“Flying high (in the competitive sky): conceptualizing the role of airports in global city-regions through ‘aero-regionalism’”

This chapter introduces the concept of aero-regionalism to explore the relationality/territoriality dialectic and mechanisms of state territorialization at the nexus of globalization, air transport, and city-regionalism. It provides a relational geographic analysis of the impact of local institutional arrangements on the political and infrastructural integration of Chicago O’Hare Airport. Air transportation holds a privileged position in studies of global city formation, development, and connectivity. Chicago’s aviation governance regime proved extremely effective for the City in marshaling the demands for the collective provision of regional air infrastructure. By embedding the territoriality and modalities of urban politics engendered by airports within broader processes of city-regionalism, aero-regionalism not only reveals the complexity of unstable and evolving regional governance processes, but discloses how the political and morphological dimensions of global city-regions are structured through a contested politics of mobility. The ‘global’, so often the abstract spatial imaginary appealed to in airport discourses, is clearly embedded within a complex, on-going, locally-contingent negotiation of scale.