Aeromobilities

Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring, John Urry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134059324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Aeromobilities is a collection of essays that tackle in many different ways the growing importance of aviation and air travel in our hypermobile, globalized world. Providing a multidisciplinary focus on issues ranging from global airports to the production of airspace, from airline work to helicopters, and from movement in airports to software systems, Aeromobilities seeks to enhance our understanding of space, time and mobility in the age of mass air travel. From Sao Paulo to Sydney, Aeromobilities draws on local experiences of airspaces to generate theory and research that are global in scope. It is the first book of its kind, bringing together a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches to aviation and air travel in the social sciences and humanities, while emphasizing the central role of aeromobilities in contemporary social relations. In a world where virtually every aspect of social life is touched upon, in one way or another, by the complex global network of airline flows, with its large passenger aircraft and iconic international airports, Aeromobilities provides innovative analyses of some of the most fundamental and influential mobility networks of our time.

Part I
Aeromobilities, globalization and social theory

1 Aeromobilities and the global

John Urry

Today my favourite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmosphere … Airplaces and airports have my favourite kind of food service, my favourite kind of bathrooms, my favourite peppermint Life Savers, my favourite kinds of entertainment, my favourite loudspeaker address systems, my favourite conveyor belts, my favourite graphics and colors, the best security checks, the best views, the best perfume shops, the best employees, and the best optimism.

(Andy Warhol 1976: 145)

Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency—the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars.

(Walter Kirn 2001: 5)

Introduction

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.

In this chapter I consider this possible counterfactual and examine the emergence of air travel and especially air systems. It is shown how they are central to the making of the new global dis/order. It is also shown that, not only do passengers increasingly fly across borders, forming new social time-distantiated social networks but the systems that make possible their travel also fly around and land in many towns and cities that become subject to ‘airspace makeover’. Air travel, although still the practice of a very small minority of the world’s population in any one year, is shown to be implicated in the global remaking of places and the contingent securing of mobile populations in a world of global riskiness.

Flying commenced at the very beginning of the twentieth century with the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903. It symbolically culminated at the end of that century with September 11 2001, when planes functioned as central ‘actants’ in a deadly network of spectacular globally watched destruction.¹ Air travel went from small beginnings on a sand dune in North Carolina to become the industry that stands for and represents the new global order. The history of flying is a remarkable history of various ingenious ways of transcending two-dimensional spatial constraints. It now produces an exceptional sorting and resorting of populations and places, both within countries but especially around the world. Geographical proximity in most countries no longer shapes social relationships (Castells 2001: 126), and this is in part because some people, sometimes rapidly, fly from, over and past such spatial proximities, forming new time-distantiated proximities in so doing.

In the next section I set out a brief periodization of flying and especially of airfields. Following this I examine some of the risks and systems that make possible the extraordinary achievement of ‘flying’ in massive machines through the air. I turn then to ten global lines of flight, before providing a brief conclusion (for further detail on much of this, see Urry (2007: chap. 7), and the various chapters in this volume).

A brief periodization

Aircraft are nothing without airspaces, and airspaces are nothing without ‘the impeccable machine making use of its splendid expanses’ (Pascoe 2001: 21). They are indissolubly linked, in a complex relationality with each other (see Adey (2006: 87–8)). And the history of flight has been the history of massive transformations in the ‘splendid expanses’ of such airspaces, of fields, runways and terminals over the twentieth century. Airspaces shift from airfield, to transport hub, and then to global hub (see Kesselring, this volume, Chapter 2).

First, early airfields in the beginning of the twentieth century were places of spectacle, record making and voyeurship. There were frequent crashes and risks for those flying and for those watching on the ground (Pascoe 2001: chap. 1; Perrow 1999: chap. 5). Initially, various inventors developed individual flying machines, machines often setting new records, akin to how cars developed as individual speed machines (Urry 2007: chap. 6). These new flying machines were astonishingly clever in leaving the airfield for short periods, so transcending the physical two-dimensional limits of land-based movement. According to Le Corbusier, aircraft were the greatest sign of progress that had so far been seen during the twentieth century, although at first the airfields did nothing to reflect this modernity (Pascoe 2001: 127). Simultaneously, flying machines transformed the nature of warfare as the new realm of airpower developed, including especially the innovation of machines that were able to bomb from the air (Pascoe 2001: 127; Kaplan 2006). But for all this there was nothing inevitable about this development of air travel. As late as the end of World War I, the Manchester Guardian authoritatively stated that aviation was a ‘passing fad that would never catch on’ (quoted in Thomas (2002: 3)).

However, the airfield stage had already been initiated by 1914 with the first ever commercial flight. Passengers paid $5 to fly for eight miles with the St Petersburg—Tampa Airboat Line in the US (Morrison and Winston 1995: 3), while the first international scheduled services took place in 1919 from Hounslow in west London, close to where Heathrow is now located (Pascoe 2001: 81). Early airports were oriented around the flying machines. They were mono-modal and concerned with transporting people and goods from one place to another by air. Aviation-related activities defined the meaning of these airspaces, with other activities playing a minor role. There was more or less nothing of the contemporary ‘terminal’ and its multiple buildings and complex intersecting activities (see Fuller (Chapter 3) and Harley (Chapter 7), both this volume).

In the second period, airports developed into transport hubs with the increasing interconnection between different modes of travel (planes, trains, metro and cars). Le Corbusier especially promoted the airport as a machine for travellers rather than as a field that is oriented to the plane (Pascoe 2001: 120–1). This quantum leap involved airspaces being turned into complex and integrated infrastructures, often with a futuristic design (Jarach 2001: 121). The airport was no longer isolated and specialised but developed into a multimodal hub so that passengers: ‘are given within airport boundaries the chance to connect in a seamless way from air to ground, railway and sea ferry’ (Jarach 2001: 121). However, the core business of such airspaces still involved managing the complex logistic services involved in the boarding and the deboarding of people and objects; increasingly these processes were governed by the concept of ‘turnaround’ time and the need for systems to minimize such time (Pascoe 2001: 125; Peters (Chapter 8), this volume). Such multimodal hubs were typically owned by public bodies, and there was a close relationship between those publicly owned airports and national carriers that were also often owned by the state. Such airports and airlines often arose out of military facilities in the era of ‘organized capitalism’ in which national transport interests and their intermodalities were planned and implemented by the national state (see Lash and Urry (1987), on such ‘organized capitalism’).

The third stage involves the further quantum leap from the traditional to the ‘commercial airport’, or what I would term the global hub (Jarach 2001: 123; see Kesselring (Chapter 2), this volume). Airports move away from being mainly transport hubs and become sites for mass travel. Airports are increasingly built on the edge of cities, as places or camps of banishment (Serres 1995: 19). They develop into small-scale global cities in their own right, places to meet and do business, to sustain family life and friendship, and to act as a site for liminal consumption less constrained by prescribed household income and expenditure patterns. Such airports are variably organized: through vertical public management (such as Munich), horizontal public management (such as Manchester), private—public management (such as Düsseldorf) and private corporation (such as Heathrow). But in all cases airports develop as strategically important within the global competition of places, cities and regions (see Kesselring (Chapter 2), this volume). Certain airport operators such as the Schiphol Group in the Netherlands, Fraport in Germany or BAA in the UK operate on a global scale, establishing and managing new airports and sets of airport services around the world.

Airspaces in this third period are full of commercial and tourist services for passengers, visitors and the thousands of employees. These services include bars, cafés, restaurants, and hotels, business centres, chapels and churches, shopping centres, discotheques (Munich, Frankfurt), massage centres (Changi), conference centres (Munich), art galleries (Schiphol), gyms (Los Angeles) and casinos (Schiphol). Also, there are many instant offices and airport hotels, allowing travellers to arrive, stay over, do their ‘business’ face to face and depart, especially as many airports are now organized on the hub-and-spoke model (Doyle and Nathan 2001). Airspaces are thus places of ‘meetingness’ that transforms them into strategic moments in constructing a global order. They develop into ‘destinations’ in their own right, ambivalent places, of multiple forms of transport, commerce, entertainment, experience, meetings and events. Such airspaces provide multiple sites for developing and sustaining what Knorr Cetina describes as ‘global microstructures’ (2005).

Risks and systems

Central to all air travel is risk. Large technical systems such as airports and the global aviation industry are sites of riskiness, and this has been so since early planes ventured into the sky a century ago. Flight is risky for those flying, for those organizing and managing those flights, and for those on the ground as viewers or innocent bystanders. The riskiness of air travel is of course the stuff of novels and movies, such as Arthur Hailey’s Airport or Michael Crichton’s Airframe, which have explored many of the possible risks in prescient detail. A wide array of software-based ‘expert systems’ have been developed to deal with this riskiness and contingency of air travel. These have remarkably transformed the hazards and physicality of taking off, cruising and landing. Various non-human actants and, especially, much computer code are combined with rule-following humans to enable this wonder of relatively safe mass air travel. Air traffic control systems effect high levels of safe take-offs and landings, while the Boeing 777 contains some seventy-nine different computer systems requiring 4 million lines of code (Dodge and Kitchin 2004: 201; Kitchin and Dodge (Chapter 5), this volume). Indeed if, as Thrift and French argue, software conditions existence in the city, this is so in a deeper and more extensive form within airspaces (2002; Adey and Bevan 2006). There is no airspace and there are no smoothly flying citizens without vast amounts of computer code. There has been the development of pervasive, consistent and routinized ‘code/space’ producing the ‘real virtuality of air travel’ (Dodge and Kitchin 2004). In these various code/spaces, the code is so significant that without code the space fails. There is no alternative to the code, even though it typically remains in the background and unnoticed until, of course, the systems crash (Adey 2006: 80). The airline passenger ticket is the material embodiment of such code/space, on which are printed several data codes that describe what the passenger is doing but also simulate and predict other actions each passenger may undertake (Kitchin and Dodge (Chapter 5), this volume).

The extremely complex management of multiple movements at airports involves various expert systems. These computer software systems, which have developed in a piecemeal way, are intended to orchestrate take-offs, landings, ticketing and reservations, baggage handling, schedules, cleaning, weather forecasting, in-flight catering, security, multiple employment patterns, baggage X-ray, waste management, environmental impact and so on (there are twelve such systems at Schiphol (Peters 2006: 115)).

Such systems have built into them risk assessments of events such as delayed flights, sick crew, damaged planes, adverse weather, computer crashes, terrorist bombings and so on. The central resources involved in managing airflights are time, money and capacity. Peters shows how continuous modifications and adjustments are made between these different resources in order to keep the system moving and especially to get the planes ‘airborne on time’ (Peters 2006: 122–4). Indeed, in the third period air travel has developed into a globally competitive industry (or set of industries) since the previously organized capitalism with protected national flag carriers has mostly dissolved. Through so-called ‘open skies’ policies, there is enhanced global competition, there is ‘disorganized capitalism’ (Lash and Urry 1987, 1994). This engenders a massive push to minimize the turnaround time of planes and of their crews. Many interrelated events must be synchronized so as to minimize the periods in which planes and the crew rest...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introducing aeromobilities
• PART I Aeromobilities, globalization and social theory
• PART II The production of airspaces
• PART III The social life of air travel
• PART IV Governing air travel