ABSTRACT
Like roads and harbours, airports are often addressed ontologically and analytically as a surface or functional backdrop for the development of places. In Greenland, two new international airports are set to open in 2023 and 2024, thus unsettling the continuous running of the current transatlantic airport of Kangerlussuaq. While political and business discourse proclaim this massive infrastructure investment a ‘game changer’ for Greenland, much hope and many fears are vested in the project. Experimenting with personal memories and ethnographic field material, this essay attempts to stitch together ways of thinking about emergent and withering airports materialities. Far from seeing ‘the airport’ as a mere outcome of rational (or in the eyes of opponents, irrational) planning activities, we explore the imagining, prospecting, maintaining and coming-undone of airports as connected to passion-enacting practices that generate – or cut – territorial attachments.
