‘May I Have Your Attention’: Airport Geographies of Spectatorship, Position, and (im)Mobility

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the immobilities which airports induce and force to occur by positioning passengers through various and perhaps unconscious technological arrangements and performances of spectatorship. Through a conceptual reworking of spectatorship, these processes are explored through examples which range from the first airports, which functioned as city destinations from which to watch aircraft, to the carefully structured terminals of today. The airport is rethought as a space not merely to travel through but one which is designed to hold people in specific spaces. The paper also discusses the rationale behind these occurrences as they do not happen by random but are dictated by the forces of airline and airport regulation and economics.