Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20

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Emotion, Space and Society

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/emospa

Globalisations utopia? On airport atmospherics

John Urry a, Anthony Elliott b, *, David Radford c, Nicola Pitt c
a
Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
b
Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations & Cultural Transformations, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, GPO Box 2471, Adelaide,
South Australia 5001, Australia
c
Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations & Cultural Transformations, Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The article argues that the highly managed atmosphere of airport terminals is particularly characteristic
Received 6 July 2015 of the ‘global’ era. Acknowledging that the thesis of airports as ‘non-places’ has been a useful provoca-
Received in revised form tion, the article contends that airports are in fact distinct spaces with particular kinds of atmosphere (of
14 March 2016
emotions, affects, passionate intensities). Moreover, these atmospheres are moving out into many other
Accepted 21 March 2016
Available online 6 April 2016
places that appear to be more and more similar to airports. Mapping connections between the trans-
We dedicate this article to the memory of formation of airport terminals and globalization, the paper draws upon research based on ethnographic
John Urry e our colleague and friend. observation and interviews conducted at European airports to situate airport atmospherics in terms of
extensive sequencing, information, consumer culture and ever-increasing technological intervention.
Keywords: © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Airports
Atmosphere
Place
Experimentation
Consumption
Globalization

Today my favourite kind of atmosphere is the airport atmo-
sphere … Airplaces and airports have my favourite kind of food
service, my favourite kind of bathrooms, my favourite pepper-
mint Life Savers, my favourite kinds of entertainment, my
favourite loudspeaker address systems, my favourite conveyor
belts, my favourite graphics and colors, the best security checks,
the best views, the best perfume shops, the best employees, and
the best optimism. Andy Warhol (1976, 145)
1. Introduction
In this paper we discuss transformations currently underway
across many airport terminals worldwide. These transformations,
which are rarely analysed as such, concern what Andy Warhol
termed the “airport atmosphere”, and are linked to global institu-
tional and cultural changes in the contemporary world. We suggest
that the atmosphere of airport terminals is highly characteristic of
global processes that over the past two to three decades have so
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: anthony.elliott@unisa.edu.au (A. Elliott).
powerfully transformed almost all societies around the globe. We
see the highly managed atmosphere of the airport terminal as
particularly characteristic of the global era. The airport space is
globalization's utopia, the perfect form that globalization takes,
stemming from the very best optimism. This utopic atmosphere is
then copied, simulated and rolled out in towns, cities, resorts,
islands, festivals, and events around the world. In short, the airport
atmosphere, at once regulative and experimental, is on the move.
This utopic atmosphere of airports appears to exemplify what
Ohmae (1990) described as: “the free flow of ideas, individuals,
investments and industries... the emergence of the interlinked
economy brings with it an erosion of national sovereignty as the
power of information directly touches local communities” (269).
Ohmae argued that this borderless world would generate new
business opportunities, international friendship, family life across
distance, international understanding, greater openness of infor-
mation and more wealth. In this utopia it was thought to be good to
move, as well as to receive flows of people and objects from else-
where. Many believed that these mobilities would reinvigorate
societies through new ideas, information and people, making so-
cieties, places and people more cosmopolitan (Beck, 2006). Bauman
(2000) conceptualised these processes as a “liquid modernity”,
contrasting them with a more fixed and stable older modernity.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2016.03.003
1755-4586/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
14 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20
This paper will examine this utopia via the notion of the airport
atmosphere. We begin with a brief history of how these utopic
spaces came to emerge. The atmosphere is emblematic of this
utopic impulse, which can be seen to carry over into twenty-first
century and the contemporary global airport hubs of today.
At the outset, however, some preliminary comments are
necessary regarding the term atmosphere. It is broadly recognized
that atmospheres are fundamental to the constitution, reproduc-
tion and reinvention of society (Elliott, 2013). There has been an
increasing body of research across a number of disciplines on the
theme of atmospheres (Sørensen, 2015; Bille et al., 2015). It is
important to recognize that, while the notion of atmosphere is
deeply interwoven with associated terms such as affect, emotion,
ambience, and attunement (or what Anderson refers to as “col-
lective affects” (2009; 78), we are talking essentially about a vague
concept, and certainly one not easily defined. There is an indeter-
minateness, ambiguousness or openness about atmospheres which
suggest it is a quality of experience that has a “singular affective
quality” (Anderson, 2009; 79). Anderson furthers elaborates on this
when he describes atmosphere as something which holds in ten-
sion a series of opposites, “presence and absence, materiality and
ideality, definite and indefinite, singularity and generality”
(Anderson, 2009; 80).
Following Bille et al., atmosphere can (as a first approximation)
be defined as “a point of reference for the immediate human
interaction with particular places”, a point involving spaces and
temporality, materials (objects) and experiences (Bille et al., 2015;
32). Atmospheres are dynamic contexts, in which people dwell. A
“force field”, as it were in Stewart's terms (2011) of lived effects;
spaces which have the ability both to affect and be affected (2011;
452). Drawing considerably on the work of the philosopher Gernot
Bo€ hme, a special edition of Emotions, Space and Society (2015, vol.
15) investigated how atmospheres are today constructed or staged,
from such disparate locations as architecturally enhanced urban
environments, the home, sports stadiums and museums. Given the
challenges of investigating the inherent subtleties related to “the
existential in-betweenness of subject and object” in relation to
atmospheres (2015; 33), this paper draws on both theoretical and
empirical perspectives, situating the discussion of airport atmo-
spheres from fieldwork conducted within airports spaces.
2. Airport terminals: beyond the aeronautical
Air travel went from small beginnings on a sand dune in North
Carolina in 1903, with the Wright brothers’ first flight, to become
the industry that stands for and represents the new global order.
And astonishing new aircraft are nothing without airspaces; the
history of flight has been the history of massive transformations of
airspace (Cwerner et al., 2009). According to Le Corbusier aircraft
were the greatest sign of progress seen during the twentieth cen-
tury, although at first airfields did nothing to reflect this modernity
(Pascoe, 2001, 127). In a second period, airports developed into
transport hubs with increasing interconnections between different
modes, of planes, trains, metro and cars. Le Corbusier especially
promoted the airport as a machine for travellers rather than a field
oriented to the plane (Pascoe, 2001, 120e1). This shift, stemming
from the growth of interwar airmindedness, involved airspaces
being turned into complex and integrated infrastructures often
characterised by futuristic design (Jarach, 2001; 121; Adey, 2010).
The third stage saw the development of the commercial airport or
the global hub, and it is these which this paper focuses upon. Air-
ports moved away from being mainly transport hubs and became
sites for mass travel and consuming, with most airports being built
on the edge of cities, as camps. Such airports are strategically
important within the global competition of places, cities and
regions. Certain airport operators such as the Schiphol Group in the
Netherlands, Fraport in Germany or BAA in the UK establish and
manage new airports and airport services around the world.
This development of airport terminals involves a reworking of
social and physical relations. Airports are “terraformers”, reconfi-
guring geography according to the “spatio-temporal rhythms and
cross-modal standards of global capital” (Fuller and Harley, 2004;
102e3). Especially striking are the European, Asian and Middle
Eastern airports often designed on a vast scale by celebrity archi-
tects and sometimes located upon newly formed islands built in the
sea, in the desert, and operating on global time (e.g., Hong Kong
International Airport Terminal 2; Heathrow International Airport
Terminal 5; Changi Airport Singapore Terminal 3; Abu Dhabi In-
ternational Airport Terminal 3; Madrid Barajas International
Airport, Terminal 4). Adey emphasizes how airports are always on
the move, with endless accretions, extensions, runways, rethem-
ings, makeovers (2006; 81ee2, see also Adey, 2010).
What is also significant is that as many people and objects are
more mobile in airspace, others become relatively less mobile.
Overall the greater the extent, range and significance of mobility
around the world, the more elaborate and complex the conse-
quential patterns of immobilisation (Urry, 2007; Adey, 2010). An
enormous fixed and immobile infrastructure affords the mobilities
of people and objects, through directing, checking, monitoring,
ensuring security, providing hospitality, entertaining, feeding,
ground transportation, engineering, and air traffic control. These
immobilities are organised around various kinds of limited move-
ment such as planes, fuel, luggage, passengers, staff, objects, ser-
vices, trolleys and consumer goods, intermittently proceeding
along mostly pre-determined routes through the airport-city. These
objects proceed around the place of the airport; on occasions being
combined (passengers to get access to trolleys) and on other oc-
casions kept apart (luggage not yet security checked must not get
near planes).
Despite the notion that airports have become ‘non-places’ of
mere holding, waiting, extended profiling, we suggest there is a
kind of romantic emotional connection to the airport both for
passengers and airport personnel. This connection to the airport
appears to be different from other modes of transport or service-
scapes in a business sense, in that the airport is regarded as a
special global space in which to dwell. Something of this other
world of airspace is amusingly captured in Walter Kirn's novel Up in
the Air: “Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language,
architecture, mood, and even its own currency e the token econ-
omy of airline bonus miles that I've come to value more than dol-
lars” (2001; 5; see also the 2009 George Clooney movie based on
this book).
The myriad entertainment and innovative, personalised, or DIY
services offered by airports as they compete for customers means
that understandings about airport atmosphere are vitally impor-
tant to the modern day airport as a commercially viable enterprise.
In drawing on recent work that investigates the role of globaliza-
tion and mobile lifestyles in the development of the air travel in-
dustry combined with an examination of atmospherics, the
calculated design of space and place for commercial purposes, in
the rest of this paper we explore the production of airport spaces as
places of increasing experimentation, experience and escape for
passengers/consumers intermittently on the move. This paper
draws upon extensive research based on various mobile methods
conducted at different kinds of contemporary airport.
2.1. Globalization
Here we outline some of the powerful connections between the
transformation of airport terminals and globalization. First, there is
 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20
the sheer scale of the air travel industry, of international travel
flows and of the monumental scale of airports, all being major
components of the emergent global economy. In 2013, the world
witnessed over 1 billion international flight arrivals. And for the
first time in human history, 2013 saw over 3 billion passengers,
domestic and international, carried by airlines worldwide. At any
one time, there is the equivalent of a large American city living life
in the sky, ready to descend onto the world's most iconic airports.
These global hubs, to be sure, produce an exceptional sorting and
resorting of populations. As Foucault (1991) contends, this process
is fundamentally political and bound up with central issues of po-
wer, knowledge and normalisation within and across societies.
Second, air travel presupposes the notion of a global or Universal
Time. Such a time synchronizes the actions of organisations and
people involved in air travel around the world. It thus presupposes
a global ordering that synchronizes air flights through the hetero-
geneous ordering of aircraft, passengers, crew, baggage, fuel,
freight, catering and information so that planes are ‘airborne on
time’. Synchronising flights is also affected by the interconnected-
ness of computerised booking systems and of English as the nor-
malising language of this airspace (Peters, 2006a,b).
Third, air travel transmits people into global relationships
through what Gottdiener (2001; 10e11) terms a “space of transi-
tion”. Air travel is the key “space of flows” that moves people
around the world, especially connecting hub airports located in
major global cities. This system links together certain places,
forming networks and bringing those connected places closer
together while making those less connected places further apart
(Van Nuffel et al., 2010). Following Derudder et al. (2005), there are
five reasons why international air travel provides a central data
source for analysing worldwide business and professional net-
works: (1) airline routes provide a reliable indices for transnational
traffic flows; (2) airline route networks indicate the level of inter-
action between world cities; (3) notwithstanding new information
technologies, the preference for face-to-face meetings remains high
in business and the professions; (4) air travel is the preferred
transport option of the global business elite, as well as tourists; and
(5) airline connections are a key component in the global compe-
tition among cities (Beaverstock et al., 2010).
Fourth, international air traffic makes possible very many mo-
bile lives, of holidaymaking, family life, money laundering, business
travel, drug trading, asylum seeking, leisure travel, professional
lives, slave trading and especially friendship (Elliott and Urry, 2010).
The production of mobile lives involves regular and routine travel,
for business miles, family miles, friendship miles, romance miles
and the like. Indeed, friendship and family miles are the fastest
growing sectors of travel and tourism worldwide. Tourism is one of
the world's largest industries, generating in excess of US$7 trillion
annually (WTTC, 2014).
Further, air flight affords a god's eye view, a view of the earth
from above, with places, towns and cities laid out as though they
are a form of nature. Air travel colludes in producing and rein-
forcing the language of abstract mobilities and comparison, an
expression of a mobile, abstracted mode of being-in-the-world
(Szerszynski and Urry, 2006). This mode of existence has been
labelled “detached engagement” (Elliott and Urry, 2010), and forms
a key plank of “the new spirit of capitalism” for this airmobile
business elite (Boltanski and Chipello, 2007).
3. The airport atmosphere
But there is something more than these connections of air travel
and globalization. This is the nature of what we call the airport
atmosphere. The most common conception here is that airports are
“non-places” which involve: “entirely new experiences and ordeals
15
of solitude” (Auge , 1995; 93). Such non-places are to be found:
“where people coexist or cohabit without living together”; they
“create solitary contractuality” (94). Or as John Berger writes about
their strange character: “Airports are too polite; reality is always at
one remove in an airport” (cited Pascoe, 2001; 229).
Airports are often viewed as a new generic space similar to
shopping malls, business hotels, service stations, supermarkets and
so on. Nothing distinguishes one airport from another since their
design aesthetic is globalized. Such an aesthetic is an example of
what Rem Koolhaas and Mau (1995) terms “generic city”. Much of
the sign language used is international (especially English) and
many experiences are similar across airports located in most soci-
eties. Certain corporations developed expertise in airport design
and management and this too homogenises airports, turning them
all, it is said, into non-places (Fuller and Harley, 2004; Putz, 2012).
There is little doubt that the thesis of airports as non-places has
been a useful provocation. However, in line with other criticisms of
this thesis (Dodge and Kitchin, 2004; Sheller and Urry, 2006), we
seek to demonstrate that airports are not non-places; they are
distinct with particular kinds of atmosphere. Moreover, this at-
mosphere is moving out into many other places which appear to be
more and more similar to airports.
Airspaces are places of considerable social, technological and
spatial complexity. There are many system features that constitute
airports, features engineered through design and material layout,
the sign system, and multiple code-spaces (Dodge and Kitchin,
2004). These system features include the following:
 the arrival of smart airports, or ‘terminals 3.0’. Smart airports are
organised in and through digital grids, with continuous con-
nections to e and monitoring of e passengers
 passengers only move one-way and they can almost never go
into reverse
 each passenger is transformed through a series of planned and
timed steps from one holding pen to another
 these pens depend upon class
 passengers have to find their un-escorted routing in what is
otherwise a maze of corridors, staircases, lifts, escalators that are
mostly illegible to the traveller
 passengers must follow informational signs from entry to plane
e there can be no tactics
 there are strict rules relating to the parallel movements of
baggage that are sometimes to be with passengers and some-
times separated from them
 most airspace involves discourses and practices of waiting-
anticipation-waiting
Fuller (2009, 63) expresses this last point as “We walk e we stop
e we sit e we walk e we stop”. There is a rhythm of stopping and
going, waiting and then moving, all within a climate controlled and
closely surveilled environment. Airspace is primarily a visual
environment which prioritises reading signs and it is those read-
ings that have the effect that intermittently those passengers move
onto the next holding pen.
These features depend upon systems of information including
frequent flyer programmes, passport control, booking by agents/
airlines, flight manifold, flight schedule, service arrangements,
retail delivery systems, luggage check-in, air traffic control, airlines
and plane systems. All activities in airports depend upon these
informational systems and they serve to constitute the passenger,
the flight attendant, the baggage handler and so on. None of these
roles are separate from the many interdependent virtual environ-
ments which constitute the bearers of each. No person has any
status without such information. People are mere collections of
mostly digital information and this helps to produce the airport
16 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20
atmosphere. It is a place of abstracted information. As Ellis et al.
(2013; 718) suggest, such spaces of surveillance can be thought of
as “complex and ambiguous, entailing elements that are both: ever-
present and yet absent (unnoticed), material (embodied through
the CCTV camera) and yet ethereal (the watcher of the camera is
invisible), geographical (location in a particular time and space) and
yet trans-geographical (transmitted to other times and spaces
through the internet), and facilitating a safe and secure environ-
ment and yet facilitating distrust (invading privacy)”.
Especially significant is automated risk profiling. This starts
when would-be passengers initially book flights. With Britain's
smart-border process developed by Raytheon, fifty three pieces of
information are automatically scanned in advance so as to identify
signs of potentially risky or abnormal behavior (Graham, 2011;
138). The algorithmic programme identifies hidden associations
between people, groups, behaviours and transactions. Such algo-
rithmic security especially developed by private corporations
brings military force into close proximity with leisure, pleasure,
family and friendship (Amoore, 2009, 2011). Another important
feature is “digitized dissection”, the anatomical disaggregation of a
person into many bits of information pertaining to various degrees
of risk (Amoore, 2011; 35). Much is rendered known, although
those being digitally dissected normally have no idea they are being
so dissected often by machines/people physically located in other
distant countries.
More generally, Fuller (2009) argues that almost everything
about airports is informational. Not only is the airport saturated
with information in terms of signage, advertising, pricing labels,
directions, but it is managed through real time integrated infor-
mation systems. But most significantly for Fuller, the airport is
organised like information. The atmosphere of airspace is of excess
information. Processing that information characterises the airport.
Indeed passengers and those working at airports are little more
than information processors.
The airport organises the chaotic movement of bodies, planes,
baggage and bits into sequenced flows through what Fuller terms
the protocols of “store and forward”. It involves a series of waitings
(for planes to board, for takeoff clearance, for baggage to appear on
the carousel, for a connecting flight), with each possessing its own
material architecture, protocols and bodily affect (Fuller, 2009). In
airspace people wait because they have no choice. They have to
wait in order to leave. They are in anticipation; Bissell (2007, 282)
notes: “waiting for an event is a form of anticipation”. While
waiting people are liberated from the present, they are in a kind of
suspended animation. And it is better to have a place in the line,
rather than not be in line at all, as with the character played by Tom
Hanks in the movie The Terminal (Adey, 2010). But passengers
wonder are they in the right line? Does the information confirm
that they are ready to go? Why does the information not move us
onwards and upwards? Why the delay?
Serres (1995; 258) summarises the peculiar atmosphere of
airspace which is full of those in suspension looking at and waiting
for information:
On the departure board, the list of destinations reads like a
gazetteer of the world…Via the operations of this particular
message-bearing system, men and women part company and
come together, re-arranges themselves and create new human
mixes. Here we see them at rest; in a short while people who are
now standing next to each other will be a thousand miles apart.
We have suggested that passengers function as information
processors at airport terminals, but this statement now requires
further elucidation. Passengers may read (and be read by) airports
and their associated complex software systems; but this should not
imply that global airports produce a one-way language of com-
mand and control. Certainly, there are licensed ways of reading
airport information, and these relate to dominant corporate and
securitized forms of valuation pervading society as a whole. But the
reading of airport atmospherics remains a relatively open-ended
affair, partly because airports cannot supply fully pre-fabricated
contexts to render signs intelligible. Another way of putting this
point is to say that every reading is (at some minimal level) a
recasting or reinterpretation, and sometimes even resistance.
Airport atmospherics should thus be seen less as fixed units (like
signals) than as active informational and communicative force-
fields; modified and transformed in significance by variable codes
and spaces, which subtly condense the broader significations of
global aeromobility networks.
There is the further complexity that the boundary between the
digital universe and airport terminals is undergoing significant
transformation, a historic moment in the spread of new informa-
tion technology. Web 3.0 technologies, sensors, processors, and
always-on communications lay at the centre of current airport
service innovation. There is a direct connection here with the
informational airport. Some observers speak of an emergent
experimental reconfiguration of agents and systems, with notions
of innovation, reinvention and creativity to the fore as human
subjects recalibrate their relationships to themselves and others
within the wider informational overlays of global networks (Thrift,
2011; Elliott, 2013).
In this approach, the spread of experimental life-strategies is
understood as the cultural corollary of complex information tech-
nologies; touchscreens, virtual landscapes, location tagging and
augmented realities. Contemporary women and men, according to
this argument, are ‘trying things out’ beyond the inherited scripts of
custom and tradition. One influential reading of such experimen-
talism emanates from posthuman social critique, which empha-
sizes the mutual imbrication of humans and machines. As Guattari
(1995; 18) writes: “today's information and communication ma-
chines do not merely convey representational contents, but also
contribute to the fabrication of new assemblages of enunciation,
individual and collective”. Such a post-human conceptualisation of
the agent-system or human-machine relation, whose outlines are
briefly noted here, underscores that multiple, experimental or-
derings are intrinsic to airport life and these aeromobility
networks.
In addition to the digital-grid operation of surveillance
information-processing systems at smart airports, there is a strik-
ing trend towards capturing, that is, promoting and nurturing, a
more embodied, affective register of experience for passengers as
they move through airport spaces. As Adey (2008; 439) suggests,
the “movements, feelings and emotions found in airports should
not be subtracted from the powerful forces that permeate the
airport terminal”. Describing the particular aesthetic and archi-
tectural layout of airports as an engineering of “airport effect”, Adey
argues that airports wield an immense disciplinary power on the
bodies that move through them, both for the purposes of surveil-
lance and security on the one hand, but also, increasingly, as a tool
for creating value and generating commercial gain on the other.
The impact of atmospheres, or atmospherics, of particular serv-
icescapes on consumers, from retailing and shopping malls to bars
and restaurants, hotels and airports, are well established in the
marketing and hospitality management literature. Philip Kotler,
who in the 1970s pioneered the idea of atmospherics as a mar-
keting tool, identified that one of the most significant features of
any product concerns the place where the product is bought or
consumed. As Kotler (1973, 48) writes: “the place, more specifically
the atmosphere of the place is more influential than the product
itself in the purchase decision. In some cases, the atmosphere is the
 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20 17

primary product”. Atmospheres thus function as a kind of silent broader implications of movement by using aspects of movement
language which can communicate particular, largely symbolic, but itself as a means to interrogate mobility from within (see Adey,
also sensory, things to buyers such as factors pertaining to lifestyle, 2010; Creswell, 2010; Büsher et al., 2011). Further, as Sørensen
quality, or aesthetic impressions of the self. Getting the atmosphere (2015; 64) indicates, the study of atmosphere “hinge[s] on the
right has become essential to the success of a whole range of presence of an experiencing subject through which atmosphere is
consumer industries producing goods and services in the neo- conceptualised and analysed”. Since atmosphere is something that
liberal age of unbridled consumption. is subjectively experienced, it was critical to have the research team
conduct fieldwork in the space of the airport terminaldboth
3.1. Methodology observing and interpreting the atmospheres of the airport space in
their own experiences of it unfolding “through the imbrication of
Notwithstanding this mounting evidence of the tangible benefit subject and object” towards them at all times, while also being
to consumption and consumer industries from the terrain of at- attuned to and absorbing the subjective experiences of those with
mospheres, however, there remains a complex methodological whom they were talking to about the same individually unfolding
issue as regards intellectual inquiry. How does one study the at- matter (Sørensen, 2015; 65, see also Bo €hme, 1993, 2000). If atmo-
mosphere of an environment? Is atmosphere something that is spheres are defined as indeterminate in nature (Bo € hme, 1993), then
captured, observed, tracked, measured, experienced, is it some a focus on identifying their affective nature, as perceived by the
blend, or perhaps all of the above? In our research, fieldwork experiencing subject and interrogating that experiences as it is
analysis was conducted at multiple domestic and international happening, presents a means to explore the hazy and ephemeral
airports in the South Pacific/East-Asia regions and at airports in the characteristics of atmosphere (Bo € hme, 1993).
European Union. This research was carried out under an Australian
Research Council Discovery Grant e “Investigating international
3.2. Atmosphere, affect and place
work-related travel, global airports and transnational networks:
Innovation, Shape and Boundaries of Mobile Lifestyles”,
Airport terminals or airspaces, we are suggesting, are far from
DP120101628. While ongoing archival, documentary and anecdotal
“non-places”. On the contrary, many airports, and certainly the
evidence from other international airports have been included in
global hub airports of vast steel and glass, designed by celebrity
this paper, one particular airport, a pivotal connection hub between
architects, are increasingly treated by passengers as destinations in
Europe and Asia, was selected for intensive study due to its vast
their own right. Such spaces are not simply transit or in-between
confluence of different cultures, size and scale. Based in Europe, this
spaces that passengers pass through on a journey (Lloyd, 2003).
airport was in the business of selling a European flair to its
Airport terminals are affective spaces. Extending Bissell (2010), we
homeward bound and incoming passengers, while also seeking to
suggest that airports enable distinct “affective atmospheres”; of
cater to the rising Asian market as an indispensable stop-over point
expectancy, hope, enthusiasm, anxiety, desire and fear. Such af-
between the two continents. The size and scale of the airport was at
fective atmosphere cross and tangle; they are shifting, floating,
once small enough in terms of physical space, providing re-
open-ended. There are many examples of such affective atmo-
searchers with a good sense of the feel and nature of each section as
spheres and their wider emotional tapestries engineered at air-
it was occurring simultaneously, while also busy enough in terms of
ports. For example passengers can experience the feeling of the
the transit and flow of people through the airport, enabling re-
tropics in Singapore's Changi Airport's Butterfly Garden e vibrant
searchers to track the varieties of change in the sensory information
butterflies flitting through warm, humid environs. There is calming
emerging in the airport over different periods of time. Because
signature Finnish natural design on display throughout Helsinki
access was granted to commercially sensitive information this
Airport. There is historical and contemporary Japanese cultural
airport must be kept anonymous.
forms spread across Haneda International Airport, specifically the
Still, the question remains: how does one accurately study the
Edo Marketplace and Tokyo Pop Town. Often such engineered at-
atmosphere of a particular place or space in the field e not least of
mospheres promote commercialism, with instrumental forms of
all where, to some degree, that atmosphere is being engineered,
rationality to the fore. Other kinds of engineering of atmosphere
with certain commercially-viable intended outcomes? In this case
unleash creativity, passion and inspiration. Still other airport at-
study a variety of mobile methodologies were employed to inves-
mospheres generate the closure of imagination or boredom, espe-
tigate, observe and interview different types of people within the
cially those airports described by one passenger as “more like bus
airport. Interviews were collected from 23 passengers, 8 airport
terminals”. It is notable, for example, that many US airports are less
staff (including cleaners, security staff, hospitality and shop
characterised by such atmosphere distinctiveness, and have
keepers, and passenger guides), and 9 senior managers (particu-
changed less since they were first established in the 1960s and
larly those in the customer relations/customer ‘experience’ de-
1970s.
partments), inquiring into their experiences and understandings
While the engineering of atmosphere is of considerable
about the sensory experiences of being in an airport. A total of
importance to airport commercial operations, it is also important to
approximately 56 h was spent inside the airport terminal, over two
recognize that other forms of social and cultural interaction,
separate fieldwork trips (2013e2014) where we observed the space
including possibilities for self-experimentation, can and do arise
of the airport terminal in concert with the flow of people, changes
from today's proliferation of affective atmospheres at airports.
to set up of security and terminal stations, as well as the de-
Airport planners, designers and architects focus much attention on
velopments (and/or disappearing) of offeringsdrestaurants, bars,
creating opportunities for affective inspiration, seeking to promote
shops and so on. The research team engaged in a series of “mobile
energy, enthusiasm and engagement, rather than just herding
interviews”, “mobile observations” and “mobile experiments” that
passengers through sterile spaces of storage. The potential personal
included, for example, setting up workstations in the airport and
and cultural productivity unleashed by affective atmospheres is
inviting passengers and/or airport staff to stop by for an informal
captured in the notion of “dwelltime”, which is nicely summarized
chat about what they considered to comprise the airport's current
by Lloyd (2003; 94e5) thus:
mood.
Defined more systematically as a series of mobile methodolo- Instead of experiencing waiting time as wasted time, which
gies, these various tools were used to try and make sense of the inevitably leads to boredom and alienation from one's
18 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20

environment, the urban traveller is invited to use transit time to such as the one mentioned above, may be engineered to facilitate
accumulate useful experiences of leisure and work in this engagement, energy and action. Yet such forms of atmospheric
revamped non-place. The alleviation of anxiety about flying and engineering are, in turn, recalibrated by the very mobile subjects
other travel, through the introduction of a level of homeliness in who use them on a regular basis. Thus, the airport-home lounge
the waiting zone…This notion of the liveability of transit zones was sometimes filled with exuberance during our periods of
has even been recently encapsulated in the concept of dwell- ethnographic observation, especially when families were eagerly
time, which is now used by airport planners to plan and create anticipating their impending holiday journeys. On other occasions,
such zones. the airport-home lounge was a site of monotony, especially for
passengers exhausted from periods of long travel.
The construction and reconstruction of airport terminals thus
4. Consuming atmosphere
involves many affective atmospheres within spaces, an “organiza-
tion of distraction…[to] reinscribe pleasure and desire in the urban
We have so far outlined various characteristics transformational
[airport] project” (Lloyd, 2003; 94).
of airport atmospheres. We turn now to discuss airports as places of
Our study of a range of experiments at a European airport where
consumption, a key aspect in the redesign of airport atmospherics.
dwelltime was embedded in forms of ‘homeliness’ is illustrative of
There is considerable literature documenting the impact of built-
such affective landscapes. Here we discovered a direct connection
environmental aesthetics or atmospheres on consumer behavior,
between the airport's engineering of a proto-domestic, lounge
emotion and spending (Babin and Attaway, 2000; Bitner, 1992;
space and the creative engagement of the desires, inspirations and
Donovan and Rossiter, 1994). Huge consumer industries have
energies of passengers. This involved the establishment of an
developed powerful strategies, from ‘branding’ to ‘theming’, to
airport lounge, with access available through single-visit payments,
convince people to purchase products and services. This is certainly
which replicated the atmosphere of home. The airport planners had
true of the one-way passages of airport terminals, with their
created a space of home, with reference to local traditions and
brightly lit, sparkly interiors, through which consumers move. The
habits, national customs, the latest fashion trends and use of so-
airport atmosphere, interwoven into terminal space through
phisticated technology. Sofas, bookshelves, the fireplace and a self-
retailing corridors and hospitality dwelling zones, aims to seduce
serve kitchen: the built space created, with its rich affective at-
passengers and trigger certain emotional, supposedly purchase-
mosphere, referenced the pleasures of domesticity. What did pas-
inducing, responses (Crawford and Melewar, 2003; 85ff). This
sengers make of this affective atmosphere? The evidence indicated
scaling up of airport consumerism represents big business. One
that the home-lounge had been a great success, but with a twist.
recent study concluded “travelling consumers increased their
Passengers used and returned to the home-lounge regularly, yet
average spend by between 3 and 12%, with the top ten global air-
recognized that the space was a highly constructed one. As one
ports accounting for combined takings of $9.2bn…[accounting for]
passenger noted: “it is not like home but it is not like being in the
nearly 1/5th of the $49.4bn global travel retail sales total in 2012”
airport either”.
(PRWeb, 2013).
Taking advantage of the free-Wi-Fi available to all within the
These vast new airport consumption centres form a major
airport, this passenger explained that he enjoyed the home-lounge
component of global consumerism. Key to these developments is
because he could keep online connections with his wife and chil-
the engendering of new consumer products and services, what we
dren within a domestic setting, whilst in fact he was remaining on-
might term ‘passenger consumer experiences’, within the mobile
the-move. Intriguingly, the passenger used a travel picture diary of
pathways of airport terminals. Here the focus is on connecting
his day, which he uploaded through mobile technology (iPhone)
consumer culture directly to the mobility fields of people at airport
and social media. The home-lounge, he said, transfigured his work/
terminals. When asked about considerations of atmospherics at the
life balance: the airport was no longer a place of disconnection, but
airport, one customer insights manager remarked: “usually we
of connection.
want to have Euros per each square meter. So that is where we
Affective atmospheres are part internal and part external.
usually start, in terms of customer and commercial operations”.
Bo€ hme (1995) writes of the personal productivity of atmospheres,
Fields of commercial activity at airports are intensely competitive,
which can induce moods, affects and passions irrespective of the
and the focus on tying customer and commercial operations
conscious self-understanding of agents. In this sense, atmosphere
together reflects the retail pressures of capturing passengers on the
has an internal relation to the subject; but Bo € hme also contends
move in an increasingly crowded marketplace. This customer in-
there is a general reach or extension of atmospheres, one of
sights manager, and also other senior managers interviewed in our
external consequence. Atmosphere is thus deeply implicated in the
study, underscored that the airport is competing both in the market
constitution of spaces. Applying Bo € hme's work, Lo€w (2008; 45)
for passengers/consumers and in the market against other airports.
argues “the generability of atmospheres…is staging work. Com-
Particularly significant again is the role of atmosphere, deployed
modities, politics, firms, and entire cities are staged. The self-
to unify symbols, ideas and discourses pertaining to the good mo-
staging of people is also an essential aspect of the everyday
bile life and the cultural value of consuming the newest global
world. It is a question of giving people and things an appearance
brands, products and services. Much of the creative and cultural
that achieves the desired aura. Designers work on it, as do cos-
work which goes into the production of airport consumer atmo-
meticians, set designers, interior designers, advertising and fashion
spheres, such as theming, branding, advertising and design, seek to
experts”.
lock the consumer's affective investment into a particular space and
This doubleness of atmosphere, working at once inwards and
generate a fixed, narcissistic focus on the solitary, consuming self.
outwards, is equally true of airport terminals, or airspaces. So far,
Just as with Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000), so we might speak of
however, our evidence indicates that, because of the highly mobile
passengers ‘consuming alone’. This is viewed, within the airport
dynamics of airport terminals and their impacts upon lifestyles on
industry, as one of the principal commercial gains of atmospherics.
the move, affective airspace atmospheres are particularly open-
The complexities of consumerism and atmospherics at airports
ended, uncertain and unpredictable. “The affective atmospheres
bring us directly to practices of ‘worlding’, a central aspect of
of mobile locations”, writes Hui (2014; 174), “emerge and disappear
experimental modern businesses. ‘Worlding’ in effect rearranges
alongside the mobilities that constitute them”. Airport lounges,
the relationship between consumers, workers and businesses,
 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20
when they have been traditionally understood contextually. As
Lazzarato (2004; 188) explains: “The company produces a world. In
its logic, the service or the product, just as the consumer or the
worker, must correspond to this world; and this world in its turn
has to be inscribed in the souls and bodies of consumers and
workers”. On this view, consumer industries do not only produce
products, services or objects. In a world of digital production, with
the creation of a global single market, consumer industries produce
consumer worlds, into which products, services and objects circu-
late through super-fast networks. This is especially consequential
for airport terminals, which are heavily digitized. The embedding of
Wi-Fi into the infrastructure of consumer environments, from
Starbucks to McDonalds, is an example of digital technology
‘worlding’.
Especially noteworthy has been the growing ‘worlding’ not only
of commercial operations, but also of airport security services. In
general terms, spaces of security at airports denote atmospheres of
surveillance. Studies have shown that one of the most stressful
aspects of passenger experience in airports is moving in and
through the security checkpoint (Amadeus, 2012; Scholvinck,
2000). But this may now be changing. While moving through se-
curity is clearly differentiated across airports and countries (for
example, airport security in the US and Israel is especially strin-
gent), some airports, including where research was conducted for
this study, have sought to redefine the security checkpoint as a
central touch point along the customer journey. Seeking to redesign
security as a smoother atmospheric experience, one senior man-
ager commented that their airport is moving away from recruiting
security staff from security-based agencies and towards hiring staff
from hospitality-based agencies. The intention is that passengers
are increasingly ‘welcomed’ to, and through, security. This has
involved a fundamental shift in atmospherics to, in the words of
this manager, “security as service”.
Would it be possible to roll back the atmosphere of security as
surveillance, avoiding the invasive methods of securitization
currently dominant at many airports around the world? Could se-
curity as service become an emergent new atmospherics at air-
ports? It has been suggested by some that we interviewed that this
is indeed feasible. As one airport manager explained:
One thing we thought about was how to minimise passenger
stress, because every departing passenger experiences stress in
coming to the airport. The main question for passengers is how
long the security check will take today … [and those] who work
in security are to take responsibility…as hosts that welcome…
There is a chance for hospitality to become a ruling ethos, ac-
cording to this manager, with all that this implies in terms of care
and concern for passengers. The transition that needs to be made
might prove to be very difficult, but the advance required is one
which centres on the notion of service. As another customer ser-
vices employee noted, the airport management board imple-
mented a new, experimental approach because it realized:
The security check can be a service e before it was only a check.
What we are aiming for is to work together with the passenger,
the journey, as safer e let's do it together. ‘Welcome to security!’
is something [additional]…to government regulations.
There are many difficulties in developing a new security atmo-
sphere to reset global airport agendas. At the European airport we
have studied, the goal to create meaningful interactions between
staff (‘hosts’) and travellers (‘users’) reflects how airports are being
reordered to produce increased efficiencies, technologies and
19
aesthetics as a more comprehensive capturing of the need of pas-
sengers. The question moving forward for these airport managers is
how to distinguish the needs of different types of passengers
(socio-economic, ethnic and so on) in the drive to provide
increasingly individualised and specifically-tailored sets of pas-
senger experience.
Such practices of reinvention infiltrate airport terminals writ
large. Airport terminals have been significantly transformed in at-
mospherics as a result of the spread of instant offices and airport
hotels, allowing travellers to arrive, stay over, do their ‘business’
face-to-face and depart (Elliott and Urry, 2010). Airspaces contain
meeting places that transform them into strategic moments in
constructing a global order. Indeed some writers thus view air-
spaces as new kinds of public spaces. Sudjic writes (1990): “It is a
surrogate for the public realm, one that offers at least the illusion of
a meeting place in which the rich and poor are in closer proximity
than almost anywhere else in an increasingly economically segre-
gated world”. Airspaces are places of meeting and consumption
rather like many other places across the world, no longer the
exception but the rule. The airport atmosphere is thus a world of
waiting, arriving and departing, lounges, English signs, pre-
packaged food, frequent flyer programmes and much consuming.
4.1. Airport atmosphere goes global
So we have established the significance of atmosphere within
the utopic spaces of airport terminals. We have argued against the
idea that airspaces are non-places, both because airports vary a
great deal and because many are places of distinct consuming
practices. But there is something else involved here, and this is the
way that this atmosphere is moving out from the airport to much of
the rest of the urban experience.
Many iconic signs and practices associated with the global order
derive from international air travel and a widespread familiarity
spread through film, TV and the internet. Such signs and practices
are on the move. Cities are becoming more like airports, less places
of specific dwellingness and more organised in and through mo-
bilities. Cities are especially like airports in how ‘security’ is
increasingly organised. In the ‘frisk society’, the use of detention
centres, CCTV, GPS systems, iris-recognition security and inter-
modal traffic interchanges trialled within airports then move out to
become mundane characteristics of many towns and cities. Global
air travel and its specific mobilities and materialities turn spaces of
exception (airspaces) into the generalized rule around the world
(Cwerner et al., 2009). For example, with the 2012 Olympics Lon-
don was transformed into a security fortress with an air exclusion
zone protected by surface to air missiles. London was made ‘secure’
through a security operation involving more British people than
were at the time fighting a war in Afghanistan.
The ending of the roaring nineties engendered various dystopic
visions for the new century. Bauman (2011) documents the
collateral damage resulting from a liquid modernity characterised
by systems of process and flow (see also Bauman and Lyons, 2012).
Moving across borders are not just consumer goods and pleasur-
able services, but also many bads, of environmental risks, terrorists,
trafficked women, drug runners, international criminals, out-
sourced work, slave traders, smuggled goods and workers, untaxed
income, asylum seekers, financial risks, and so on. There is a dark
side to movement and indeed to the airport atmosphere. In a way
the airport utopia turned a globalised open world into its very
opposite.
J.G. Ballard describes the symbolic aspects of the global infor-
mational display seen in airport concourses. They “are the ramblas
and agoras of the future city, time-free zones where all the clocks of
the world are displayed, an atlas of arrivals and destinations forever
20 J. Urry et al. / Emotion, Space and Society 19 (2016) 13e20
updating itself, where briefly we become true world citizens” (cited
Pascoe, 2001; 34). Airports we have seen are complex spaces with
peoples and cultures from around the world overlapping within
them through the intersection of enormously elaborate relays.
These relays come together especially within the departure lounge,
places of sameness produced by the systems of the industry and of
hybridity as mobile peoples and cultures unpredictably intersect
through various modes of waiting in transit, in a kind of suspended
animation.
And we have seen how the atmosphere of the airport is
particularly characteristic of the global era. The airport space is
globalization's utopia, the perfect form that globalization appar-
ently takes. But this utopic atmosphere is then copied, simulated
and rolled out in towns, cities, resorts, islands, festivals, and events
around the world; it is on the move and taking over cities near us
all. And that is why the analysis of the airport atmosphere and of
their variations matters a great deal, far beyond the literal perim-
eter of each airport.
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