My best advice is for you to study the cases of Japan and US.  They locate airports outside the central urban areas and still can gather people to go to these places.  

Well, you can identify the impacts brought by the airport by looking from the perspective of sustainability: economy, social, and environment.

In terms of economic and social, you may examine whether there is any impact on the local employment, business opportunity, infrastructure development etc. In terms of environmental, you may need to know whether the existence of the airport will cause air pollution, noise pollution, degradation of the surrounding ecosystem etc.

Hope that the following document are of useful to you:

I am in a 3 - year COST Project related to the same topic ATARD; Air Transport and Regonal Development; Project no 1408. you can follow something on website www.cost.eu. At least you can read MOU.     

Hello. I think that the next links could be useful for your investigation:

http://www.edrgroup.com/pdf/airport-econ-ptrc.pdf

http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL33949.pdf

http://www.aef.org.uk/uploads/PlanningGuide2.pdf

http://web.mit.edu/aeroastro/partner/reports/congrept_aviation_envirn.pdf

http://www.erieco.gov/DocumentCenter/Home/View/182

Best Regards!

I think the business of running an airport is like an industry. A lot of employment opportunities will be created as well as service industry activities. The socioeconomic benefits can be high provided the environmental consequences are carefully thought about and mitigated. 

One of your earliest tasks will be to understand the different kinds of airports and modes with which people interact with their airport.  For example:

- some airports are far from the cities they serve - Montreal Mirabel, Damman King Fahd and Kuala Lumpur International Airport.  These airports don't add much direct economic opportunity to the city, but may allow some industry to build up around it.

- some airports are very well connected to the cities they serve - Atlanta, Frankfurt.

- Some airports are very small but well integrated (Rotterdam, Toronto Island) while others are in the middle of the city (e.g. Dubai). 

Each of these offers different economic stimuli that may or may not be a benefit to the community.

It depends of the data available. If in your case there is remote sensing data followed by ulterior classification (see Corine Land-cover project) I would say it is one of the best ways to achieve it. You can also use socioeconomic data from the censuses.

Then, you should look to the spatial planning of the airport because the development of the areas have great chance to have been planned in connection with the airport. If it is not the case, you could identify at least the economic activity of the areas and based on literature establish a relation with the airport. Consultancy, small manufacturers, fresh products, hotels, for example, are typical companies placed near an airport.

Hope I could helped you

Cheers

The answer is simple: hedonics. Here is an example which handles airports across different land use types:  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4889389_The_Structure_of_Urban_Land_Prices

Article The Structure of Urban Land Prices,

In addition to hedonics, you may also consider a difference in differences approach.  (Subject area before airport - subject area after airport) compare to (control area before- control area after).  This method is often used in contamination research because it effectively captures time and economic differences if the control is good.

You can establish a simple land use impact model (for instance bases on a "old-fashioned" gravity model), "calibrate" it on one or two existing airport locations, and use it for an analysis for a new airport location. Factors which can be included in the model may vary, from number of households, household incomes, property values, highway traffic volumes, number of employees, what have you.

Let me try again. It is not clear what constitutes an observation and how many observations are needed to establish a relationship. Do you need many properties at various distances from just one airport? Alternatively, do you need many airports and properties around each of these airports? Consider the latter requirement. This would be like borrowing event studies from finance and hedonic analysis from economics. A combination of an event study and hedonics is found in the following: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227638888_The_Effect_of_Group_Homes_on_Neighborhood_Property_Values

Article The Effect of Group Homes on Neighborhood Property Values

The development of areas around airports depends a lot of information’s, like developed or undeveloped country, size of the city, land-use planning. A starting point could be a comparison of satellite images before and after, as we can see the development in satellite image of the airport of São Paulo, Brazil. If you have enough time and can collect a lot of information, e.g. employment, salary, land values, construction types, etc. before and after the construction and development of an airport in a timeline of may be 5 to 50 years, you will identify any impact you want. The ideas of Professor Spencer (differences indifferences approach) and Professor Peter (hedonic analysis) you may consider first.

Let me try again. At first I though your case was about establishing a new airport. But even in studies of an existing airport, you may use an analytic model as mentioned. You can set up a linear equation including the factors mentioned earlier, as a kind of transport generation model. The most robust analysis will be a sort of multiple stepwise regression analysis, combining linear and non-linear elements, making sure to include the number of air passengers, or airplane movements. By manipulating  air traffic volume you may by multiple runs see the changes in the other socio-economic variables, such as aggregate house rent, aggregate house values, disposible income, aggregate retail sales, and so forth. You may do a model calibration by running analyses on data from several airports and the surrounding impact area.

This is somewhat along the lines of Andreas.