ENACTING AIRPORTS: SPACE, MOVEMENT AND MODES OF ORDERING by
Hannah Knox Damian O’Doherty Theo Vurdubakis Chris Westrup
EBK Working Paper 2005/20
Enacting Airports: Space, Movement and Modes of Ordering
Hannah Knox* Damian O’Doherty** Theo Vurdubakis*** & Chris Westrup**
*Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, 178 Waterloo Place, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL **Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester M15 6PB ***Centre for the study of Technology and Organization, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4XY
Acknowledgements: We gratefully acknowledge the support of the (UK) Economic and Social Research Council’s Evolution of Business Knowledge research programme (Grant no RES-33425-0012). We would like to thank all those who we interviewed for their assistance. We would also like to thank Alf Rehn and the participants to the 21st EGOS Colloquium, Freie Universitat, Berlin, June 30th-July 2nd2005 for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
For further details please contact Dr Hannah Knox, CRESC, 178 Waterloo Place, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL. 00-44-(0)161-275-8989,
[email protected], fax: 0044-(0)161-275-8986.
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Enacting Airports: Space, Movement and Modes of Ordering
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Enacting Airports: Space, Movement and Modes of Ordering
Introduction Airports are said to epitomise much of what is held to be distinctive about the ways we currently organize our world. Castells (1996:412) argues that airports constitute nodes in ‘a new spatial form characteristic of social practices that dominate and shape the network society’, a form that he calls the ‘space of flows’. By the space of flows, Castells draws attention to ‘the material organization of time-sharing social practices that work through flows’; and by flows he understands those ‘purposeful, repetitive, programmable sequences of exchange and interaction between physically disjointed positions held by social actors’ (ibid). Modern societies, he argues are constructed around flows: flows of people, flows of capital, flows of information, flows of social and organizational interactions, and flows of symbols and images. Flows, for Castells, are not just one element among the many that comprise and enact contemporary social organization. Rather, they are the expression of the very processes that dominate modern life, the material ‘foundations’ of a new culture.
Flow and the dissolution of form is one of the major preoccupations of J.G. Ballard’s writing who describes the world’s major airports as being, in effect, the suburbs of a Calvinoesque ‘invisible world’, ‘a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles De Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre’ (Ballard, 1997). Augé (1995) sees airports as exemplary of what he calls the ‘non-places’ of supermodernity. Identifying airports as the epitome of epochal societal changes, these narratives hint at both the
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distinctiveness and ubiquity of airports as new organizational forms. Such imaginative and fatidical cultural narratives evoke and engender the hopes and fears associated with new technological orderings of organization and society. In this paper we explore the multiple ‘modes of ordering’ (Law, 1994; Mol, 2002) that airports mobilise in their efforts to construct and maintain this smooth space of flow.
The architecture and design of airports could be thought of as one modality of ordering. For visionaries such as Corbusier and Saarinen the dream had been to remove all material reminders of earth-bound inertia and resistance so as to give flight to the ‘naked airport’. In recent years architecture has become a popular medium through which to explore previously hidden and overlooked dimensions of organization where order is assembled and reproduced (Gagliardi, 1990; Burrell and Dale, 2004; Kornberger and Clegg, 2005). We briefly trace a history of airport design in order to contextualise and situate our empirical research in ‘Fulchester International Airport’1, a history which shows that modalities of ordering are situated in tension, always-already between forces of discord and (an idealised) euphonic harmony. To understand the dynamics of this organized reconciliation between entropy and the modernist ideal of flow our paper examines the various modes of ordering that Fulchester airport has sought to install through a deployment of various digital and information, communications technology.
We draw upon a two-year ethnographic study of ‘Fulchester’ to discover that the enactment of the airport as a ‘space of flows’ is supplemented by complex regimes of signification, segmentation and emplacement. The on-going work of boundary
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construction and its maintenance, and the ceaseless effort to repair what Mary Douglas (1966) calls ‘matter out of place’ – whether people or objects – distributes, allocates, and assigns the phenomena of organization into various ‘waiting areas’ and ‘holding pens’. We find that airports and their management are poised in-between the fear of disorder and the ideal of flow giving rise to all kinds of mediation, compromise and reconciliation. The forensic break down of organization into specialisation, division and responsibility which is then later reassembled into heterogeneous assemblages of subject-object, human-machine, and the virtual-real, helps form a complex marquetry of disjunctive fragmentation. At the confluence of competing modes of ordering, various objects, artefacts, spaces and people become ‘charged’ with tension and fissility in ways that bestow a portentous quality to organization and its social relations. Technologies and practices for the effective management of flows seek correct placement, but the ge-stell (Heidegger, 1977) of this emplacement also gives rise to new conditions of disorder and unpredictability. Digital information and communications technology creates a spectral and uncanny double that feeds back into the here-and-now of mundane, organizational reality. This emergent hybridity between the virtual and real opens up an intensive space that seems to extend the becoming of a ‘post-human’ ontology but in so doing also provokes the return of a recalcitrant and unpredictable mass – what we might call a ‘digital reserve’ – that proliferates in delitescence and potentia behind the surface of everyday life. Here we will encounter strange phenomena and alien forces, where buildings attempt to take flight and mimic the form of aeroplanes, and passengers begin to resemble luggage. In the space of the airport the observer meets ‘flow controllers’, confront ‘snowstorms’, converses with virtual avatars and interacts with
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‘artificial intelligences’. All of this seems to conspire to give the airport a mutant, self-acting, and uncanny machinic-like quality – where orderly flows are always under threat of usurpation by flux, stoppage, interruption.
The ‘naked airport’: Transparency and Flow Since its earliest days, air-flight has conjured up images associated with the excitement and thrill of adventure, transgression and travel into the unknown. Boundaries were to be broken down, distances eradicated and the world brought closer, giving rise to a new global citizenship and community. Planes were given names like ‘Hercules’ and ‘Goliath’, and their engines called ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Pegasus’ (Gordon, 2004:55). The pioneer aviator and celebrated French author Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1995:13) describes the exhilaration of passing ‘beyond the borders of the real world’, and of flying blind in cloud and fog with unreliable instrumentation ‘a world void of all light and of all a substance’, where a mountain peak can suddenly ‘change into a bomb and fill the entire night with its menace (ibid.:14-17). However, writes Exupery, we ‘must throw bridges out into the darkness’. The line of flight, we might say, is irresistible, expressing an urge to innovate and extend that breaks through the enclosures of the familiar and the known. Flight restores the sense of fragility to human life as it opens up the possibility of invention and the new; from on high a ‘liberated’ vision allow us to see that we do not live on a ‘moist and tender planet’, but rather on an immense desert, ‘the essential bedrock, the stratum and sand and salt where life, like a patch of moss deep in hollow ruins, flowers here and there where it dares’ (ibid.: 33-4)’. St. Exupery’s flight reminds us that we live on insecure foundations and uncertain genealogies, a ‘wandering planet’ that ‘from time to time,
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thanks to the aeroplane … reveals to us its origin: a lake connected with the moon unveils hidden kinships’ (p.36).
In response to the introduction of jet airliners and the vast expansion of international air-travel between 1957 and 1970 airport design begins to reflect this spirit of adventure and travel, of a journey into the alien and unfamiliar. In 1957 Newsweek magazine declared it was a ‘Jet-Winged World’ as airport architecture took inspiration from the streamlined flow of the sleek fuselage and sweeping wing. Corbusier famously announces in Vers une Architecture that the plane and its aerodynamical struts will revolutionise the way we think and build. Everything from fountain pens to hairstyle and fashion begins to mimic the look of the jet airliner. In L’Esprit Nouveau (1920) he writes that we ‘may affirm that the airplane mobilized invention, intelligence and daring: imagination and cold reason. It is the same spirit that built the Parthenon’ (cited in Pearman, 2004:81). For airports the only kind of architecture and spatial design adequate to the new demands of jet-travel, Corbusier writes, is ‘that of the magnificent airplanes which have brought you or will take you away’ (Corbusier, 1946; cited in Vidler, 2000:179). The logic was such that airports must be designed to be ‘naked, entirely open to the sky’ (Corbusier, ibid.), a conception that replaces earlier avant-garde and futurist fantasies, from Antonio Sant’Elia to speculations by Lloyd Wright who anticipates airport skyscrapers in Los Angeles, and designs by Kenneth Lindy, Winton Lewis, and Charles Glover for elevated airports in London that sit upon the roofs of existing buildings. As Vidler (2000:180) writes, ‘the ultimate fate of airport buildings designed with such efficiencies of flow in mind was their eventual disappearance’.
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Built in 1928 the Fuhlsbuttel airport in Hamburg designed by Dyrssen and Averhoff was one of the first airports to embody this notion of flow with split level design, the basement used exclusively for baggage handling, the ground floor reserved for ticketed passengers, and an upper level designed with restaurants and observation terraces for spectators. Tramlines and dual carriageway transport links brought the terminal to within a few minutes of Hamburg city centre as everything was subordinated to speed, movement, and transition. Lambert Field at St. Louis was designed to bring the sky into the terminal building through a massive cross-vaulted roof filled with huge panels of curved heat-resistant glass. The terminal induced ‘a feeling of being suspended’, one critic wrote, and its vaults appeared to float ‘like bulbous clouds’, another noted (cited in Gordon, 2004:177). Inspired by St. Louis, Eero Saarinen’s famous TWA terminal at Idlewild (JFK) in New York went further still and removed the solid, foundational plinth that typically anchors buildings to the earth. ‘We wanted an uplift’ Saarinen explained, and the terminal to be a ‘place of movement and transition’ in which everything from flight information board, clocks, lights, heating ducts, bridges, tunnels, lounges, staircase, and railings was integrated to form a continuous flowing surface invoking the ‘upward soaring quality of line’ (Gordon, ibid.:199). Sculpted like a bird, about to take off, the impression is of light and transparency, a building without terrestrial body or form, a shining orb of incandescent light somehow miraculously suspended in the medium of air. Swooping passage-ways and curved walls that become ceiling and floor add to the impression, while the gentle convex incline of the umbilical-like departure tubes, fitted with recessed lighting, emphasise and dramatise departure and flow, the seamless transition
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from all that is solid dissolving into otherworldly space and the infinite, extraterrestrial.
Fulchester International Seductive as this architectural dream might be, not all airports find themselves so able to enact the ideals of flow and transition in their physical form. Fulchester, one of the premier UK international airports, is a relatively more modest affair than the TWA terminal at JFK or Hamburg’s Fuhlsbuttel airport, having evolved over time in a discontinuous and piecemeal architectural fashion. It is bound by a legacy of local government transport management and regional economic development, rooted in an era of retrenchment, economy, and an unremitting functionalism that in more recent years has been overlaid with an ersatz corporate aesthetic makeover. A bricolage of inconsistency and competing ‘anti’ aesthetics, Fulchester has expanded to contrive and give form to an uneven, heteroclite assemblage, a shanty-town of partially integrated fragments and disconnected-connections, a fractured-whole that continues its tentacular spread into the surrounding environment.
Entering the main terminal at Fulchester one is asked to navigate a complex and confusing geography. Part shopping mall, night-club and hotel lobby, part executive business conference suite and bus station, the modern airport has a strong claim to represent the logical evolution of Benjamin’s Paris Arcades or the carnivalesque phantasmagoria of its ‘dialectical fairyland’ (Benjamin, 1999; see Burrell and Dale, 2004). Open planned spaces swarm with jostling crowds, surrounded by digital publicity hoardings that flicker, dissolve and reform; shopping-channel TV stations
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compete with the VDU broadcast of constantly updating departure information; and screens displaying digital animation and high speed graphics clamour for attention against the backdrop of games consoles and gambling machines.
At Fulchester we find an expanding array of information and communications technologies deployed to solve the problem of ordering. Computer-mediated organization holds the promise that discordant demands made by different ‘orderings’ can be harmonised, that the organizational Humpty-Dumpty can, so to speak, be finally put together. ICTs are complicit, however, not only in the production of visions and possibilities of order and stability, but also in rendering them precarious and fragile – by destabilising information, identities, processes and procedures. We want to explore how these proliferating digital and ICT solutions to the problems of flow within airports are challenging accepted modes of inhabiting spaces while posing new questions concerning the limits and character of identity and organization. As we argue below, the organization of ‘flow’ is always in danger of ‘overflow’, of disintegration into confusion and flux, where people and objects become unstuck from the smooth operation of representations and get lost in the intransigent opacity of the ‘mass’.
Geometries of Fragmentation: Service Level Agreements and Customer Service Agents Fulchester airport is made up of many, often competing spaces, all enacting different modes of ordering. It is composed of an ebb and flow of spacings that are being shaped, pushed and pulled by a multitude of socio-technical agencies and actants2.
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Many different institutions and legal, regulatory agencies, including the military and the police, the IATA (International Air Transport Association) and the various domestic and international airline companies take an interest in the development and evolution of space in the geographical site that is the airport. Airline deregulation, intensified global competition, and the decentralisation of large, formerly integrated bureaucratic organizations (Colling, 1995) has led to a multiplication of spatial delimitations that complicates the lines of connection which are then required to (re)assemble all the parts into collective organization. Airlines now have contracts with a range of different companies who provide ticketing and check-in services, baggage handling, cleaning and catering, and aircraft engineering and maintenance. Even the stewards serving drinks on the flight may be employed by a sub-contractor. From check-in to arrival the customer might not meet an employee of the airline with whom they have ostensibly travelled.
To deal with this fragmentation, relationships between airports, airlines and service providers are managed through service level agreements (SLAs) which attempt to make clear the divisions of responsibility in order to reduce the complexity and contradiction of competing interests. Airlines will have service level agreements with the airport to justify landing fees charged by the airport, as the airport will have SLAs with retailers and franchise outlets. In other words SLAs seek to smooth out striations into a space of free flow. These SLAs, as one system administrator put it, ‘basically just drives your organization to a standard based organization’. In these spaces of flows, congestion provides evidence of the failure of mobility through space, potentially leading to chaotic disorganization and systemic breakdown that impacts
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beyond the boundaries of the airport often concluding with financial compensation for those affected and monetary penalties for those at fault. Flows, it appears, constantly need confining, enumerating and checking, otherwise the spectre of flux threatens to break through in the form of financial penalties.
In practice, techniques of demarcating responsibility between different companies are often difficult to establish and maintain. SLAs are not visible to the passengers and in the contingency of everyday transport – of delays and cancellations – the carefully organized lines of responsibility become difficult to sustain. Passengers do not necessarily understand the demarcations and finer details of the various roles performed by airline flight attendants, airport employees, and baggage handling staff, and the intricacies of their contract arrangements in which management and organization is instructed by the procedural dictation of remote information systems, appears abstract and irrelevant. The customer service agents who staff the various help and information desks are central to the translation and reconciliation of these abstractions in the day to day practice of flow management. The first line in a list of ‘principle accountabilities’ detailed in the job description for customer services advisors (CSA) reads: ‘Ensure terminal operations including passenger and baggage flows are maintained and meet or exceed the specified standards.’ The job description goes on to itemise the more specific responsibilities and accountabilities of the CSA and explains the specific instances in which these broad duties may have to be performed, including the need to ‘react positively to customer requirements and problem situations’ and to ‘input flight information and passenger instructions via the airport systems, including TOBIAS3, onto display screens and make Tannoy
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announcements in order to ensure that passengers move through the terminals in a safe and efficient manner’.
Times of crisis push these descriptions to their limits as CSAs are forced to reconcile their responsibilities to passengers with their inability to influence other organizations operating within the airport. ‘Last Friday night, in Terminal 2, Angela had about 14 flight arrivals about 10 o’clock …’. Patrick, one of the airport terminal management staff, is telling a story about a ‘third party’ baggage handling company contracted by one airline that illustrates this problem. ‘Customers were waiting for 3 hours to get their bags back’, he continues, ‘we were inundated with complaints ... telephone calls from the chief executive … all these sorts of things … and our staff were getting lynched’. Patrick concludes by informing us that ‘We ended up lashing out about seven hundred quid on refreshments just to keep them happy’, but as he explains ‘we don’t have any influence over [the baggage company]’ because ‘we’re not paying for their services’.
In order to generate and retain a seamless flow of passengers through space, customer services advisors find themselves having to subsume and embody the friction of boundary disputes into their own jobs, deflecting tension and blockages away from the traveller experience and onto their work load. Attempting to maintain a seamless flow by displacing the complex fractures of organizational boundaries compromises the ability of airport staff to regulate the boundaries of their own job roles. The boundaries and limits of staff responsibilities are somewhat vague and open-ended and their jobs demand invention, initiative and improvisation. The job of the CSA is
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characterised by constant interruptions, re-directions and demands as he or she is contacted by radio, text, or tannoy. CSAs are periodically stopped in the concourse by lost or confused passengers and they are routinely called upon to move obstructive vehicles or mend broken escalators in order to keep the airport and its passengers moving. Hence, maintaining customer flow requires an ‘overflow’ of responsibility for CSAs in responding to the inevitability of contingency, obstacles, inertia and disturbance. They can be seen wandering around the airport in their blue uniforms, rushing here and there, sometimes solo and on occasion collectively in teams. Order is co-implicated with disorder, and flow with inundation; the role of the customer service agent might therefore be interpreted as an obligatory point of passage between flood and order. Their talk is constantly about being prepared for the unexpected, they tell us that ‘anything might happen next’ (cf.: Deleuze, 1989) and of events that can rapidly escalate and trigger off a series of repercussions cascading over boundaries and spatial demarcations to overwhelm management and organization. The sense of an imminent disorder stimulates a state of being alert and receptive amongst the CSAs, but also forming a ‘nervous system’ of vigilance and agitation (Taussig, 1992).
Multiple Codings: Passengers, Luggage, Aeroplanes The airport increasingly now deals with the problem of capacity and flow through the use of information systems and technologies that monitor, model and map space and movement. Modelling and software technologies are used to plan the future needs of the airport by digitally simulating the flow of passengers. In the area of airport planning, for example, modelling technologies project various scenarios in order to help predict the spatial effects of passenger flow around the airport. Passenger flow
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gets constituted, re-presented and manipulated in virtual environments that are constrained by parameters laid down by industry standards which are translated into ‘system’ limitations. Peaks and troughs of passenger throughput are traced and followed to establish a more detailed representation of patterns of flow and distribution, a process that helps identify congestion areas and hot spots. Such systems have the effect of objectifying the imagined passenger and thereby reducing the unpredictability of subjectivity in order to represent the possibility of organization as an ideal of flow. The confused passenger has to be re-presented as a predictable element by airport planners who have to forecast changes in passenger movement.
It is a matter of considerable indifference for these managers of flow whether information systems and technology are dealing with people or inanimate objects. We can follow the flow of airport traffic in the form of passengers or in the form of aeroplanes and bags as they are variously broken down, made ready for their diverse itineraries, transported and later re-assembled in other times and spaces. Like the airports that took on the form of the aeroplane, we might well consider if it is any wonder that people in their passage and transport begin to resemble and behave like baggage, which in turn all begin to resemble matter in flight? However, the multiplicity of information systems in use in airport organization constitute objects and subjects in many different ways, which poses problems of identification and consistency that requires skilful acts of mediation and translation. Moreover, as we follow these object-subjects in their journeys we discover an increasingly intensive use of space which exacerbates those conditions of possibility where ‘anything might happen next’. The unpredictability of subjectivity returns then, despite the promise of
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information technologies, but in surprising and novel forms, combining subject and object, matter and spirit, the animate and inanimate, the artificial and real, in compacts whose lineaments and tensions are intricate and complex extending as they do across vast networks of assembly and maintenance.
Aeroplanes are inscribed with multiple identification codes and processed and regulated through different communication media by Air Traffic and Ground Control. The flight number used by passengers (‘BA2032 to London’, for example) is only one form of classification that is supplemented by other codes used by air traffic control. In circumstances of ‘flight shares’, yet a third identification number – referring to the partner airline – may be in use as well. Computer controlled docking information systems also use identification codes that carry information about wing span and the length of the fuselage, which is critical in the allocation of correct boarding gates with sufficient space and clearance for the various respective aircraft. As information systems multiply they become increasingly sensitive to accurate data coding. Conflicting information or errors in translation can often result in dramatic effects. A recent event at Fulchester illustrates the catastrophic potential built into the media of these heterogeneous information systems that share overlapping jurisdiction and responsibility. Information relayed from ground traffic controllers to air traffic control prompted air traffic to advise the pilot of a Boeing 767 to proceed along taxiway Juliet and to then turn right towards Runway 2. In this case, relying on air traffic control, the pilot believed there must be sufficient wingspan clearance between his plane and the next one further advanced down the taxiway so that he could make his manoeuvre. However, as the pilot turned right off the taxiway his left hand wing crashed through
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the tail of the stationary plane and only narrowly missed its vital fuel tanks. Although there were no fatalities in this incident, over 80 passengers were taken to hospital, some with severe neck and whiplash injuries. Contrary to visual ‘evidence’, the pilot maintained his trust in air traffic control instructions which suggests that the automatic and routine deference to procedural instructions and abstract information systems management can override common-sense and the old tactile skills of the human sensorium. With multiple identification codes triggering different instructions and actions it could even be said that planes are schizophrenic objects (both virtual and real), and at times, it seems, they simply don’t know how to behave correctly.
Like aeroplanes, passenger luggage is variously labelled and coded through information systems that are used to monitor and regulate traffic flow. The baggage system is a complex series of conveyor belts which channels bags from the check-in desk to the trolleys which then transport them to the planes. Check-in staff place the bag, identifiable through a bar coded luggage tag, upon a conveyor belt, which then feeds it through a series of security checks and automated x-ray scanners. If the bag is deemed safe, it continues along the conveyor belt during which time it is repeatedly scanned by laser barcode readers in order to identify its location. Ultimately the bag will be dropped into a ‘bucket’ that will ‘know’, on the basis of the laser readings, which flight the bag is destined for. At the correct moment the bucket will tip the bag down a final conveyor belt where it is picked up by a baggage handler who will again ‘read’ it using a bar code scanner before placing it upon the trolley. If the bag does not pass the first x-ray, the conveyor belt drops it through to another level where it is fed through to a CT scanner that conducts a cross sectional analysis of the bag in
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question. This scanner is programmed to analyse the cross section and decide whether the bag is safe or not. If it is not deemed safe then security staff will analyse the cross sectional diagrams and will act accordingly, with the most dramatic outcome being the evacuation of the terminal and the destruction of the bag.
The whole baggage system is monitored by a person called the ‘flow controller’. Sitting in an office deep in the bowels of the terminal, the flow controller observes a VDU monitor that details the diagrammatic representation of the whole conveyor belt system. He is able to see if a bag has got stuck or gone missing, for the system scans the bags at defined stages. If the bag does not get scanned then the diagrammatic representation of that section of the system turns red to alert the flow controller that there is a problem. He will then radio one of the baggage handlers, whose job it is to sit by the belt and wait for such calls. The handler will then scramble over the conveyor belt to dislodge, or relocate the missing bag. One of the main causes of blockage are check-in desk staff, often working for sub-contractors, who during busy periods attempt to deal with queues, time pressures and passenger impatience by forcing bags down the conveyor belt before the system instructs the staff that further bags may be processed. Each bag on the baggage system occupies a particular slot on the conveyor belt and check-in staff have to wait until there is an available slot before they can send luggage on its way. Sometimes, during busy periods, as queues mount up in the check-in hall, check-in staff take matters into their own hands and, rather than wait for clearance, they physically force the bags into a slot already occupied by another piece of luggage. Despite being explicitly instructed not to do this, check-in staff often choose to ignore these instructions in order to respond to immediate
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pressures. This is much to the ongoing consternation of the flow controller whose diagram ends up flashing red indicating repeated blockages and stoppages. These red lines might be thought of as a representation or digital trace of the flow or ‘translation’ of frustration from people to conveyor belts and then, via information systems, on to different people, reflecting a series of translations that turns subjects to objects and then back into (different) subjects.
We were invited to view the baggage system at a quiet time of day when there were few bags travelling the system, but the flow controller described to us the height of the summer when the dots on the system that represent each of the bags make the screen ‘look like a snowstorm’. During this time, the threat of collapse into disorder is heightened. ‘Snowstorms’ are strange phenomena signifying the return of the mass: the prospective degeneration of flow into disorderly flux. As such, ‘snowstorms’ prompt intense concentration and attentiveness amongst flow controllers and other system operators called upon to restore orderly flow. Like the CSAs and air traffic controllers in the radar room, the flow controllers must maintain a constant vigilance, aware that at any moment a snowstorm may break out, which instructs them to begin manually searching and scrambling over bags and conveyor belts in order to remove blockages and disruptions.
The effort to construct flow through the investment in various information and communication technologies of calculation and inscription can be seen to stimulate ‘overflow’, evident in the scrambling gymnastics of the flow controller or the frenetic activities of the customer service agents. Inefficient disordering is not simply
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eliminated by ICTs; rather, it is displaced to find expression and form in other areas and dimensions of organization, which in turn gives rise to further efforts to recover flow and re-organize physical space and its passengers with ever greater efficiency and rationality. Moreover, with the expansion of information and media teletechnologies comes a general ‘intensification’ of matter and potentiality: here matter is broken down through an increasingly forensic inspection of its constituent parts; rendered ‘useful’, put to work, and activated in new ways; and variously re-assembled and hybridised to form novel, heterogeneous phenomena that is precarious and volatile by virtue of its complex, miscegenated assembly. In addition, with the expansion and advance of the virtual into the mundane real, the distension of ‘space’ into the static, Euclidean geometries of ‘place’ (see Rajchman, 1998; Massumi, 2002:177-207), comes a general dematerialisation, a plasticity of form, and the loss of familiar organizational co-ordinates. Abstract and remote systems of control gives rise to new possibilities and new fears, which in the context of airports has been explored by writers like Ballard (1997) and Calvino (1979), artists such as Martha Rosler (1998), and contemporary architects like Rem Koolhaas. Overflow is made more acute by the confusion and volatility of phenomena that emerges out of this intensification of matter consequent upon the encroachment of the virtual into the real (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994), represented in the airport by developments in digital and simulation technologies.
‘Snowstorms’ can be seen as products of a certain symbiosis and creative interface between operator and technology, the real and the virtual. A snowstorm is, then, a hybrid phenomenon identified and labelled by human operators whose creative
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designation brings forth and adumbrates potential crisis as the system finds definition and understanding in terms of new limits. It also has agency like capacities of its own, much of which is unknown and yet to be discovered and therefore, in some ways, unreliable. Modes of ordering in the form of new technologies of representation (Cooper, 1992) alter the way space is perceived in the airport, but it also changes the way airport staff relate to and understand space. What was once understood as a restricted or confined space becomes more voluminous and capacious as new technologies teach subjects the possibility of a new spatial organization and awareness (Heidegger, 1962). However, as one boundary gets transgressed others are made apparent in their absent-presence, a penumbral movement which must always lie coiled in the background of organization generating phenomena that intrudes and interrupts smooth flow and its elusive quest.
Digital Oracles: TOBIAS, FAITH, and ‘Smart’ Buildings The creation of digital space as a means of mastering physical place is widely recognised to be changing the nature of organization and the ways in which it is practically accomplished through social relations (Negroponte, 1995; Thrift, 1996; Kittler, 1999), a phenomena we can begin to observe in the management and processing of people through the airport. In what we might call an ideal and well organized world of the future, every journey will commence in the virtual realm with each passenger visiting the airport website. The website can pre-arrange travel and flow in ways that are designed to both enhance the visitor ‘experience’ – spending money, of course, as they go – whilst improving a smooth and seamless movement through space. The website is designed to provide diverse information for different
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audiences, as well as enabling prior booking of car-parking; it also includes a facility to allow passengers to buy duty free before arriving at the airport, and a similar arrangement that enables the purchase of foreign currency. Designed around the principles of increasing the number of passengers and altering the movement of passengers and their allocations of time within the airport, the website seeks to increase passenger spending whilst facilitating flow.
Once the passenger arrives at the airport they are immediately confronted with numerous means of flow-subjectification and management. Signage, for example, silently directs the passenger, who is almost divested of all need to think, through space (see also Lloyd 2003). As we have seen, customer service agents are also mobilised to assist the passenger in flowing through the airport. CSAs are assisted by a number of IT tools that have been designed to facilitate this process of managing flow as passengers, bags, and aircraft ceaselessly move through the airport to be variously brought together and separated at various junctures. The most important of these tools is an information system called TOBIAS which is described by managers, (with allusions to HAL, the computer in the Kubrick film 2001), as ‘the heartbeat of the airport - it kind of drives everything’. Flight schedules, departure and arrival times and gates, fuelling and catering information, passenger lists, the billing of airlines, and statistics on service levels are all either fed into or generated by TOBIAS. When TOBIAS stops, the airport flows do continue as one of the IS managers explains: ‘there is a certain momentum to the operation that sort of keeps going’ but, inevitably, it then ‘starts to slow, and the trouble is, because we are so reliant on it, manual backups in a lot of those systems don’t exist ... Yeah we revert to
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it in terms of telling passengers where to go and we can literately revert to something as crude as a white board.’ TOBIAS is by and large dependable and reliable, but people, bags, and planes all have to be constantly linked and re-affirmed within technologically mediated representations. Slippages between representations and objects have to be repaired and central to this mediation is the role of the CSAs. Matter out of place emerges when information provided at the check-in desk, for example, is not consistent with TOBIAS, which is sometimes caused by software translation incompatibilities between airline information systems and the software controlled update procedures of TOBIAS. Once again we can see that latent in the system the always-already possibility that displaced immobility will return, this time in the form of undecidability between sources of information. CSAs need to be prepared to assemble an army of display boards and improvise with symbols and artefacts, even distributing refreshments and cups of tea during times of prolonged distress. As witnessed at Heathrow during a recent unofficial stoppage by BA staff in response to industrial relations problems in a catering subcontractor, airports are complex media of extended global webs of dependency and co-dependency, which always means that flow can quickly turn into forms of overflow and flux.
New technologies provide additional ways of reinforcing this management of bodies through space. However, passengers are often pulled in a number of often contradictory directions. The individual is sometimes customer and sometimes passenger and is encouraged to move through the airport space in specific ways designed to satisfy a variety of different groups with very different interests. Airlines
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are concerned with the extent to which passengers’ experiences reflect favourably upon their service, whilst also aiming to reduce the cost of processing each passenger. To this effect, automated check-in facilities have been recently introduced which speeds up the check-in process and reduces queues whilst making further economies on the number of check-in staff employees. On the other hand, airport management(s) have to take a more ‘global’ or ‘macro’ view of space and its configurations. The introduction of automated check-in desks may speed up check-in but increased efficient flow in one place creates overflow in others, producing long queues at passport control or security, requiring downstream remedial action in the spatial layout of the airport. This can also have knock-on effects for retail outlets who have a vested interest in the length of waiting time that passengers can expect. Indeed, in some sense, retailers want delays. This provides further evidence of the transition from flow into what we have been calling ‘overflow’, a phase change by which what had been deferred and displaced – disorganization, mass, and opacity – return.
The displaced ‘others’ of ‘flow’ and organization are not aberrations or occurrences which can be easily fixed or ordered out of existence simply by more stratification, segmentation and emplacement. These overflows return in surprising and unpredictable ways – here in the form of gathering crowds and ‘blockages’ that will provoke frustration and confusion, storing up tension that may discharge in any number of ways. An undercurrent of disorder and panic is never too far away (Kroker and Cook, 1986; Burrell, 1997), a symptom of contemporary organization that is perhaps captured in the airport photographs of Martha Rosler (1998), but also manifest as trace in the ‘psychological space’ of recent airport architecture with its
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warped spaces and twisted, contorted geometries (Vidler, 2001). The discovery of these dark and often repressed dimensions in organization means that ‘speed’ and ‘flow’ are somewhat limited as ways of thinking about space and time in organization and certainly intervention designed to alter and manipulate spatial arrangements according to their narrow criteria is likely to be dangerous and liable to backfire.
This final point can be illustrated by the 20 customer information kiosks that Fulchester installed in an attempt to prevent mass congregation and to enhance smooth people flow, manned by a virtual customer services representative that takes the form of an avatar named FAITH4. When a passenger approaches the kiosk FAITH walks onto the screen from left to right and knocks on the screen and asks if she can be of any help. The user-interface screen offers a series of windows and menus, icons, tools and various controls. Modelled on one of the human CSAs who works at Fulchester and complete with ‘feminine attributes’ and regional accent (see Gustavsson and Czarniawska, 2004), FAITH is a way of relieving crowd build up and pressure around customer service desks. We are told that in recent years CSAs have been subject to ever increasing demands by passengers who look to them to solve all kinds of queries - a problem exacerbated, it has been suggested, by the popular television broadcast of a number of fly-on-the-wall documentaries about airports which follow and highlight the activities of demanding passengers5. The kiosks have been installed to answer routine customer information requests about facilities in the airport, flight information, train information and details on local accommodation and sights. FAITH is designed to ‘detect’ user confusion and responds to hesitation or
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uncertainty with a series of help functions which guide and train the airport passenger to use the system to its full capacity.
FAITH provides an uncanny mimesis of the customer service interaction and extends the reach of the ‘virtual organization’ into the physical. Customers are increasingly being constituted by and taken into the virtual realm where they can explore space beyond the immediate geography of the kiosk and the terminal. FAITH can offer recommendations and even draw your attention to special offers on sale in the various shops within the airport. In connecting with FAITH the passenger can be quickly and easily re-designated as a consumer or regional tourist. By touching base with FAITH and by plugging into its man-machine symbiosis, the space or mapped-space of the airport is redistributed and reoriented around the position of kiosk. Unlike static maps FAITH makes the passenger the central reference around which the airport is digitally translated and represented on screen; in tandem, airport users are re-inscribed as subject-object or ‘subjectile’ (Deleuze, 1993) so that they can be redirected along various lines of flight that traverse the airport.
The kiosks are designed to provide customers with the information they need to keep them moving as an element in the wider economy of flows around the airport space. The location of the kiosks is therefore important for managing this flow. People who refuse this enrolment by the virtual, however, can become awkward nodes of recalcitrance and in some cases the kiosk can, by virtue of its visibility, be ‘hijacked’ and re-appropriated for more traditional functions within social relations. Indeed, there have been a series of unintended consequences and unforeseen repercussions
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arising out of the use of FAITH. Christine Newsome, an IT manager at Fulchester Airport, tells us of a recurring problem in terminal two where FAITH is located. This is a high volume passenger-flow area: ‘…just before you go through security in departures. We would get a PIA (Pakistani International Airlines) flight and there were just so many people in that area, and because they all have to walk through, past the FAITH kiosk, they all come with all of their families, and they are usually very very big families and that whole area is just absolutely swamped … the kiosk is either going to be an obstruction for those people, or it is just completely hidden anyway for any other passengers that want to use it. So we are looking at moving that one’
Like the mapping of airways for aeroplanes the airport is being diagrammed and reshaped by new information systems and communications technology in relation to the calculation of movement, forces and flow. The virtual has begun to fold itself into our world, altering physical experiences and consciousness, and colonizing our unconscious in ways that finds expression in imagination and fantasy – sometimes revealed in the trace of language and its mixture of anthropomorphic and sciencefiction style phraseology. ‘Inundation’, ‘TOBIAS’, ‘FAITH’, ‘Snowstorms’, and the phrase ‘pushing tin’ used by American air traffic controllers to describe their control of aeroplanes, are all suggestive of some of these effects. The architecture and space of airports is also beginning to incorporate the shape-shifting potential of digital technology and artificial intelligence.
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To navigate the increasingly complex and digitally constituted space that characterises the modern airports passengers must increasingly defer to the (hybrid) logic of symbiotic human-machine technologies (Gray, 1995; Harvey, 1996). Automated voice announcements instruct individuals where to go and what to do. Meanwhile a complex architecture of automated security technology discreetly monitors, regulates and channels the flow of the mass, opening doorways or closing off exit gates, or sending signals to loudspeakers if it is necessary to relay further warnings and instructions (Adey, 2004). In addition a series of personal navigational-aid technologies are in various stages of development and deployment that will offer interactive forms of time and spatial management returning a degree of discretion and choice back to the individual user of organization (Diller and Scofidio, 2002).
Cutting edge airport design is no longer the modernist architecture inspired by the adventure of flight and travel into the unknown, but now looks towards architects such as Diller and Scofidio, Kas Oosterhuis, Lars Spuybroek, Stephen Perella, and Marcus Novak, who are all experimenting with buildings of ‘liquid’ and ‘soft’ architecture, buildings that are contingent and ‘emergent’ embodying revolutionary building ‘materials’ such as active inner skins, animated textures, and data driven structures creating multi-strata, convergent and enfolded, organizational forms. We might call these experiments ‘media machines’ which embody sentient technologies that act and react to human behaviour and other environmental forces allowing for a complex co-evolutionary growth of architectural form and user (Beckmann, 1998; Perella, 1998, Zellner, 2000). As it is being ‘emptied out’ to facilitate transit and flow the space of the airport is becoming increasingly more ‘plastic’ and variable,
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responsive to various forms of digital media and the ‘sensate’ qualities of hybrid manmachine ‘actants’ acting in concert with simulated and artificial intelligence. The implications of this diversity and development are not always known and the uncoordinated growth of personal mobile ICTs alongside the multiplicity of innovations and initiatives promoted by different ‘interest groups’ makes the space of the airport a heterogeneous-becoming, a multiplicity productive of all kinds of new borders and boundaries, zones of transition and mutual interference across ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ dimensions in organization.
Conclusion Fulchester airport promotes itself with the logo ‘bringing you closer to the world’. Indeed, the official (business) mission of any airport is the performance of connections. Airports are judged by where they connect to and by how speedily and efficiently they can process passengers and goods to those destinations. Airports tend to be thought of not so much as places in their own right, but more as what comes inbetween ‘proper’ places. They are said to be ‘non-places’, mere points where ‘thousands of individual itineraries’ converge for a moment, unaware of one another’ (Augé, 1995:3) – and are thus commonly narrated through vocabularies of ‘transience, alienation and discontinuity’ (Ballard, 1997). In fact ‘alienation’ increasingly describes the ambivalent relationship between airports and their local environments, a tension captured in celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas’ proposal that the replacement for the increasingly inadequate Schipol airport should be built on an artificial island in the North Sea – the symbolic subordination of physical space to the ‘space of flows’.6 In the era of an increasingly ‘light’ and ‘liquid’ modernity (Bauman, 2000), airports
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are sites where we might expect to find ‘the space of flows’ most visibly performed. This gives the airport the status of a prototypical organization for Castells’ ‘Network Age’.
We have attempted to evoke and understand something of the strange and disorienting experience of moving through, working in and inhabiting the airport as a non-place of supermodernity, a space of flows that we find is challenging the spatial and social categories through which objects, subjects and organization is normally described. At Fulchester the performance of ‘flows’ is routinely invoked by members as a mode of ordering, a means of ‘appropriating order out of disorder’. Any airport performs a wide range of such orderings (security, citizenship, customer service, ‘dwelltime’7 management etc.) and their associated space-ings. The successful movement of people and objects from one mode of ordering to another, does not, we have argued, translate the latter into the mirror of the former. Rather such movements open up a whole range of questions: about how subjects and objects assembled within, say, virtual space, fare in physical space and vice versa; about the tensions that are in evidence between representation and represented, sign and referent; and about how these drift apart and how are they pulled together again. We have here traced a series of objects, subjects and artefacts at Fulchester as they are passed from one mode of ordering to another, their assembly and disassembly performed by various information, communications, and digital technologies designed to facilitate order and enhance ‘flow’. In doing so we have explored the implications of these orderings for the management and performance of identities and spaces.
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At the same time, it is clear that order(ings) and stabilities are inevitably incomplete and prone to interference and overflow. Visiting Saarinen’s TWA terminal today is a very different experience from the soaring uplift inspired by its design and installation. Agitated, jostling crowds animate the concourse, washed in an uneasy mix of over-illuminated artificial light and grey ‘natural’ daylight that filters through grimy, stained windows. A worn and faded red carpet, and walls that reveal splinters and cracks, violate a building routinely cluttered with a series of plywood sheets that hide temporary building work (Gordon, 2004). Vast car parks and roadway extensions have encroached upon this once seamless orb of light, striated now with complex lines of gravity and cross-cutting demarcation. The airline it once served has disappeared, replaced by Delta, a low cost economy airline. International air travel is no longer a rarefied privilege for the ‘kinetic’ elite but a mass market segmented into streams of flow that course through airports at variable speeds, occasionally sharing the same space at brief moments of confluence, but otherwise diffluent in passage to various lounges and reserved territories, virtual and ‘real’, within airport space.
We have seen how objects, subjects, and meanings are rendered more volatile as they become ‘overdetermined’ by the constitutive and inscriptive work of modern information and communications technology (Knox et al., 2005). Today, media and surveillance technologies in combination with various forms of expert systems fuel novel dreams of order(ing) by means of smart buildings, automation, virtuality, and remote control. Space is the medium of their co-evolution, but space in organizations such as airports is no longer a stable container. It is increasingly more akin to a heterotopia of ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ topoi that are circumscribed and conjoined by a
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complex network of borders and boundaries that invent new limits and transgressions as it attempts to fulfil the desire to bring the world closer. Bringing one world closer, however, displaces another, as St Exupery’s line of flight beyond the boundaries of the real world survives in the contemporary airport in the form of digital oracles and an alien-nation of strange forces and hybrid becomings. Castells’ vision of flow is seemingly shadowed by a spectral and uncanny dystopia of instability and flood.
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1
A pseudonym.
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2
As Mol and Law (1994:643) argue, ‘the ‘social’ does not exist as a single spatial type. Rather it
performs several kinds of space in which different operations take place’. 3
4
5
TOBIAS is an Airport Information Advise System Fulchester Airport Information & Travel Help Here we discover another case of the intrusion of artifice and media into ‘real’ organization, the copy
back-forming the ‘original’ to create spirals of simulacra and the hyperreal. 6
As Koolhaas commented on Euralille, his large development in Lille, the nearest stop to Eurotunnel, .
‘What is important about this place is not where it is, but where it leads, and at what pace -- in other words, is to what extent it belongs to the rest of the world.’ (Goldhagen, 2002) 7
See Lloyd (2003) for a fuller explanation of this term.
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