One of the key processes that I failed to touch upon in that manifesto I dreamt up last week was globalization. The process of globalization has been an ongoing human effort for thousands of years – I just a few short weeks ago found myself standing at the Jade Gate in China’s Gansu province, which marked the limit of the Emperor’s (天子) territory. This facility marked a significant node of global trade at the time, and two of the branches of the Silk Route entered China through this gate bringing with it wares from Anatolia, Arabia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, Persia, India and even Europe. It was also a cultural node as well, bringing together the merchants, traders and officials who gathered in the area to profit from the commerce that globalization had encouraged. The nearby Mogao Caves reflect the cultural capital (.pdf) accrued by powerful merchants who sponsored elaborate statues and frescoes in the contemporary Buddhist style.

Today airplanes have replaced camel trains, and the airport is the new Jade Gate that connects across distance and between culture. Functioning as a crucial node in the global network, airports present both an enticing business opportunity and an enormous management responsibility. It feels ordinary today to go to the airport and travel thousands of kilometers to a distant destination in a single day. This is definitely a contemporary attitude, as travel used to be incredibly time consuming. Distance used to be something that you measured in time – the time that it took one to travel a given distance. For instance in the 19th century It took settlers five to six months to follow the length of the Oregon Trail to the West Coast, and in 1912 the Titanic was in the midst of a five day journey to cross the Atlantic. Thanks the greater speeds enabled by airplane propeller (and later jet) engines we can cross the same distance in just a handful of hours.

When travelers reach their distant destination, they first enter the liminal zone of the airport. As a node in the global transportation network, airports are venues that stand in-between the place that you departed from and the place that you are traveling to. Experience tells us that airports do not tend to take advantage of this privileged position to build their own identity, and If you think about all of the airports that you have been in over your lifetime chances are most of them had similar features arranged in a typical style. This space of the airport terminal itself is an example of what Marc Auge calls a ‘non-place’ – a location from which cultural context and identity are largely stripped as a consequence of their transient nature.  This can be soothing – if a little boring – because of the volume of different kinds of people that transit airports, all of whose needs must be served by the same space. This has led to a general homogenization of airport terminal layouts and design around the world to make the ‘non-place’ of the airport surprisingly familiar, if unspecific to its geographic location.

So here is the conundrum: airports must be functional above all other considerations – their value is primarily tied to their ability to connect travelers and cargo with the global aviation network. And yet, as a consequence of this effort to serve functionality, airports have largely neglected developing an individual identity that reflects the geographical and social circumstances surrounding them. If international airports are modern-day Jade Gates, then they are too often lacking in their demonstrations of institutional cultural capital; they do not have their own Mogao Caves.

Without sacrificing essential functionality, airports should be striving to develop individuality instead of sameness in their terminal experience, and distinguishing themselves from both regional and international competitors through performances of their fitness as essentian nodes of the network and their socio-cultural significance as the facilitator of contemporary global consumer lifestyles. By developing and propagating a stronger institutional identity, airports will be able to tap into the potent strengths that are inherent to their essential function in the global market, and assume a singular character as among the most meaningful places of contemporary life, rather than an abstract ‘non-place’ connecting to other ‘non-places’ in the network.