Smart City Workshop Models the Airport City
December 19, 2024
At the recent Future Airport and Aerotropolis City Design symposium, organized the School of City and Regional Planning and the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL), collaborative student teams presented digital models and design concepts for the future of Atlanta's main airport.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has 300,000 people coming in and out, every day, said Perry Yang, professor in the School and one of the instructors of the Smart City course. "It's like a city on its own."
Citing examples in Amsterdam, London, and Singapore, Yang said more international airports are acting as global city hubs.
"It's not possible to have one entity or one group deal with that," said Michael Balchanos, senior research engineer in the ADSL and another instructor in Smart City course. "Our group has been acting as systems architects or integrators, but we couldn't do anything without the actual subject matter experts, which is urban planning and architects."
"We needed a collaboration nexus to bring in these experts."
To that end, the Smart City course and associated workshop bring together multidisciplinary teams of students to generate ideas and digital engineering solutions for Atlanta's airport city. At this year's workshop, the fifth, students representing three schools in the College of Design — the School of City and Regional Planning, the School of Architecture, and the School of Building Construction — joined students from Aerospace Engineering to present their research to industry and government affiliates.
"This is a little bit unprecedented in the university to break down the academic barriers and stovepipes and create a community that cuts across campus," said Dimitri Mavris, Regents' Professor, ADSL director, and the final instructor of the course. "This is one of many such activities Georgia Tech is pushing."
Co-organizing the event were the Aerotropolis Atlanta Alliance, a public-private partnership seeking to improve prosperity in Atlanta's airport city, and the airport itself.
Want To Know More?
