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.

机场选址是一个众所周知的规划问题，可以对城市的可达性、经济、噪音污染和居民福祉产生重大影响。在本文中，我们利用现有的开源地理信息和地理信息系统 (GIS) 软件来计算统计指标，使我们能够在全球范围内描述机场在其周围城市环境中的封闭程度，同时考虑到人类过度拥挤和实际土地使用机场周围。所谓的圈地指数是根据居民人数及其与机场的距离制定的。相当多的机场面临着高封闭指数，但没有发现与空中交通量的明确关系。本研究还通过主成分分析调查了机场周围的实际土地利用情况，这揭示了机场周围环境之间有趣的对比，并表明，平均而言，交通流量较大的机场往往位于人口稠密的地区附近或内部。为这项研究制作的所有原始材料，包括指标、计算代码和通过地图集对全球机场环境的可视化，都以开放获取的方式提供，以供未来对该主题的研究。