Airports, a “place in my heart”

In recent decades geographers and anthropologists have argued that an increasing number of human activities take place in spaces that could be anywhere. These places look the same wherever they are in the world, and that they develop little, if none, relationships to the place/landscape where they belong. They are placessless This applies to shopping malls, high shopping streets, big shopping chains (from fast food to home furniture), leisure parks, hotels chains, highways, airports, and even Internet. In his anthropological approach to place, Marc Augé called them “non-places” which, in front traditional places of memory, are not relevant to any local history and identity: they are unrooted places with no collective memories attached to them, places no specific personality or meaningful relation to whom use them. They are barely transit places or places of consumption.

Augé’s conclusions however, contrast entirely with the experiences of current globalized citizens. Airports, and its land equivalent in terms of movement and transportation “roads & highways”, are certainly to be significant to all TCKs Personal accounts of TCKs always place airports and planes in an exceptional spot in their personal memories: a place of home, familiarity, and psychological comfort, and therefore give an opposite picture to Augé’s notion of ‘non-places’. All testimonies shortly exemplify the strong connection that TCKs have with mobility and movement, both physically and emotionally, whereas airports planes and roads are simply its physical representation. Pico Iyer, a journalist and a TCK himself, dedicates a full chapter to describe airports in his book The Global Soul (2000). His descriptions account several world airport experiences, but all these encounters recall for the clear sense of place that an airport (any airport) transmits to TCKs, certainly constructed via an interplay between feelings and practices. Iyer perceives airports positively as recurrent, homey and comfortable place, totally integrated and familiar with their global nomad life. In a live full of mobility, full of new unknown homes, landscapes, schools and friends, of different social habits and cultural expressions, the only familiar place for TCKs are airports. And the fact that all airports look the same, follow alike international protocols, actions and rituals, instead of inspiring alienation to TCKs, give them security. It is on this condition of meaningful place on lays airports’ capacity of being “placeness” for TCKs.

The fact that the community of TCKs do not experience a sense of place to common familiar locations, it does not mean that places and landscapes do not have meaning to them. Places are certainly a way of being in the world. Places are spaces which people have made meaningful and therefore are attached to in one way or in another. After describing airports from a TCK perspective, I would disagree with the affirmation that non-places, at least airports, have non-significant histories, activities, or experiences to a particular community of people, to the point that they may even develop a “sense of place”. Airports are the places where “global mobility” takes place, where all personal and collective stories and memories begin, end, and start again. Airports stage important moments in the live of a TCK, and become a familiar and a recurrent place in TCK’s global mobility. Actually, as a referent point in this global transitional life, airports are the only secure landscape, and therefore a potential landmark. For TCKs airports are both the place between new homes and new relationships, and by it self is a place full of meaning and experience. Airports represent the physicality, the material culture, of movement, of a mobile life, and that is what makes airports a landmark.