Overview

This text outlines the distinctive shapes of the physical and social infrastructure of the airport. It is a sustained attempt to consider the airport both as a place and as a cultural icon of the late 20th century, combining informal anecdote and speculation with discussions of contemporary cultural theory, architecture, social history, film, and literary criticism. While it is a commonplace to say that cities increasingly resemble airports - cross-cultural spaces that are a gathering of tribes, races, and disparate languages - it is also true that airports are in many ways like miniature cities; both form complexes of intersecting transport systems, economies, buildings and people. But, as John Thackara has pointed out, there is one crucial difference: ""Cities have inhabitants. At airports everyone is transient"". Within these spaces of dim amenity, urban traffic is smoothly converted into air traffic, and the individual traveller is transformed into a ""package"" - anonymous, pacified cargo to be shifted around the globe as swiftly as possible. The area between check-in and baggage reclaim the author identifies as the ""airspace"", a region that stretches from airport to airport, and across time zones. In this space, authority is absolute, machinery replaces individuality, and the body, steered by instructions, undergoes a controlled acceleration or decleration - departure and arrival - to which resistance is both minimal and futile. The book argues that the airport functions as a particular space of fear and uncertainty, a place as alienating as a police station or as disquieting as a general hospital. Now that air travel has eliminated geographical distance, the space between, the ""airspace"", must be regarded as a distinct area on any map of modernity.

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9781861890900

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Reviews

'eclectic and intelligent ... a thought-provoking analysis' - Financial Times

'Powered flight is one of the wonders of the modern world and the worlds it inhabits, both literally and metaphorically, are the subject of David Pascoe's eclectic and intelligent book ... a thought-provoking analysis.' - Financial Times ' ... the scope of Mr Pascoe's rumination is impressive' - The Economist 'Personal observations fuse with meditations on air accidents, architecture, literature, and film to give us the full picture of the metaphorical and literal territory of the air, always readable, never irrelevant. Airspaces could well be the guidebook to tomorrow we've been waiting for.' - Untold London

Author Information

David Pascoe is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture in the Department of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Peter Greenaway: Museums and Moving Images (Reaktion, 1997), Airspaces (Reaktion, 2001) and Aircraft (Reaktion, 2003)

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