Parallel Lines

The first chapter of the book focuses on the construction of a railway corridor built in the 1990s to connect Hong Kong's airport to its downtown. It contrasts the normative projections that informed its design with the heterodox uses that characterizes its now day-to-day operations. The chapter discusses on how several sites along the corridor have been appropriated by budget air travelers, such as Mainland Chinese tourists, lower middle-class Hongkongers, and Filipino domestic helpers, as an informal means of traveling cheaply to the airport. Melvin Webber's concept of “channel capacity” is used to theorize the insertion of these passengers into the everyday spaces of a suburban new town and to critique the failures of transport designers to adequately plan for their needs.

Cheap Tickets

The fourth chapter traces the development of budget air travel in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. It researches the development of low-tech interventions, e.g. airline ticketing counters located inside convenience stores and no-frills terminals built on the periphery of major hubs. This chapter looks to document how these facilities cater to travelers who lack the basic infrastructure needed to fly, such as a credit card, internet access, or even a last name. It examines two particular airports in Thailand's Bangkok and Malaysia's Kuala Lumpur, as they preform a “trickle down” process where cargo hangars and older terminals that were slated for demolition have instead been redeveloped into centers of low-cost aviation. Through a study of the future budget terminals in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, it contrasts the populist narratives adopted by budget airlines with the reluctance of planners to adapt airports to the needs of low-cost travelers.

Transborder Infrastructure

The second chapter investigates the “upstream” check-in system that allows passengers in Mainland China to fly through Hong Kong's airport without going through customs and immigration procedures. These facilities serve travelers whose cross-border movement is limited by their income or citizenship, such as tourists or traders from Africa and the Middle East. At the upstream terminal in China, travelers print their boarding pass and proceed through emigration. A sealed ferry then takes them across the border to Hong Kong, where they are transferred to an underground train that takes them to their departure gate. Isolated from other passenger flows, these “upstream” travelers technically never enter Hong Kong. Mapping the movement of passengers between Mainland China and the airport, this chapter documents the insertion of aviation infrastructure into marginal neighborhoods and unspectacular structures. It analyzes the aesthetics of transborder infrastructure in order to interpret broader discrepancies in global migration regimes in the political and economic framework of the Pearl River Delta.

Mobility, Migration, and the Future Asian City

Airport Urbanism concludes with an autobiographical account of the author's relocation to Singapore. Through observations of daily life and interviews with planning officials, the chapter demonstrates the urban design challenges entailed by the influx of short-term visitors and temporary migrants, who account for 40% of the city-state's population. The author argues that the current discipline of urban planning, as well as scholarly approaches to urban development in Asia, need to be reconceptualized in order to engage with the added demands that temporary inhabitants place on urban housing and transport systems. Ultimately, scholars, designers, and policymakers need to work together in order to explore how cities can productively accommodate a growing number of itinerant inhabitants and harmonize their needs with those of full-time residents.

Special Zones

The third chapter continues the theme of accommodating travelers despite architectural and social conventions by studying cross border bus networks between Hong Kong and the Chinese city of Shenzhen. These networks developed due to the differences in aviation regulations that made it easier to fly internationally from Hong Kong and cheaper to fly domestically (i.e. within China) from Shenzhen. The de-facto specialization of the two airports produced a system of “cross-boundary” coach terminals at shopping malls and border crossings located throughout Hong Kong and Shenzhen. An ethnographic study of air passengers traveling between the two cities revealed how the increase in cross-border traffic has affected a fundamental redesign of the border zone that separated Hong Kong from the Mainland.

What Is Airport Urbanism?

An autobiographical introduction that provides a unique frame for studying the cross-border movement of the “semi-privileged” air travelers in Asia. The chapter argues that these passengers, and the infrastructure systems that they use, have been omitted from urban scholarship due to the methodological and conceptual limitations of the existing literature. Through an analysis of three key theoretical concerns—mobility, infrastructure, and the everyday—it outlines an alternative, humanities-based methodology based on mapping, interviews, and site analysis that is more applicable to studying urban development in a contemporary Asian context.