topic in 1973, suggesting that resilience is “the persistence of relationships within a system” and “the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist”. In other words, resilience is the ability of a system to sufer disturbance and maintain its functions and control. 78 A small number of airports have been defined as “floating airports”. They stand on artificial islands and have become symbols of a new union between architecture, landscape and water. Japan's Kansai International is a “floating airport”. It was designed as refuelling base for transoceanic crossings, then turned into an airport further removed from the city of Osaka. AIRPORTS ON ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS NAGASAKI AIRPORT RJFU IBRAHIM NASIR INTERNATIONAL VRMM KANSAI INTERNATIONAL RJBB MACAU INTERNATIONAL VMMC HONG KONG INTERNATIONAL VHHH VRMM CHUBU CENTRAIR INTERNATIONAL RJGG KOBE AIRPORT RJBE KITAKYUSHU AIRPORT RJFR RJGG TOKYO INTERNATIONAL HANEDA RJTT RJTT 0 0 5 5 15 Km 15 Km 2004 1981 1987 1995 1998 2005 2006 2006 1.54 km 2 1.80 km 2 10.62 km 2 1.14 km 2 12.29 km 2 5.80 km 2 2.80 km 2 3.73 km 2 1.50 km 2 2 637 000 passengers year 2004 2 600 000 passengers year 2011 13 857 000 passengers year 2010 5 000 000 passengers year 2006 53 314 213 passengers year 2011 9 060 000 passengers year 2011 2 215 000 passengers year 2011 3 000 000 passengers year 2007 64 211 074 passengers year 2010 N.A. N.A. 712 000 tons year 2010 220 000 tons year 2006 3 939 000 tons year 2011 151 000 tons year 2011 N.A. N.A. 818 806 tons year 2010 2010 offshore runway year 2011 year 2011 KANSAI KANSAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT CONSTRUCTION NUMBERS 21 000 000 CUBIC METERS OF LANDFILL 48 000 TETRAHEDRAL CONCRETE BLOCKS 80 SHIPS 10 000 10 000 000 WORKERS WORKED HOURS IN 3 YEARS 79