[ Mapping Sozio-Spatial Mobilities ] (2005-06, Field Research, Spatial Analysis and Mapping)
In these times of constant mobility, urban metropolises are turning into intersections of transit and migration of goods, capital, services, cultures, knowledge and especially people. New concepts of urbanity with a transnational range are emerging. Moreover the relationship between geographic and social space is shifting. Social realities with specific qualities are appearing beyond traditional descriptions of locality, implying new spatial correlations between the local and the global as dense moments of transnational space. International airports are examples of these emerging transnational spaces and can be understood as compressors of space and time, conduits between physical locations in the world. At the same time the extraterritorial zones of airports become an important threshold controlling the flow of people in a free market economy. It is impossible to mark the border on the footprint of an airport. The border mutates into an abstract space extending beyond the physical territory of the airport. Nowadays, rather than a geographical boundary of the state, airport borders are a transit condition of the mobile body...