Informace o publikaci
"Where Are You?" Exploring Passengers' Perceptions Of The Airport As A Place Of Arrival
| Autoři | |
|---|---|
| Rok publikování | 2016 |
| Druh | Konferenční abstrakty |
| Citace | |
| Popis | Recent growing interest in passenger mobilities and embodied experiences of travels has opened up discussions about airports being not only global transfer points and flow machines but also places of anxiety and excitement, power and surveillance, encounters and separation. In our study we focus on passengers’ perception of the airport at their arrival, more specifically on the attributes of a place being ascribed to the airport by arriving passengers. By analyzing aspects such as behavior, movements and conversations of arriving passengers at London Heathrow airport for a period of four weeks, we offer several insights into a wider issue of what kind of a place an airport can be. In this case, we consider the moment of arrival to be particularly interesting, as the passengers are instantly confronted with the locality of the airport side. Therefore, the question “where are you?” was perceived as a major one in most of the passengers’ conversations, whether by asking it or answering it. By using the collected empirical data we challenge the idea of placelessness of airports, pointing at some of the more nuanced experiences of passengers shown in an exemplary context of arrival. By contrast, we find the commercial image of an airport serving as a gate to the city and the country to be more useful in this case, since it reflects passengers’ views on its locality as well as its position in (their) mobile networks more accurately. |