ABSTRACT
Airports are fascinating places, but as objects of social-scientific mobility research they are almost entirely uncharted territory. This strikes us as all the more surprising as international airports, the transfer points of international air travel, play a fundamental role in the globalization of society and the economy (Urry 2007: 154 ff.). The French spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre saw this as early as the 1970s. He speaks of the ‘geopolitics of air travel’ (Lefebvre 2000: 365) and points up the structuralizing influence of global spatial mobility. The idea that transcontinental air travel networks and airport transfer points reflected a new global spatial matrix occurred to more prescient observers in the aircraft and airline industries early on:
The marketing experts at Lockheed may have been thinking [when they christened their new airliner Super Constellation] . . . of a network of air travel routes that, like a heavenly constellation, spanned the earth and thus defined a unique space of their own. Thus it is a product name that also denotes how air travel functions to create new constellations.
