Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. x, 201 pp., [10] pp. of plates. (Maps, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-8166-9610-9.
Max Hirsh’s Airport Urbanism offers an innovative (re)reading of contemporary cities through the lens of the airport. The book takes issue with expert understandings of urban development, and critiques scholarly approaches that “display an unfortunate reductive tendency to subsume all dimensions of urban change under a critique of neoliberalism” (viii). Hirsh’s work gives salience to a different kind of urbanism that complicates, if not contrasts with, elite planning notions of the modern, the progressive, and the globalizing. It seeks to historicize the manifold socio-cultural relationships that animate the city, and unearth the various disconnects between mainstream planning philosophies and lived experiences. In particular, the book focuses on the entanglements between mobilities, infrastructure, and urban form in East and Southeast Asian cities, where clearly different rhythms of urbanization are unfolding in tandem. Using Hong Kong, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore as its key examples, the book teases out a range of everyday informality and cost-consciousness that rub up against the glitz of urban life.
The introductory chapter opens with the author’s personal encounter with air travel in Berlin in the 1980s, when flying was still closely associated with the affluent. The seeming contradiction of travelling as a “non-elite” was, for Hirsh, symptomatic of the common conflation of a city’s offerings with one’s socio-economic status. The book nuances this view with understandings from Asia, calling to attention the rise of “the semi-privileged” who fly often, albeit on low-cost carriers. Using an “urban humanist approach” to capture their stories, chapter 1 immediately establishes the presence of parallel streams in Asian cities, as embodied by the diverse mobilities coursing through their airports. With specific reference to Hong Kong, the chapter uncovers a disjuncture between the design of the city’s airport (HKIA) as an efficient urban infrastructure for kinetic elites, and its less conspicuous function as a gateway for foreign domestic workers, low-skilled labourers, and Chinese tourists circulating to/from the city. Interrogating the slew of strategies that these non-elite travellers employ to become mobile, the chapter elucidates the entrepreneurial means by which they navigate Hong Kong and its expensive infrastructures through a variety of informal networks, social favours, and pop-up services. These stories suggest the tenuousness of “unifocal” understandings of the city as “sleek” and “modern,” exposing an underbelly that is just as much part of contemporary urbanism.
Chapters 2 and 3 extend this focus on the low-cost circuits threading through Asian airports/cities through an examination of certain “transborder infrastructures” and “special zones” springing up around Hong Kong. In referring to transborder infrastructures, chapter 2 calls attention to another stream of “non-elite” travellers—residents of the Pearl River Delta region—who take advantage of nearby nodes such as HKIA, beyond their jurisdictions, to connect with the world. Coinciding with a time when the Mainland’s infrastructures are not yet on par with the travel demands of its population, HKIA has stepped in to offer procedural enhancements like up-stream check-in and SkyPier (ferry connections) to facilitate the extra-territorial incorporation of these marginal populations within the airport’s orbit. Chapter 3 elaborates on this logic by elevating Shenzhen as a classic spillover or border city of Hong Kong. Sustaining another form of travel economy predicated on inter-modal connections and last-minute, over-the-counter ticketing to regional switching points, Shenzhen’s mobilities speak to a more colloquial form of globalization, which crucially supports the pent-up travel demands of the Pearl River Delta region that mainstream transport systems omit. Insightfully, these alternative systems depart from the usual discourses about prestigious international airports found in most literatures, making them an invaluable addition to mobilities scholarship.
The two closing chapters trace these non-elite circulations further south to Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, placing a particular spotlight on the low-cost carrier sector in each of these three countries. Observing Southeast Asia’s movement towards a single aviation market, Hirsh hones in on earlier discussions on the low-tech and less glamorous nature of these low-cost traffics, by fleshing out their dependence on offline channels for air ticket purchases, cheap bus transfers for getting to/from the airport, and old, defunct airports adaptively re-used as terminals for budget flights. Again, the new empirical cases presciently point out the contrasts between “plebeian” consumption patterns and the “first-world” image that urban governments tend to want to accrue to their cities. Nowhere is this contradiction more patent than in Singapore, where airport planning has taken on a more technology-savvy turn, even as air traffic growth in the city is driven largely by lower- and middle-class fliers not plugged in to the dot-com age. As the book concludes, this slippage between aspirational design and the less-than-congruent mobilities in Singapore and other Asian metropolises necessitates a serious relook at conventional rubrics of what counts as forward urban planning. It exalts policy makers to heed the lessons of the airport, to construct cities that are more in tune with the rhythms and flows of twenty-first-century “globalization from below.”
Airport Urbanism shines most in its advocacy of a subaltern view of contemporary cities. Innovatively, it does so through the metaphor of the airport and the messy, non-uniform streams that it carries. Rather than approaching these alter-mobilities as somehow residual or parasitic to the intended design of elite travel, Airport Urbanism exhorts scholars and urban planners to recognize them as a burgeoning norm in Asia, where large segments of the “semi-privileged” class can and are beginning to learn how to be mobile and urban in their own terms. While these networks of informality and cost-consciousness are not historically new, and indeed may not be as particular to Asia as the book paints them to be, the way in which Airport Urbanism puts these low-cost circuits into conversation with the conspicuous flows of kinetic denizens helps draw out a more balanced view, capturing the contradictions and simultaneities of international mobilities. This is a facet of today’s urbanism that is also worth highlighting, if to remind us that cities are not purely the domain of the well-heeled, but a shared space claimed, and resiliently transited through, by people from all walks of life.
Weiqiang Lin
National University of Singapore, Singapore