Air traffic has undergone significant changes since it became available to a wider population. The commercialisation of air travel, supported by reduced costs and technological development, increased the size of passenger terminals and the overall footprint of airports, driving urban and infrastructural transformation. At the same time, the life cycle of an airport is unpredictable, and many airports become obsolete as conditions change. According to Eurocontrol, 80% of European airports are now subject to territorial and environmental development constraints, as Laura Cipriani notes in Fragile airports. Fragile cities. Fragile landscapes. Moreover, many airports globally are facing challenges due to extreme meteorological events and rising sea levels.

This article examines cases of airport extensions and conversions following decommissioning. Case studies and literature suggest that a landscape approach to airport design was rarely considered in advance, despite its potential to support future transformation. The failure to think of airports as landscapes across their full life cycle has consequences for ecological, economic, and civic futures once the former infrastructure is repurposed.

Airport Urbanism

Michal Stangel, in Airport City — An Urban Design Question, states that airports “are no longer places where airplanes take off, land, and are serviced”. They have become hubs of cities and regions, where locality combines with globality, and where the transfer of people and goods in the global economy is concentrated. While earlier phases of globalisation were tied to maritime transport and later to railways, since the 1980s, globalisation has been closely linked to telecommunications and air transport. Airport infrastructure has evolved from simple sheds into vast intermodal complexes. Often surrounded by cargo logistics, business centres, car rental facilities, and hotels, airports extend their premises and develop into mixed-use environments branded as Aeropolis, Sky City, or Flight Forum.

However, airport cities operate primarily as satellites of aviation infrastructure, forming seemingly autonomous nodes rather than being embedded within the wider urban fabric and landscape. Laura Cipriani, in her Ecological Airport Urbanism, shows that new centralities and urban forms emerge from the local airport node, yet the effects of airport development extend far beyond its immediate boundaries. Cipriani expands spatial models of airport cities, airport corridors, and airport metropolises with the concept of “ecological airport urbanism”. By examining North Italian airports, their configurations, impacts, and the landscape transformations they catalyse, she proposes strategies, spatial positioning, and landscape devices to mitigate environmental impacts and potentially embed airport infrastructure within the landscape. This approach could, in turn, facilitate a smoother conversion to other uses should the airport cease to operate.

Decommissioning Strategies

With the proliferation of services and increasing operational demands, older airports may become obsolete due to higher standards, spatial constraints, and proximity to residential areas. Airports that are unable to adapt, become obsolete, leaving behind large, well-connected sites that are typically targeted for redevelopment according to prevailing economic and planning priorities. The lifecycle of an airport is estimated to be up to 50 years, and while the decommissioning is now often ingrained in the airport infrastructure design, which takes decades to realise, Cipriani urges to design and redesign airports with climate resilience in mind.

The strategies of reuse, as synthesised in Strategies for Reuse of Underutilized or Vacant Airport Facilities, include securing a replacement tenant, adaptive reuse, demolition, or leaving the site inactive. Adaptive reuse is generally favoured, as it minimises environmental impact by retaining existing structures. Where historical buildings and cultural heritage can be preserved, they may support new functions. Terminals, control towers, and runways lend these flat sites a distinct character and are frequently repurposed to host museums, educational programmes, tourism-related uses, or business activities.

From a landscape perspective, Sara Favargiotti identifies distinct typologies of conversion in Renewed Landscapes: Obsolete Airfields as Landscape Reserves for Adaptive Reuse. She describes airfields as landscape reserves, “owing to their capability to be turned back into landscape and to generate a new productive landscape”. Adaptive reuse, in this reading, may proceed through gradual natural processes, partial conversion, complete transformation, or deliberate suspension. However, the pressure to perform and generate revenue, particularly in highly serviced sites such as former airports, remains strong, as the case of Tempelhof Airport demonstrates.

Innovation and Resilience

In their article The Potential of Regenerated Airports, Nina Schwarz and Charleen von Kolpinski examine the development of “innovation ecosystems” as a means of increasing urban resilience, using Tempelhof and Tegel in Berlin as case studies. From an entrepreneurial perspective, an innovation ecosystem is defined as “the evolving set of actors, activities, and artefacts, and the institutions and relations that are important for the innovative performance of an actor or a population of actors”. Urban resilience, as defined by the City Resilience Index developed by ARUP, refers to the capacity of cities to survive, adapt, and grow in the face of unpredictable challenges. Schwarz and von Kolpinski argue that innovation ecosystems could develop at both Tempelhof and Tegel, enhancing urban resilience, particularly when combined with smart city frameworks. In their comparison, however, Tegel is assessed as ‘outsmarting’ Tempelhof: while Tempelhof is associated with “less profitable creative industries” and limited economic evolution, Tegel prioritises technology and knowledge production as drivers of an innovative environment.

We can observe two opposing tendencies acting upon decommissioned airports – redevelopment and “doing (almost) nothing”. While Tempelhof is a bottom-up, participatory-led space and socially engaging, generating value from a “cultural economy that resists complete commercialization” it lacks the innovation potential, according to Schwarz and von Kolpinski. On the other hand, Tegel airport, which changed from a military airport to a rocket launch area to commercial uses, is now being incorporated and transformed into ‘Urban Tech Republic’, a research and industrial park for urban technologies with a residential district. The landscape part of Tegel airfield will counterbalance the development. The reuse is led by Grün Berlin, as a meticulous operation to combine nature conservation, biodiversity and civic use. The resilience of social engagement has, for now, left Tempelhof undeveloped in terms of economic metrics. Its innovative potential lies in adaptive programming, and the openness of its structure to host numerous activities and ecologies, and the exchange of knowledge through co-use and experimentation.

The Middle Way

Returning to adaptive reuse, the former Maurice Rose Airfield illustrates a recycling strategy that treats existing structures as material and spatial resources, framing the site as a form of infrastructural archaeology. The design by GTL landschaftsarchitektur integrates the once military airfield with its surroundings by selectively demolishing hard surfaces and reusing the material in different granularities. This approach supports habitat formation and ecological succession, while retaining areas for recreation and social use enables new forms of exchange between the site and its context.

The former Johannisthal Airfield in Berlin now works solely as a Landscape park Johannisthal / Adlershof, designed by Büro Kiefer, and was opened in 1998. In the centre of the park, there is a landscape conservation area and a nature reserve, bound by a circular path, edged with gabions. On the offset, there is a green belt, diversified by uses and plantings, creating landscaped chambers. Due to extreme site conditions, low water storage capacity of the soil and high surface temperatures, the park is also a lesson on maintenance adaptation, while airport hangars and other structures await repurposing.

Complete Restructuring

Phase Shift Park by Mosbach Paysagistes, is an example of a converted airfield without any reference to its former use. To the contrary, the design uses a completely opposite language – incorporating undulating topography, soft foldings, meandering water and intersecting ribbon paths. The surfaces are porous, ambients intimate, inviting users to previously inaccessible quarters. The park uses the notion of “smart” in a different way than prescribed by a technological innovation ecosystem. Phase Shift Park is surrounded by a wastewater treatment center and is autonomous in energy production through installed photovoltaic panels. The educational component is guided through the maintenance centre, and the visitor center performs cultural programming, focused on issues concerning the planet Earth.

In Conclusion

Parque Bicentenario in Quito provides a critical counterpoint to the preceding cases. As analysed by Antonio José Salvador in Parque Bicentenario. A large void in the construction of the Urban Project, the project poses the challenges of transforming a decommissioned airport into a Large Urban Project (LUP). By scale and ambition, the Park held the potential to operate as a metropolitan ecological and civic structure, aligning with principles of ecological airport urbanism. Although the project succeeded in delivering an open and accessible public space, Salvador argues, it failed to mobilise the wider urban and ecological potential of the site, particularly in relation to surrounding lower-income neighbourhoods.

In this sense, Parque Bicentenario demonstrates how revitalised airports can remain spatially generous yet structurally underperforming when landscape is treated as an outcome rather than a framework. The project occupies an uneasy middle ground: formally realised, yet strategically unresolved. Salvador questions “the capability of the city and its citizens to implement a project of this scale administratively, financially, and socially”. Even if critical of the process and decision-making, Salvador nevertheless admits that the current unique spatial qualities of this former airport, panoramic vistas and open-ended programming contribute to a sort of self-reconciliation.

Taken together, the cases in this article suggest that the transformation of airports into parks cannot be addressed solely through “post-hoc” design strategies. The failure to design airports as landscapes across their full life cycle limits their capacity to absorb change once aviation ceases. If landscape continues to be introduced only after decommissioning, it can remain a system on-hold, shaped by external economic and political pressures. Treating landscape as a primary system, capable of structuring ecological processes, governance models, and long-term public use, offers a more robust framework for negotiating the uncertain afterlife of any large urban project.