Did Singapore plagiarise an airport?

If the accusation had been about a train station or shopping mall, it would not have made much of a fuss. Airports, though, are no longer mere transit nodes. Over the past few decades, countries throughout Asia and the Middle East have come to see them as tools for advancing their ambitions and expressing their national self-conceptions. In short order, they have become audacious sources of soft power.

It is a long way from the early days of aviation, when a runway, a shed and a windsock were enough to qualify as an “airport”. But even by the 1930s, cities were beginning to realise that their humble airfields had powerful symbolic potential. In 1940, New York opened LaGuardia Airport’s still-in-use art deco Marine Air Terminal, with a huge mural depicting humanity’s quest to fly — a quest that not incidentally culminated on the East River. Fifteen years later, the TWA Flight Center, a sleek modernist masterpiece, opened at what is now John F Kennedy Airport.

But the real boom began a few decades later. In the 1990s, the aviation business started a long-term shift towards Asia and other emerging economies, necessitating a lot of new air hubs. At the same time, China was hoping to build statement airports commensurate with its emerging superpower status. Just as important, smaller countries such as Qatar saw that their geography offered an opportunity to grow in parallel with China’s rise by serving as transfer hubs.

That turned out to be both good business and good politics. In 2018, sales at Dubai Duty Free, which operates shops at the city’s two international hubs, exceeded US$2 billion, most of which came from passengers who were simply transiting between continents. Those sales were not just about profits. They also served as a kind of calling card for Dubai, which advertises itself as a “consumer’s paradise”. It is a potent message designed to persuade even the most transitory visitors that the city is open for business and embraces the ethos of globalism.

Other countries have tried to convey more complex messages. Changi Airport, for example, was designed to convey passengers from their gates, through immigration and customs, and into the city — via excellent public transit — as quickly as possible. In the process, Singapore expressed the competence and inventiveness that have transformed it from a backwater to one of the world’s financial capitals in a matter of decades. It also helped Changi retain its reputation as one of the world’s top-rated airports.

But with competition heating up, especially from the Middle East, Singapore felt the need for something more. Earlier this year, it opened the US$1.25 billion ($1.7 billion) Jewel Changi Airport, a nature-themed mall and entertainment complex, outfitted with the world’s largest indoor waterfall and a high-altitude tropical forest. The complex was an instant hit with global media and with visitors — it will enjoy record passenger numbers in 2019 — many of whom came just to see the airport. For Singapore, it was an unabashed triumph, conveying the country’s commitment to balancing economic growth with environmental stewardship.

That is the kind of soft power that any government would covet nowadays, and it is especially valuable to emerging countries that need to aggressively market themselves to visitors and investors. So, perhaps it is inevitable that Qatar would try to claim some credit. But the accusations of plagiarism merely highlighted how far Qatar lags behind Singapore in the metrics that now matter most. In the 21st century, people want to connect across continents as never before — and to do so in style. — Bloomberg LP