ABSTRACT
In this chapter I want to pick up on the title of the conference this collection is based upon: air ‘time-space’, for the reason that even while we see airports and airspaces as particularly fluid sites of transience, often the focus is directed towards the kinds of passenger mobility that flow, it seems, upon the surface of the airport’s geography (see, for instance, Adey (2004) and the ground-breaking work of Crang (2002), Hannam et al. (2006), Fuller and Harley (2004), Gottdiener (2000), Cresswell (2006), Salter (2007; 2008, forthcoming)). Rendered simple containers through which people and things pass through, space and time are removed to a kind of passive stage upon which the drama of the terminal plays out, as opposed to an active and animate terrain that constitutes and is composed of practice, performance and social life (see also Adey (2006b) for this critique). One of the ways we might think about this is as a cinematic movie. It is as if airports have been imagined like the blue screens used to make films, where computer graphics and special effects are added in later. Just in this way, the airport is pushed to a backdrop – rendered a blue screen to be shortly replaced by other temporal and spatial contexts.
