"An aerotropolis is an urban plan in which the layout, infrastructure, and economy is centered around an airport, existing as an airport city. It is similar in form and function to a traditional metropolis, which contains a central city core and its commuter-linked suburbs. The term was first proposed by New York commercial artist Nicholas DeSantis, whose drawing of a skyscraper rooftop airport in the city was presented in the November 1939 issue of Popular Science. The term was revived and substantially extended by academic and air commerce expert Dr. John D. Kasarda in 2000, based on his prior research on airport-driven economic development." –– Wikipedia
whereonearth-aerotropolis is a subset of the Natural Earth urban
areas
dataset. It is the list of urban areas that contain one or more
airports. Those airports are then used to name the urban areas that contain
them. For example given the following airports:
urbanarea_id,iata_code,gps_code,airport_name
2541,SFO,KSFO,San Francisco Int'l
2541,SJC,KSJC,San Jose Int'l
2541,OAK,KOAK,Oakland Int'l
...
4818,LGA,KLGA,LaGuardia
4818,JFK,KJFK,John F Kennedy Int'l
Urban area #4818 would be named JFK-LGA and urban area #2541 would be OAK-SFO-SJC, assuming that 3-letter airport codes are used
instead of 4-letter codes. It's sort of academic as one can serve as an exonym
for the other; likewise with nearby cities for each airport. Either way, all the
airport codes contained by an urban area are sorted alphabetically and then
hyphenated.
Natural Earth data contains 891 airports. The whereonearth-airports dataset contains 16079 airports in total and 1128 airports with matching IATA codes (many of which overlap with NE). It's not that the other 15, 000 airports don't have IATA codes (although some don't) but rather that I haven't completed the mapping.
Natural Earth airports take precedence when naming urban areas. For example, the
name of urban area #2541 is OAK-SFO-SJC rather than
HWD-JCE-NUQ-OAK-PAO-SFO-SJC-SQL (which is the set of airports defined in WOE
and contained by that urban area).
As of this writing there are 974 aerotropolii.
Each new "aerotropolis" has been assigned a (64-bit) WOE ID using an artisanal integer provider and will eventually be assigned a WOE hierarchy (region, country, etc.).
As of this writing there are draft quality (ESRI) shapefiles in the data
directory. There are also (sometimes incomplete) reference CSV files for
aerotropolii and airports in the reference directory.
Sample images can be seen at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/straup/tags/aerotropolis/
This is totally a work in progress. Objects will shift in transit.