© Emily Ding - Stansted Airport, London

John Mayer - Wheel

An excerpt from Starting Points and Destinations, an honours research paper by Marlaina Read:

The airport is a place where journeys begin and end. These are the places that I start feeling like a traveller. In the airport I feel a sense of dislocation, it comes, I think, from knowing that there are hundreds of airports just like this one all around the world. I cannot be intimate with a location that is constantly repeated because it does not exist as an individual place. The structure of the airport does not require individuality in order to function. Its production of repetition and homogeneity is the basis for its efficiency worldwide because it creates an order through which people’s movements can be controlled smoothly. Any intimacy I could want to feel in this space would, therefore, be swallowed in the airport’s overwhelming sameness. This is a space that serves to move people on their way, it does not exist of and for itself, but instead only as a means of delivering people to their destination. The airport is a place of transition; it does not need to describe history or culture because no one is coming to the airport to be at the airport. They come to the airport in order to leave. The airport is what Marc Auge calls a non-place.

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