2 Passports and the airport

The globalisation we've seen over the past five decades has led to a huge increase in mobility, rapid growth in the movement of both people and things. The airport is an icon of this global mobility, but it presents a problem. Mobility can be desirable. Airports are gateways for tourists, travellers, and imported goods. But mobility can also be undesirable, opening the door to criminals, terrorists, controlled substances, and diseases.

Security and surveillance are therefore essential to monitor movement at airports. Indeed, airports have become the modern frontier towns that control access to the very core of the nation state. Today's airport can be thought of as being in a ceaseless state of emergency, constantly organising for potential catastrophe. Emergency teams rehearse procedures for a range of disaster scenarios.

Passengers are subjected to ever more intimate searches, each one treated as a potential terrorist. Surveillance is therefore used to control not only mobility, but also threat. The airport is one of the most surveilled spaces in modern life with its security cameras, scanners, metal detectors, overt and covert security personnel, and checkpoints.

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The passport is central to controlling security and mobility within the airport. Without one it's impossible to pass key gateways and choke points, check in, going airside, boarding the plane, and so on. Within the airport, conduct is also closely monitored. The movement of people and things is controlled in flows, which are kept to designated spaces.

Different choke points and sorting processes govern the flow of planes, baggage, passengers, crew, and vehicles. This is made possible by artefacts, signs that are internationally recognisable. It's assumed that people are unfamiliar with the geography of a particular airport, but the signage is an interface that directs them to their temporary destinations. It manages what would otherwise be a cacophony of movement, sorting people, designating routes, creating decision points, and generally regulating the conduct of passengers.

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The airport is home to contrasting forms of attachment. Airports exist at specific locations, but are also unattached to these locations. Many people pass through airports like Amsterdam or Chicago without ever experiencing the place itself, yet the generic place called airport with its shopping malls, bars, cafes, and waiting areas is entirely familiar to most travellers. It's as if we have become pre-attached to the landscape of the airport. How does the simultaneous process of attachment and unattachment come about?

The airport is therefore structured and designed for different and disparate forms of attachment. It has built-in technologies of security and fear, at the same time is providing comforting spaces of pleasure and consumption. Within a few short steps, you can be subjected to a body search and then be given a free sample of perfume. Behaviour is monitored to an extreme, even specific words are prohibited like bomb or gun. But all this happens in the context of a familiar mall-like setting.

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Disparate systems can meet each other here and co-exist. High-speed jet routes intersect with slow urban motorways. To quote sociologists Fuller and Harley, airports mix multiple forms of life, matter, and information into a series of new and constantly changing relations between bodies and the sky, between local landscapes and global capital.