Before I move on to the bookās contents, I have to explain the reader the format I have chosen for the book. Although I have included some key illustrations, printing on paper has several limitations compared to the wonderful possibilities of electronic media. So, I invite the reader to visit the webpage www.ālandisdeairside.ācom where you will be able to see both the illustrations that are reproduced in full splendor, along other fascinating historical photographs, documents, and drawings. It is important to say that the Web site is a separate entity, fully non-profit and built only with the purpose of amplifying the discussion and analysis of the topics related to airport history. It has been said that one image speaks a thousand words; in this book, this may be true, but I will do my best to gear you up with a special pair of glasses that eventually, will allow you to see beyond the images. Precisions made, we move on to the difficult task to understand, why airports are the way they are.
The history of the airport seems to be rather different from that of its relative: the train station . While both aircraft and rail served as mass means of transport during most of the twentieth century, it is remarkable to see how similar train stations are around the world and to witness how most of them work really well. They are practical, easy to understand, and efficient in expediting multiple convoys of trains, with precision down to the second. Most of these facilities share a similar configuration, which has been proved right for a long time, creating a sort of basic design pattern for rail transportation planners. One may infer that in socio-technical terms, train stations rapidly reached a ādesign closure ā (or when experts agree that the basic problem of planning has been solved and thus left behind). In contrast, since their origins, the development of airports seems to be full of uncertainties. Just a glimpse of the last eighty years of airport design showcases a surprisingly wide catalog that does not seem to have two similar boundaries . Although hundreds of airports share a similar layout, today there is hardly such a thing as a typical airport ; instead, each one of them is so puzzle-like, so aesthetically diverse, that problem-solving skills are demanded of passengers and visitors . Figuring out where to go, what to do, and how do it on time is the norm of contemporary air of travel . Clearly, airports have become much more complicated than rail stations, and this is still fairly inexplicable. And while this question has remained unresolved for decades, the so-called level of service that rules both the aviation and airport industries has fluctuated decade by decade, year by year, just like the stock market, ranging from the true excitement of many to the more exaggerated air -rage syndromes of some. Rail stations have successfully sorted out congestion and delays, whereas airports have historically undergone serious jam crises, and we as passengers have paid the price of these inefficiencies.
I personally became concerned with this matter, or at least aware of it, when I started working as an airport designer in 1998. Since then I have become increasingly involved in both airport and transportation planning projects and have developed an interest in their historical development. But it was not until my second year in Cornellās super demanding Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies (S&TS) program when I started looking how technologies are perceived differently according to context and the social network that creates them. Because this book is thoroughly permeated by S&TS ideas, I think is relevant to say that I interpret S&TS as a new, interdisciplinary, and systemic field of study that analyzes the social , political, and cultural factors that shape science and technology, and how society is not necessarily driven by technological advancements. I must confess that it took me no less than two years in order to fully grasp this concept , and it was then was then when I realized that in essence almost no two airports looked the same.
Further inquiry suggested that most airports needed to be tailored-designed, thus making difficult the creation of standard models. This condition also seemed to contradict the very stable technological change in aircraft āincluding the change from propellers to jet engines after the Second World War. Indeed, one may argue that aircraft innovation was mainly invisible to users and related less to aircraft shapes than to their technical specifications, safety systems , and speed . Throughout history, airports have successfully increased and adapted the capacities of the airside in order to meet dimensional changes that are the product of technological change . But it was not until I became more aware of the mechanisms that allow a social construction of technology and of the ways that social historians put them in context that the invisible started to become not just visible but evident. There seems to be a single obstacle to airport standardization or patterned-continuity: The serious conflict that arises in defining the frontier between the landside and the airside .
In 2006, while I was in charge of designing a new international terminal for an airport , I noted that most of the planning meetings stalled when we were trying to define the overlapping of zones between the landside and the airside . In those meetings, everyone had an opinion about how to draw the line between the two, so consensus was hardly reached. At the time, I became more attentive to these issues and triedāunsuccessfullyāto find references in the available literature on airports. But every path became a dead end, sadly, there was scant record of the frontier as an object of scholarship. In a search to amplify the concept , I borrowed some key S&TS concepts and methods for my inquiry. Perhaps it was Star and Griesemerās (1989) concept of āboundary objects ,ā a classic within the field that became the closest reference on my way to figuring out what a landside āairside boundary could be. Although the concept was not necessarily applicable in the same way, I found some interesting common threads; in practice, just as āboundary objects ā functionāworking as a point of linkage between diverse specialistsālandside āairside boundaries are right at the crossroads of not just specialists but institutions, the state, the prevailing ideology, and the larger discourse of society. However, they lack integrity because the concept of the landside āairside boundary is not necessarily used indistinctly on a regular basis as a means of expert communication. Thus, I learned that although they are always present in every negotiation , these boundaries are slippery entities, potentially hard to trace, identify, or even make visible. However, as I suggest through this work, they are often tangible objects .
In hindsight, it all started making sense. I gathered my own recollections and notes starting from the days I worked as a project architect with Moshe Safdie and Associates in Boston; some colleagues and I were in charge of developing the expansion of Lester B. Pearsonās Toronto International Airport . Indeed, most of the time we workedārather than with the architecture or with the endless technicalitiesāusing simple, colored diagrams to represent jurisdictional zones. Some of these zones were symbolically owned by different entities or showed the status of passengers and employees, others marked the functional separation between retail and seating areas, and yet others represented flow patterns, restrictions, and codes. We would pin up and overlap those diagrams and then hold meetings, often packed with consultants and experts; we always upended trying to sort out the near-to-impossible task of pleasing everyone with an integrated diagram. I clearly recall that the need for a double segregation flow āunique to Canada, according to which US passengers are split from Canadians and again split from all other nationalitiesāseemed literally insurmountable. We spent months zoning and eventually designing the three-dimensional boundaries that will end up āsegregatingā those passengers. We devoted most of our energy to defining what I now call the landside āairside boundary , but back then, we were not even aware of it.
By Fall 2008, I decided to move on to formally researching this topic. After several months of reading, I could confirm that landside āairside boundaries were not discussed in most airport literature, so I felt compelled to investigate whether other groups of colleague planners, designers, and experts had had the same experience and trouble in defining them as physical entities. My first approach was historical, but instead of following a chronological order, I forced myself to randomly sele...