Airport Urbanism: Infrastructure and Mobility in Asia by Max Hirsch (review)

Air travel in Asia often invokes images of elite businessmen in designer suits traveling by high-speed rail to a shiny new "starchitect"-designed passenger terminal. International flight can be assumed to be the domain of the elite. In Airport Urbanism, Max Hirsch has us look to the infrastructures that are serving the less-privileged populations of Asia. By focusing on the aviation infrastructures that serve the non-elite, Hirsch provides insight into who he terms the nouveaux globalisés and their impact on urban form. The nouveaux globalisés are constrained by income or citizenship in their ability to be mobile; yet, they have the desire or the need to fly. They are finding ways to travel internationally outside and alongside the infrastructures planned for the wealthy.

Despite the growing passenger base of budget travelers (low-cost carriers operate 60 percent of flights in Southeast Asia),¹ Hirsch argues aviation infrastructure has been planned for the wealthy. Iconic terminals filled with designer handbag retailers are not constructed with the budget traveler in mind, nor do they serve that passenger. Because air travel infrastructure does not take the budget traveler into account, the nouveaux globalisés utilize a combination of structures designed by experts and what Hirsch calls "bottom-up mobility tactics" (21), strategies devised by members of the flying public when their needs are not being met by more formal structures. Hirsch points the reader to the shopping mall kiosks where air tickets can be bought with cash, the far-from-luxurious warehouses serving as passenger waiting areas, and the crowded buses bringing migrant laborers from their employers' homes to the airport. Through examining the mobility tactics of the non-elite, Hirsch illuminates how increasing cross-border mobility is reshaping aviation infrastructure and Asian cities.

Hirsch is in conversation with scholars contributing to what has been called the new mobilities paradigm, research that views the social as being "reconfigured as mobile, with many aspects of social life, civil society, and political participation increasingly understood as being performed through mobilities" (Sheller and Urry 2006:210). Hirsch is responding to a particular call within mobilities research to analyze how movement is restructuring time and space and impacting urban form (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). This body of research has explored mobility at a range of scales, from transnational migration to a stroll down the street. Hirsch, too, examines mobility and its impact on Asia's cities at multiple scales, including how cities accommodate increasing international migration and the infrastructures needed to transport people from their homes to the airport. Hirsch argues that policy makers are not planning for the increase of international flight of non-elite populations. As a result, alternative, less visible infrastructures have fulfilled the needs of these fliers.

Hirsch is also engaging with the growing body of literature examining infrastructure from a social science perspective. Architects, city officials, and urban studies scholars alike have focused on infrastructure mega-projects. Transportation megaprojects such as urban rail systems or international airports come to signal the economic health of a city, evidence of its global connectivity, and point to its bright future. Not only is Hirsch skeptical of the impacts of large-scale infrastructural projects, but he argues throughout the book that less formal transportation infrastructures can do some of this work, albeit far more inconspicuously. Hirsch's focus on infrastructures which are built from the bottom-up with the non-elite user's needs in mind adds to the growing focus in anthropology on how communities creatively repurpose infrastructure.

It is at the intersection of urban studies, mobility studies, and infrastructure studies that Hirsch makes his theoretical contribution regarding the role of informality in urban areas. Hirsch argues that informality is constitutive of Asian cities and the infrastructures that ensure the mobility of people and goods within and between them. For those who study urban areas in the US and Europe, the extent and necessity of this informality may be new. Hirsch resists notions that informality...