http://sac.sagepub.comSpace and Culture DOI: 10.1177/1206331203251254 2003; 6; 93 Space and CultureJustine Lloyd Airport Technology, Travel, and Consumptionhttp://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/93 The online version of this article can be found at: Published by:http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:Space and Culture Additional services and information for http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://sac.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions: http://sac.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/6/2/93 Citations at SONOMA STATE UNIV LIBRARY on February 14, 2009 http://sac.sagepub.comDownloaded fromDwelltimeAirport Technology, Travel, and ConsumptionJustine LloydUniversity of Technology, SydneyThis essay speculates on the changing forms through which “traveler’s space” is materially consti-tuted within the fabric of everyday life. The author first provides a history of traveler’s space as anon-place, via the writings of Le Corbusier, Boorstin, and Augé. Second, through an examinationof the recent public work of celebrity architects such as Norman Foster, the author suggests thatrather than displaying a tendency to an overarching “supermodernity” dictating flow and move-ment, contemporary technospaces work toward a new experience of waiting as pleasurable. Thishybrid and remixed modernity invites a different kind of engagement between technology andtravel that affects our ways of being in place. Finally, in a case study of the recent renovation ofSydney Airport, the author draws some distinctions between the scales of travel (local, regional,global), which affect such spatial performances.Keywords: airports; travel spaces; liminality; distraction; consumption; modernityThey revamped the airport completelyNow it looks just like a nightclubEveryone’s excited and confused.—Flansburgh and Linnell (2001)Author’s Note:A version of this paper was presented to the “Technotopias: Texts, Identities &Technological Cultures” conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow in July 2002. I wouldlike to thank the conference organizers and session participants for their questions and com-ments. I am also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for suggestions on editingand rewriting.space & culture vol. 6 no. 2, may 2003 93-109DOI: 10.1177/1206331203251254©2003 Sage Publications93 at SONOMA STATE UNIV LIBRARY on February 14, 2009 http://sac.sagepub.comDownloaded fromRecent urban design has been characterized by a rejection of modernist function-alism. This is evident in the considerable emphasis on style in post-1970s urban ar-chitectural design.1A less discussed topic is the function of this architecture. The closeattention that urban designers have recently given to considerations of utility strays farfrom the well-rehearsed divergence between form and function that is seen to markpostmodernism. Yet witness the new emphasis on fantasy in themed environments,the development of aesthetics of communal spaces in public art and street-scaping,the massive public- and private-sector investment in urban festivals and civic celebra-tions: All seek to reinscribe pleasure and desire in the urban subject. The motivationsbehind this increased focus on affect in design may range from warding off perceivedthreats to personal safety and security through increased surveillance to a need to in-crease property values and retail opportunities, yet their aggregate effect is remarkablysimilar. The formerly nonproductive act of loitering in the street and mall is encour-aged, mobilized, and transformed into a form of economically useful activity.This pleasurable postfunctionalism is particularly evident in the current revamp-ing of airports, railway stations, and to a lesser extent bus stations by public and semi-public authorities.2This reinvestment in public and private transit has given a new dis-tinction to urban routes: no longer somewhere to pass through, but somewhere tospend time. Here, after Siegfried Kracauer (1995), I consider the task of architecture inthese new public spaces as an organization of distraction. Kracauer—influenced bythe work of other cultural critics, including Walter Benjamin—believed that moder-nity was marked by experiences of distraction that hold at bay experiences of dissolu-tion and fragmentation. Seizing on the ways in which the new cultural forms of “ra-dio, telephotography . . . the expansion of land, air and water traffic . . . and speedrecords” represented a radical displacement and reconstitution of human sensory ca-pacities through mechanical means, Kracauer (p. 70) and Benjamin sought to under-stand the new forms of subjectivity that these cultural forms allow. Kracauer believedthat “spatiotemporal passions” of distraction (namely, travel and dance) delivered aliberation from earthly woes, the possibility of an aesthetic relation to organised toil,[corresponding] to the sort of elevation above the ephemeral and the contingent that mightoccur within people’s existence in the relation to the eternal and the absolute. (p. 72)Distraction from what is not the question, but rather distraction as an end in itself.Rather than contemplation or transcendence of the ephemeral, distraction’s object isto immerse the traveler in the very surface of the travel experience: hence a sense ofthe passing landscape as “flattened out” and relativized. Distraction is increasingly ev-ident in the inclusion of fabulous spaces within the most banal, in other words (as ex-pressed in this issue’s call for papers), the linking of junctural zones with liminalspaces—the airport as nightclub, the railway station as arcade, the Internet café.Temporal investment, rather than pure expenditure, encapsulated in the notion of“spending” time, is crucial to this “nightclubbing” of nonplaces. Instead of experienc-ing waiting time as wasted time, which inevitably leads to boredom and alienationfrom one’s environment, the urban traveler is invited to use transit time to accumu-late useful experiences of leisure and work in this revamped nonplace. The alleviationof anxiety about flying and other travel, through the introduction of a level of home-liness in the waiting zone—as well as an intensification of surveillance—has also be-come necessary in the age of the “War on Terror.” This notion of the livability