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AIR TIME-SPACES: NEW METHODS FOR RESEARCHING MOBILITIES

Abstracts

David Pascoe
Peter Peters
Peter Adey
Frank Witlox
Gillian Fuller
Ross Harley
Saulo B. Cwerner
Sven Kesselring
Claus Lassen
Rob Kitchin

Air Conditioning: The Pressures of the Passenger Terminal

David Pascoe

Early on the morning of 23 May 2004, a section of the newly opened Terminal 2 E at Paris CDG collapsed; 4 passengers were killed instantly. The long, tubular structure, a daring fabrication out of glass, steel ,and concrete was designed by Paul Andreu, who was at the time Director of Architecture for the Aéroports de Paris, and whose visions and concepts of what he terms the ‘Aerogare’ have proved internationally successful, and instantly recognizable. A public inquiry in 2005 was highly critical of the construction process, but stopped short of criticising his design, despite reports of technical problems throughout its construction. This paper will use both Andreu’s design philosophy and his literary aesthetic – his first novel was published last year -- to reflect on the pressures that led to the design and execution of such a unique tubular space into which to funnel passenger flow; a space that has its origins in the external shape, internal ambience, and computer aided simulations of a new series of passenger aircraft, and, in particular, the Airbus A380.

Airborne on Time: Coordination as Real Time Problem Solving in KLM’s Operation Control Center

Peter F. Peters

In my paper, I focus on the labour which employees of the Dutch airline carrier KLM must do in order to provide customers with reliable and punctual flights. How do they ensure planes to fly on time when the complexity of daily flight operations increases? To answer this question, I first elaborate on the concept of ‘passages’. In order to travel, I claim, passages are needed that produce a situated relation between time and space. As planned yet contingent heterogeneous orders, they must be ‘repaired’ continuously in real time. To show how this is done in the everyday practice of air traffic, the paper presents an ethnographic case study at Schiphol Airport that shows how planned passages can be repaired when contingencies do arise. How an overview over spatially distributed actions is created becomes clear in the Front Office of KLM’s Operations Control Centre. Here the processes making up the KLM network on the day of operation are continually monitored. If something goes wrong anywhere - whether in baggage handling, aircraft handling, passenger services or elsewhere - this can affect scheduled departure times. The paper examines two problematic episodes in KLM’s Front Office from the perspective of the ‘exchange’, the material and immaterial resources needed to repair passages and fly on time. In general, it is argued that coining and innovating exchange is necessary to connect and synchronize the temporal orders that constitute a passage. Finally, I will make some comments on the relevance of my research for theorizing the real time coordination of mobilities in general.

Getting into the Flow: Airports, Aeromobilities and Air-mindedness

Peter Adey

In this paper, I suggest that while we tend to see air time-spaces as symbolic of movement, flux and flow, various attempts at unpacking them have done so from particularly static and lifeless theoretical and methodological approaches that lack a time-space dimension. These perspectives, I argue, do not only serve to efface the incredibly mobile, historical, yet differential constitution of air time-spaces, but they also miss how these spaces, sites and technologies inflect social life and experience in a multitude of ways. Attending to this dynamism, however, throws up numerous problems for practicing mobilities research. Through several different case-study examples I explore the difficulty in attuning to subjectivities built on continually shifting contexts; the problems of representing something that has already moved on; the practicalities of discerning patterns within the chaotic materiality of the terminal, or, indeed, understanding how life in the air collides with life on the ground.

Connecting the world: an analysis of the spatial patterns in the world city network using global MIDT airline data

Frank Witlox

The potential usefulness of airline data for analyzing flows between major world cities is clear: data are comparatively easy to obtain; air transport is traditionally organized through cities rather than through states; and transport is mainly about connections and flows. However, previous assessments of the world city network based on air passenger transport flows have faced problems due to inadequate and/or partial data. The major impediments in this context have been: the lack of real origin-destination data; the implicit state-centrism (i.e. a bias towards interstate rather than transstate flows); the incorporation of non-world city processes; and that airline data are not always provided and/or analysed in an appropriate framework. To circumvent these problems we constructed an intercity matrix based on the so-called Marketing Information Data Transfer (MIDT) database. This MIDT database contains information on bookings made through so-called Global Distribution Systems (GDS) such as Galileo, Sabre, Worldspan, Amadeus, Topas, Infini, and Abaccus. GDS are electronic platforms used by travel agencies to manage airline bookings (i.e., the selling of seats on flights offered by different airlines), hotel reservations, and car rentals. With the cooperation of an airline, we were able to obtain a partial MIDT database that covers the period from January to August 2001 and contains information on a total of 3.7 million O/D trips or half a billion passengers.

Using this (and other global) data source(s), a variety of analyses has already been conducted (see http://www.lboro.ac.uk/gawc/publicat.html).
We described and analysed the global network economy (RB 152 and RB 157). We compared our information on air passenger flows with data on corporate organization (RB 173 and RB 196). We reassessed the different roles and functions of hubs (RB 187). And we are in the process of comparing different airline data sources (AEA, OAG, IATA, ICAO), looking into multiple city airports and analysing their function in a global airline network, focusing on specific regions using a network analysis approach (e.g. issue of the Eurasian giants), estimating transfer passengers and assessing hub-and-spoke networks, analysing first/business class travel (using data from AEA), etc. This research is in collaboration with Ben Derudder and Lomme Devriendt (Ghent University), and Peter J. Taylor (Loughborough University).

Thoughts about air/time/space from a diagrammatic perspective

Gillian Fuller

Among the bustling movement of flaneurs, gamblers and poets who occupy Benjamin’s thoughts on the daily lives and routines of the collective stands a lesser figure - the man who waits. He who “takes in the time and renders it up in altered form – that of expectation.” (AP: 107) This paper will focus on another side of movement for the collective: anticipation. Specifically, I’ll be looking at the spatiotemporal politics of store and forward systems in relation to proceduralised networked movement. Airports, like contemporary digital networks share the distributive architechnics of store and forward, in which bodies and bits are packeted, tagged and routed in specific sequences forming unities in praxis and oneness through serialisation. As part of an ongoing enquiry into how informationalisation is qualitatively changing the politics of mobility, this paper works through a series of diagrams that attempt to elaborate sets of relations intrinsic in store and forward systems from multiple perspectives. How do crowds becomes queues, and units becomes unities as the spatiotemporal coordinates of store-forward invoke place as position, movement as sequence and duration as delay? As natural resources shrink, aviation costs rise, net neutrality becomes debatable, and social organization synchs up to databases, the cultural politics of distributive systems seems more crucial, not only in the air. What can the minutiae of distribution systems tell us about the relations of mobility and contemporary control?

Aviopolis and beyond: The Role of Multimedia in Mobilities Research

Ross Harley

In this presentation, I will show original new media work related to airports and explain the significance of using such an approach in the emerging field of mobility research. How does the collection and representation of audio-visual material generate new insights into the study of global networks typified by the “aviopolis”? The paper will include original photography, video, 3D visualisation, and web work generated for the Aviopolis project, as well as new material relating to my current work "Around the World in 80 Airports".

Helipads, Heliports and Urban Air Space: Exploring the Contested Infrastructure of Helicopter Travel

Saulo B. Cwerner

This paper is concerned with the urban infrastructure of helicopter travel. Based on empirical research conducted in São Paulo, Brazil, the paper delineates the major processes involved in the construction and governance of the infrastructure of urban helicopter travel. São Paulo has experienced the world’s fastest growth in intra-urban helicopter flights over the past 15 years. One major feature of it has been the development of an unrivalled infrastructure for door-to-door flight comprising, among other things, the construction and expansion of major heliport facilities and the proliferation of rooftop helipads across the city, especially in the city’s major business districts. Now boasting over 300 operational elevated helipads, more than any other city in the world, São Paulo has also seen the development of new air traffic control measures that have conferred greater legitimacy to this unique form of urban mobility and modality of air travel. However, this development is fraught, and the paper also explores the various problems that arise from the expansion of urban air travel, especially from its inevitable embededness in the dense urban fabric. The detached nature of urban air travel, whereby a growing parcel of the city’s mobile elite manages to bypass the cluttered roads and social problems below, can hardly mask the fixity of its urban infrastructure, both in terms of its imprints on the built environment and of the grid of air corridors running immediately above. Based on the author’s own research experience, the paper also invites reflections on the various unique methodological issues that become apparent in the course of researching air travel in the conspicuously tri-dimensional metropolis.

'The social construction of global 'air time-spaces'.
International airports: global transfer points of the mobile risk society'

Sven Kesselring

Living in the mobile risk society rests on complex networks of socio-material relations and global connectivities. Airline networks and the social and spatial practice of “aeromobility“ dynamically foster processes of globalization and cosmopolitanization. They play a crucial role for the territorial de- and restructuring of cities and regions under the conditions of globalization and the constitution of politics in an age of second modernity.

Airports are part of risk society’s mobility potentials (motility). They cause far reaching transformations in society’s social and spatial structures. The „geopolitics of air transport“ (Henri Lefebvre) is an underestimated field of research and sheds a light on the emerging world city network. Analyzing policies and discourses around airports reveals the nature of powerful interscalar networks that shape the future of cities and regions. Deliberative practices (such as the Frankfurt airport mediation process and the “airport neighbourhood advisory board” in Munich) often neglect and cover the glocal nature of policy and civil society networks around airports.

The paper presents a point of departure for theoretical reflection and empirical research on one of the future key themes of social science based mobility research.

A life in corridors - Social perspectives on aeromobility and work in knowledge organisations

Claus Lassen

This paper explores international work related travel in knowledge organisations and present the result of a case study carried out in two Danish knowledge organisations. It argues that work in international knowledge organisations can not be understood separate from aeromobility organised though a big material system of corridors. However, the article also shows that the knowledge workers approach such systems of corridors differently and produce different patterns of aeromobility. Therefore the social consequences of ‘a life in corridors’ are also experienced differently. For some knowledge workers aeromobility means new opportunities to network, to combine work and pleasure, to develope a cosmopolitan identity, to play at new places etc.; but for others, it involves a great deal of frustrations and ambivalences in relation to cope with work, family, leisure, localities, belongings in-between the global and local. In conclusion the paper therefore focuses on the necessity of a critical view on the idea of the happy cosmopolitan who lives a carefree life on the move in further research of aeromobility and work.

Air travel, code/space and automated management

Rob Kitchin

In this paper we are interested in the ways that software is reconfiguring airports and air travel. In the first half of the paper, we make the case that air travel now consists of passage through code/spaces - spaces that are reliant on software for their production (e.g., travel agencies/websites, check-in areas, security check-points, flight decks, air-traffic control, immigration and customs checkpoints) which together form assemblages that define the practices and experiences of air travel. Code/spaces occur when code and space are mutually constituted - dyadically produced through one another so that if either the code or space ‘fail’, the production of space ‘fails’. In the second half of the paper, we focus on one particular set of code/spaces concerning security, arguing the production of these spaces is profoundly influenced by a new form of governmentality that we term automated management. Automated management consists of two interlocking sets of regulatory technologies: automated surveillance that seeks to enforce more effective (self)disciplining and capture systems that actively reshape activity. We argue that these work together to alter the air travel landscape by creating new socio-spatial arrangements with respect to access, movement, flow, and behaviour.

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