A Review of Airport Concepts and their Applicability to the new Lisbon Airport Process

Abstract

Airports have been evolving since the 1930’s and currently they tend to present considerable dimensions and higher versatility, producing significant impacts both at local and regional levels. This paper aims to analyze several relevant aviation concepts that have emerged in the last decades, namely the Airport Region, the Airport City, the Airport Corridor, the Aerotropolis and the Airea, by assessing which concepts were well defined and were in practice implemented and which weren’t. From the developed analysis, it was concluded that some of the referred concepts are well documented, namely the Airport City and the Airport Corridor and some aren’t, namely the Airport Region, the Aerotropolis, and the Airea. Also, on a more local relation, the New Airport of Lisbon’s plans are compared with the same aviation concepts in the last fifty years, thus evaluating if the New Lisbon Airport (NLA) process was able to keep up with the modern aviation concepts. Two different degrees of coherence exist between these and the NLA planning process. Although in the 70s the NLA had a strong resemblance with the Airport Region, in the last two decades it was difficult to find a strong coherence between aviation concepts and the reviewed NLA’s planning and technical documents.