The airport policy of the last decades reveals a particular trend: the development of the so-called "inner city airports”, located very close to cities and often immersed in the urban environment.

These interchanges of global and local mobility have become major accelerators of proximity. The tendency to gigantism that distinguishes many airport hubs already demonstrated its limitation in the eighties with some observers predicting a future trend towards decentralization.

The competitiveness of small airports is principally based on two main factors: 1) the reduced time needed to reach the airport from the city (they have transformed the traditional "hub and spoke" air travelling into a system of "point to point" connections); 2) the cost factor: low-cost airlines turned the plane into a means of mass transportation, no longer for the exclusive use of an "elite". They transformed also small airports from marginal spots into supernodes. The network of small airports and the relationships flowing through them represent one of the key criteria to define areas, areas of influence and homogeneity of macro-regions and local identities in Europe.