You’re Surrounded! Measuring the Enclosure of Airports in Urban Areas

Airport location is a well-known planning issue that can have a significant impact on a city’s accessibility, economy, noise pollution, and residents’ well-being. In this article, we leverage existing open-source geoinformation and geographical information system (GIS) software to compute statistical indicators that allow us to characterize worldwide the extent to which airports are enclosed in their surrounding urban environment, considering both human overcrowding and actual land use around airports. A so-called enclosure index is developed based on the number of residents and their distance from the airport. A significant number of airports face a high enclosure index, but no clear relationships with air traffic volumes are found. This study also investigates actual land use around airports through a principal component analysis, which unveils interesting contrasts across airports’ surroundings and suggests that, on average, airports with more traffic tend to be located close to—or within—densely built districts. All the original materials produced for this research, including the indicators, the computational code, and the visualization of the context of airports globally through atlas, are provided in open access for future research on the topic.