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Reviewed by:
  • Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia by Max Hirsh
  • Kate McDonald (bio)
Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia.
By Max Hirsh. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Pp. 216. $25.

Correction:
In the original print version of this review, Max Hirsh's name was misspelled. The copyright year of his publication was also mistakenly printed as 2014, instead of 2016. The online version has been updated.

Over the past twenty years, the share of global air traffic in Asia has tripled while that of North America and the transatlantic corridor has shrunk by half. Max Hirsh’s Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia plumbs the relationship between the rapid growth of low-cost aeromobility and urban development in five major cities in Asia—Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Bangkok. Airport Urbanism argues that to understand how aeromobility is affecting urbanism in Asia, one must redirect attention away from the iconic infrastructure of international terminals and the vaunted networks of jet-setting “global elites” to the hidden (sometimes in plain sight) networks that facilitate the movement of an increasing number of low-cost air travelers.

The central argument of the book is that airports designed for the corporate business elite are ill-equipped to handle the rise of low-cost air travelers. The result has not been the exclusion of these travelers from the infrastructure of international travel, however. Rather, Hirsh explores the “transborder infrastructure” and “parallel transportation networks” that have emerged to facilitate the aeromobility of non-elite travelers.

The Airport Core Program, developed to anticipate the needs of non-traditional international travelers, led to the emergence of new infrastructure [End Page 886] and spatial practices in the Pearl River Delta, particularly between Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Dongguan. Hirsh focuses on three spatial practices in particular: (1) low-cost infrastructural bypass, in which lower-income travelers, such as Hong Kong’s large population of foreign domestic helpers, skip the iconic yet expensive high-speed Airport Express for airport buses, local trains, and even employee shuttles to get to the airport; (2) upstream check-in, which allows travelers transiting to or from mainland China via Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) to avoid the extra visa required to enter Hong Kong by checking in from special locations in the Pearl River Delta and transiting to/from these areas aboard the sealed SkyPier ferry; and (3) cross-border bus systems, which move travelers between Shenzhen International Airport, which serves mostly domestic flights, and HKIA, which serves mostly international flights, aboard buses that transit special border checkpoints built to facilitate the movement of people between these two airports.

Hirsh argues persuasively that these infrastructures and spatial practices are not “leftovers” from a previous era. Rather, they arose in response to the contradictions between economies based on regional labor and leisure mobility, rigid national borders, and a global image politics that has encouraged states to build infrastructure for a dwindling class of elite travelers at the expense of the growing class of “nonpedigreed” cosmopolitan travelers. Chapter 4 and the Conclusion turn to the role of low-cost carriers in the push to make the ten-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations into a common market, and to the urban and airport design practices of integration and segregation that this has entailed. These chapters shift the focus to Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Bangkok, where low-cost carriers have repurposed abandoned infrastructure to facilitate the mobility of budget travelers and laborers around the region.

In an illuminating analysis, Hirsh shows how the reluctance of these states to acknowledge and embrace low-cost travel led first to slapped-together solutions and later, in the case of Singapore’s Changi Airport, to the planning of a “boutique,” low-cost terminal that, with limited public transportation, expensive dining and shopping options, and automated check-in procedures, did not in fact cater to low-cost travelers. In an eloquently written Conclusion, Hirsh draws attention to the interrelationship of airport design strategies that segregate low-cost leisure travelers and urban design practices that segregate low-wage foreign labor. Harkening back to the analysis of the infrastructure and spatial practices of foreign domestic helpers in...

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