ABSTRACT

Monumental terminals of glass and steel designed by celebrity architects, gigantic planes, contested runway developments, flights massively cheaper than surface travel, new systems of ‘security’ – these are icons of the new global order. They are points of entry into a world of apparent hypermobility, timespace compression and distantiation, and the contested placing of people, cities and whole societies upon the global map. There are many ways in which flights, aeroplanes, airports and airport cities are central to an emergent global order. Without the rapid development of the complex extended systems of mass air travel, ‘globalization’ would be utterly different, indeed possibly it would simply never have developed in anything like the present, high-carbon form.