The form of urbanisation has fundamentally changed in recent ears. In particular between the airport and the city of Graz, and in the airport environment, which is predominantly used by trade and industry, a complex spatial organisation has developed mostly as a result of logical, economic and political decisions. This functionalisation of the space in the environment of the airport has given rise to a recognisable spatial pattern with specific features which can be easily distinguished from other structures on the outskirts and which is duly triggering a new hierarchy of spatial organisation. There is thus a special motivation to transform this spatial complexity in the environment of the airport into a sustainably integrated spatial development for city, region and neighbouring communities ¿ into SmartAIRea.
The dynamically growing environment of the airport is an ideal and innovative test bed for intelligent, cross-linked and integrated solutions where sustainability demands can be tried out under such multifactorial conditions and implemented as an example throughout Europe, where 42% of the 460 airports will have to face potential shut down due to regulatory change. The objective is to integrate the airport and its environment not only through ecological, economic and technological synergy and cross-linking, but also by generating an innovative spatial quality which provides creative sustainability, thus yielding potential for further urban and regional development. This process needs change and the change, in turn, is reliant on concepts which generate and combine these smart systems, solutions and methods. So far, the focus on the interaction between airport and city has been aimed at metropolitan areas in the European region, where transformational processes become visible very fast. These investigations have up to now taken on more of an inventory approach to the spatial changes between airport and city and serve as a helpful point of departure for further assumptions.
The Graz Airport environment thus offers an ideal possibility to embed thematic principles such as building and spatial organisation, sustainable development and energy supply, quality of life, noise reduction, economic balance and good governance in the planning process and to test them out for the first time. The airport environment is thus transformed into a transparent, interconnected, controllable and resilient location ¿ into SmartAIRea, where the term creative sustainability, which properly belongs to a people-oriented space, is at centre stage.
Through the results and findings of the exploration and through the developed scenarios and analyses, the environment of the airport will be tested out, observed, further developed and evaluated using target indicators. Furthermore, the interweaving of the various infrastructural levels demonstrates an added value as against single systems or single solutions. The effects of the airport location on urban development, which have up to now been insufficiently recorded, can count as an additional criterion for the underlying decisions of regional development. SmartAIRea can thus give a future-oriented answer to burning questions of sustainable urban development.
