‘Where are you?’: (Auto)ethnography of elite passage and (non)-placeness at London Heathrow Airport

Abstract

Led by the question of where an international airport is placed within the aeromobile experience of kinetic elites, the author took on the role of a Business Class passenger to empirically reflect on the issues of placeness and non-placeness while routinely passing through one of the world’s busiest airports. The author gradually reveals the unique sense of place individual terminals hold, the familiar at-homeness of frequently used passages, the dwelling-in-motion within virtual infrastructures of habit, the ostensible segregation of ‘upper class’ passengers, the multiple placemaking efforts and the importance of specific aeromobile practices in the place-related perception of airports. Applying the concepts of place and mobility jointly in their mutual interconnectedness, this (auto)ethnography points to the hybridity of airport perception within the elite passenger experience, which goes beyond the usual binary of a traditional place and a detached non-place.

Keywords:

• Aeromobility
• autoethnography
• kinetic elites
• London Heathrow Airport
• non-place
• passenger
• place

Introduction

The arrival hall at Heathrow Terminal 3 is busy this early afternoon. At the arrival board, I read the departure places of aeroplanes that have just landed: LAX, HKG, AMM, ISB, VIE, HND, DXB. The three-letter airport codes are regularly replaced by the names of faraway cities they claim to represent. The automatic door opens and closes at high frequency, releasing groups of freshly deboarded passengers to the open space of the arrival hall. A young woman in casual business attire with a light suitcase rolling smoothly at her side suddenly stops near me to pick up a ringing phone in her purse. ‘Where are you?’ she says in a high-pitched and slightly irritated voice. ‘I’m at Terminal 3’ she continues, the rising level of her irritation becoming obvious. After a while of discussing a meeting point with the person on the other side of the call, she slowly moves towards the exit sign, occasionally sighing and shaking her head as if something hardly believable had just happened to her—she was expected at a different place, a different terminal.

In the following days spent at London Heathrow Airport (LHR), I realised that, indeed the question ‘Where are you?’ seems to be of significant importance to passengers. When asked to locate themselves, passenger replies ranged from the small-scale, ‘by the Costa cafe’, to geopolitical macroregions, such as Great Britain or Europe, and they oscillated between ‘being in London already’ and the rather unsettled ‘still at the airport’, still travelling. The designers and other entities involved in the production of the physical structure of Heathrow seemed equally preoccupied with the placeness of its various passenger welcoming sites at, respectively, Pret A Manger, at Heathrow, in London, at American Airlines and in the Skyteam Lounge. The simple but essential geographical question of the perceived self-location of (elite) passengers at airports resonated with my long-term interest in the geographies of frequent flying and led my research through the elite spaces of Heathrow to ask the very same question: Where am I when I pass through this international airport?

As many airport ethnographies demonstrate, different types of passengers and airport users can develop very specific place-related meanings as regards certain airports (e.g. Abranches 2013; Cresswell 2006; Gefou-Madianou 2010; Khoshneviss 2017; Hernandez Bueno 2021.) While there is an observable trend (undoubtedly legitimate) to depict marginalised and unprivileged experiences, not much is actually known about the perception of airports by kinetic elites, and even less comes from empirical studies. As a result, scholarly claims often either romanticise or negatively judge the (aero)mobile practices and lifeworlds of the privileged few (Birtchnell and Caletrío 2014), or they seek to apply the well-established conceptions of place(less)ness where a much deeper, nuanced understanding is needed. In this paper, I step into the shoes of the fictional Pierre Dupont (in a female variation), the experienced Business Class passenger from Marc Augé’s prologue to Non-places (Augé1995), to question any easy notions of place-related perception that elite¹ passengers develop through interaction with the material and social environment of routinely visited airports (Augé 2001; Crang 2002; Lassen 2009; Kesselring 2009; Sysiö 2019).

The figure of the elite passenger encapsulates the kind of mobile experience presented in this paper, but my main focus here leans on the elite airport passage itself. The ‘being in passage’, as Peter Merriman reminds, rests significantly upon the attributes of places ‘where there is a way through’; thus, the means through which the geographical position of passengers within transport corridors shapes their experiences of passengering and travel should not be ignored (Adey et al. 2012, 180). Recent social research provides growing evidence of affective atmospheres that are being engineered at many airports to create a distinct sense of place, a destination in their own right (Urry et al. 2016; Nikolaeva 2006), to oppose the still very influential thesis of airports as non-places (Augé 1995) and as exhibiting placelessness (Relph 1976), that is, new generic spaces of globalised sameness. Yet it remains largely under-researched how these placemaking efforts are being perceived (or ignored) by elite passengers as well as what unintentional elements in airport environments co-constitute the place-related meanings these passengers ascribe to airports within their aeromobile practice. This paper aims to fill in that gap and enrich the ongoing debates on both airports and elite aeromobilities² with a more balanced, empirically informed perspective on the constellations of meanings that airports can be given in the lived experience of a routine, privileged passage through their material and social environments.

In the following sections, I first outline the connections between the two essential concepts—place and mobility—that I work with throughout my paper in a non-binary and non-competitive way. Afterwards, I discuss my mobile methods and continue on to describe my journeys through Heathrow’s elite spaces and corridors. Wrapped up thematically under subheadings that stem from actual visual or aural in situ moments, my (auto)ethnography gradually reveals the uniqueness of all the Heathrow terminals as well as emotional attachment commensurable to familiarity, the dwelling in motion through embodied virtual infrastructures of habit, the stylisation of gated communities of an ‘upper class’ identity, the multiple placemaking effects of airport facilities and VIP airline lounges, and the apparent detachment of the corridor-like practices of extended business travel. Finally, I will point to the hybridity of airport perception within the elite passenger experience in the conclusion.

Approaching the airport as a place?

Driven by the interest in where an international airport is being placed within the aeromobile experience of frequent elite travellers, I draw my theoretical inspiration from two key humanities concepts—place and mobility—and particularly in their fusion within practice theories, as developed by Tim Cresswell (2002). For long decades, the duality between place and mobility shaped discussions and social theories of human engagement with their surroundings. In the context of airports, it mainly revolved around the place/placelessness distinction as offered by Edward Relph (1976) or the influential anthropological place/non-place binary of Marc Augé (1995).

The humanistic concept of place rested upon philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism and claimed a central role for the human being-in-the-world. In the work of geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) and Edward Relph (1976), places were experienced; they incited a sense of attachment and belonging; they were centres of value, care and meaning for people; they were authentic, stable, rooted and bounded. Mobility and movement, on the other hand, have been typically viewed as antithetical to the moral character of place (Cresswell 2006). For Tuan, only a ‘pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’ as mobility lacks commitment, attachment and involvement. Thus, the mobile modern man ‘has not the time to establish roots; his experience and appreciation of place is superficial’ (1977, 183). Relph considered increased mass mobility to be destructive of places, and hypermobile sites, such as roads, railways and airports, ‘cutting across or imposed on the landscape rather than developing with it’, he described as meaningless and inauthentic, and thus placeless (1976, 90).

The ideas of Marc Augé evolved within a different stream of postmodern thought, where dynamic changes and hypermobility in postmodern (or supermodern, as he calls it) society have been looked at with fascination rather than judgement. Nevertheless, he reproduced the same binary of an anthropological place invested with meaning for people who live in it—the source of identity, traditionally rooted and seemingly permanent—and an oppositional non-place ‘which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity’ (Augé 1995, 77). His non-places such as motorways, airports or supermarkets were essentially spaces for travellers, cold and lonely sites of liminal character designed solely to be passed through, where transitions are wordless, and signs replace real history (Triebel 2015).

Such binary thinking, according to Cresswell, stems from the two opposing metaphysical positions of sedentarism and nomadism. Whereas ‘sedentary metaphysics’ seeks to divide the world into clearly bounded, rooted and static territorial units like nations, states and places and actively territorialises identity in place, ‘nomadic thought’ celebrates mobility, flow and dynamism while despising any attachment to place or a singular place-based identity (Cresswell 2006). In Cresswell’s view, the way to overcome such binaries is signposted by theories of practice that help to portray the place as lived, mundanely practised and always in process (Cresswell 2002). Building on the work of Edward Soja (1996), Pierre Bourdieu (1990), Michel de Certeau (1984) and Doreen Massey (1997), he conceptualises place as practice and practice as placed, which relies ‘on the symbiosis of locatedness and motion rather than the valorization of one over the other’ (Cresswell 2002, 26). He develops a similar point further in his ‘constellations of mobility’, in which he puts forward three aspects of mobility (and we may say place as well), namely, material (conceived) movement, mental (perceived) representation and experienced and embodied practice, all of which are closely bound up with one another (Cresswell 2010).

It is this fusion of thinking that I found inspiring, and it represents a starting point for further reading. Focusing on the elite airport passage at Heathrow, I, therefore, explore the conceived materialities and socialites of the passage, in other words, the ‘airport atmospherics’ that come pre-structured (Urry et al. 2016), the shared and individual representations and meanings that arose from my own mental perception of my whereabouts at Heathrow and my gradually habitualised mobile practices of walking through the elite spaces at Heathrow as they were experienced through my body. In so doing, I hint towards similar constellations, combining in a hybrid way elements of traditional place and dynamic mobilities within the specific embodied experience of the elite airport passage.

(Auto)ethnography in the hypermobile environment

My methods for this paper unsurprisingly stem from the same position I tried to sketch above. I examined the mobile phenomena of elite airport passage within the hypermobile environment of one of the world’s busiest airport hubs. This inevitably mobilised my fieldwork in terms of both my own physical participation in the movement and my constant theoretical and analytical focus on mobility (Sheller and Urry 2006). At the same time, my focus on the lived experience, on place-related meanings, on the sensual and embodied perception of airports, brings my research close to phenomenology, traditionally connected to humanistic interpretations.

Inspired by mobile (auto)ethnographic methods of physical in situ immersion in the flows and rhythms of people and places one attempts to study (Larsen 2013; Gottschalk and Salvaggio 2015; Spinney 2006) while simultaneously acknowledging the practical difficulties of researching elite mobilities in high surveillance environments (Birtchnell and Caletrío 2014; Pütz 2011), I reached for a novel method of analytic (auto)ethnography while being myself an elite passenger. I purchased five fully flexible Business Class tickets from London Heathrow to various Schengen destinations, each from a different terminal and with a different airline, and I used these tickets repeatedly according to their terms and conditions to be able to repeatedly undergo the same passage through elite airport spaces as most the Business Class passengers do.

Analytic autoethnography, as proposed by Anderson (2006), aims to produce accounts that are more compatible with traditional ethnographic practices than the emotional evocative autoethnographies that have long dominated qualitative research (Adams, Jones, and Ellis 2016). In fulfilling this aim, Anderson suggests having informal conversations with and observing other participants in the field as well as drawing upon and developing theoretical understandings of broader social phenomena. At the same time, he refers to ethnographic work where the researcher is a full member of the research setting and is visible as such in the published text. Let me stop for a moment at this last point. While I entered the flows of elite passengers at Heathrow and gradually became a full member of this particular setting, I deliberately set myself apart from other flows that also significantly co-constitute the place-related meanings of airports. I was not actually travelling anywhere. I did not plan my journey ahead and had no expectations or thoughts about my destination; thus, I had no experience of an actual departure, arrival or transit within the frame of a journey and within the context of an elite or hypermobile lifestyle.

This methodological decision necessarily limits the possible generalisation of my findings, as I further elaborate in the last empirical section and in the conclusion. Yet, as the aim of my paper is to zoom in on the experience of a routine, elite passage through the airport, I find it beneficial to step out of certain flows to dive deeper into others. The more tasks, processes and thoughts that occupy the traveller’s (and researcher’s) attention, the less it is possible to (self-)reflect on the nuances of each one. As Larsen (2013) noted, even the ‘most experienced legs’ struggle to reflect in interviews upon the subtle, bodily and sensuous dimensions of their movement practices and their fleeting interactions with their mobile environment, certainly in part because they focus more on the goals of their journeys than on the routine of the passage. Moreover, the placelessness and non-placeness of airports are typically pictured as attributes of airports, the (lack of) inherent qualities of their material and social environment that their users simply react to (Augé 1995; Relph 1976); thus, in this regard, my focus solely on the airport passage seems highly relevant.

Nevertheless, the experience of passage inevitably enfolds dependent on the person who moves. For me, as a White, able-bodied woman in her thirties, decently dressed, holding an EU passport with an electronic chip, speaking fluent English and experienced in air travel, there were absolutely no obstacles to the smoothness of my passage within the Schengen Area. There was no tension about the border for me. I was a welcomed and trusted guest, stereotypically unproblematic and voluntarily transparent (Hall 2015). Although I have travelled Business Class only once before, I had detailed knowledge of elite airport processes and its specific jargon from years of working in the air travel industry managing VIP passenger inquiries. Taking into account any other even slightly different situations, such as travelling outside of the European Union; fitting another category of passenger profile with negative sociocultural or political baggage (Salter 2007); having different bodily dispositions, poor knowledge of English or the local language or no previous experience with (elite) air travel; or being located at a different kinetic airport like Dubai, for instance, my otherwise still elite experience would have been entirely different. I chose this particular setting, including the choice of Heathrow airport, to capture the most profound experience connected to the claims of placelessness and non-placeness of international airports, which is, undoubtedly, the experience of kinetic elites (Crang 2002; Augé 1995; Lassen 2009).

My airport passage at Heathrow followed a prescribed path, from quick check-in machines or Business Class check-in counters to fast-track security lines and then onto Business Class lounges, where I spent time and changed my ticket to another day. I then continued to my gate to observe the boarding process. Instead of boarding the plane, however, I would exit the transit zone to join the stream of deboarding passengers, continuing with them through immigration and, finally, to the arrival hall. The passenger flows at airports are strictly one-way (Urry et al. 2016). Yet as Rachel Hall (2015) reminds us, before a plane leaves, a traveller can, for whatever reason, always decide not to fly. In practice, when I expressed my intention of not travelling to airside airport personnel, I was simply diverted to another one-way flow of incoming passengers leading me to the border. Similarly, in the few instances I went through the immigration booth instead of electronic passport gates (E-gates), if asked at all, I only informed the border control that I was navigated here as I decided not to fly today.

I conducted this elite passage once a day during a 30-day-period between May and June 2015, both in the mornings and late afternoons. The division of my visits between terminals, however, was rather disproportional and in accordance with the ease of various procedures and personal preference.³ The very intense rate of my research was inevitably inscribed into my experience, and, very possibly, some elements of place-perception were artificially highlighted and overrated, whereas, in reality, their presence is much subtler. On the other hand, it is also due to this intensity that the otherwise rather overlooked elements of elite airport passage became pressingly recognisable, and I could capture and describe them more easily.

In order to preserve the ethical responsibility of my fieldwork, I followed the three principles suggested by Pospěch (2012): the principle of anonymity towards sensitive locations, airlines and other companies as well as individuals; the principle of staying unfocused in terms of not taking initiative towards gaining information more than any other Business Class passenger can normally encounter; and the principle of no harm to any enterprise or individual, whether directly or indirectly, by revealing sensitive information about them. In abiding by the legal terms and conditions of my Business Class tickets and surely also due to their extreme flexibility and privileged status, as well as thanks to my EU electronic passport granting me (at that time) unlimited free entry to the United Kingdom, there were never any problematic negotiations with airport or immigration personnel. The only instance I was called upon by airport security was to prove that I was the holder of the credit card I had used for a ticket.

Goodbye Terminal 1, hello new Heathrow

At the beginning of May 2015, London Heathrow Airport held a stable position among the top 5 busiest airports worldwide, with an impressive traffic volume of more than 73 million passengers in 2014 (ACI 2015 World Airport Traffic Record). Its size seemed similarly overwhelming, with its five terminal buildings, two runways and vast support infrastructure. Yet, when I stepped out of the elevator on my first day of fieldwork and found myself in the arrival hall of Terminal 1, the surroundings suggested a rather provincial airport as opposed to one of the world’s busiest hubs. A small space with modest architecture, Terminal 1 had a lazy atmosphere, with only a few occupants filling the seats around Costa Coffee and newly arriving passengers from Palma de Mallorca warmly waving goodbye to their fellow vacationers. I found a similar picture in the departure hall later on. And it was only there, next to deserted check-in counters, that I noticed billboards announcing the permanent closure of Terminal 1 by 30 June.

The history of an airport terminal rarely reveals itself to passengers in such dramatic fashion; nonetheless, contradicting Augé’s picture of ahistorical non-places, airports, too, have their own (often quite rich and turbulent) history, their own sets of connections, their unique situatedness distinguishing one from another (Cresswell 2006). And the distinction goes further, to the level of individual terminals, where different airlines and different place connections shape unique atmospheres through the ‘place-ballet’ (Seamon 1980) of travellers and the languages and cultures that accompany them. At Heathrow, there was the ghost-like Terminal 1 with the last few remaining flights, lazy atmosphere and nostalgic old photos hanging from its empty walls. There was the neat, modern and airy Queen’s Terminal or Terminal 2, the only one with a proper name and the port for almost all Star Alliance members, where, in its peak hours, German was heard more than English and whose straightforward layout of fenced corridors maximally supported the surprisingly organised movement of its visitors. There was the somewhat chaotic Terminal 3, accommodating most of the Oneworld airlines with its vibrant outdoor plaza and arrival hall, often overfilled with multicultural extended families. Its stable population of homeless people resisted the typical sterile officiality of airport environments to altogether produce a sense of place similar, in a way, to European city centres. Then there was the cosy Terminal 4, which was mainly for the SkyTeam airlines. The warmest of all terminals in both indoor temperature and its relaxed atmosphere, its old wooden benches, old-fashioned design and backpackers usually occupying its floors contrasted with the rest of the terminals. And, at last, there was the spectacular Terminal 5, the proud and representative home base of the national carrier British Airways, a remarkable display of technological beauty, where even lavatories featured fine classical music to amplify the presumed high-class manners of its visitors.

The uniqueness of each terminal at Heathrow struck me on my first visit. All of them appeared to me as completely different places connected through a few unifying elements in design and management and a common symbolic meaning, as all of them equally represented London Heathrow Airport. Otherwise, they seemed to operate largely on their own, and they undoubtedly produced a different sense of place. A part of that sense was shaped by different pre-engineered airport atmospherics, as argued by Urry et al. (2016). Yet the main creators were the people who gathered and diverged in different dynamic configurations and thus uniquely embodied the outside world within particular terminal buildings. They were those who constantly reproduced the highly particular ‘spatio-temporal event’ called place (Massey 2005, 131). Airports, as Fuller and Harley write, are ‘stable in their constant instability’ ( 2004, 114). They are always in process, always becoming (Cresswell 2006), and this becoming happens through practice. As such, every individual airport terminal is both a distinct context for practice and a product of unique practices (Cresswell 2002).

Over time, the feelings of familiarity with each terminal increased to the level where I could experience my passage in a relatively non-stressful way. Soon I started to build up emotional preferences towards terminals, particular paths and airline lounges that made me visit them more often than others. Terminal 4 became my favourite and, as there was only one massive lounge for all partner airlines, my passage always followed the same path. I passed by the same boutiques every time, saw the same familiar faces at the lounge reception. They started to greet me by name after some time, and we used to exchange a few informal words when arriving to and leaving the lounge—even the security officer recognised and welcomed me once. Augé (2001) was right in his later work where he admitted that certain airport users, such as frequent flyers, could, over time, develop an emotional attachment to particular airports such that they become meaningful places. Frequent pleasant visits certainly have the potential to transform unknown airport spaces into meaningful places of familiarity, at-homeness and emotional attachment.

Still, the experiences of passengers are necessarily incomplete, partial and subjective, and they need to be approached and valued as such. The performance of the passage can rarely allow for a thoughtful analysis of an airport’s history and its complex relations, nor for acknowledgement of its heterotopian complexities. Despite the overall tendency of passengers to speak of certain airports as a whole while only experiencing their parts, I need to stress that I did develop an intense emotional connection to one particular elite passage at Terminal 4. Switching to a different terminal always involved a certain level of shock, strangeness and alertness of my senses. I had simply found myself at a different place even though I was still at the very same airport.

You are approaching the end of the conveyor belt

A friend of mine asked me recently what I do here all day long, and her question keeps resonating with me. If I had to pick one activity over the others, one main activity that I do here most of the time, almost constantly and automatically, would definitely be that I WALK. I walk here so much that my feet hurt enormously at the end of each day.

(extract from my personal diary, 14 June 2015)

If an airport presents a pause in the context of long-distance movement, a place where, after hundreds of kilometres of high-speed movement, passengers make a stop, a break before they continue on to quickly consume another great portion of distance, in the context of bodily activity, the opposite is true. After being strapped to an aeroplane seat for a long time, passengers now move on their own again. The joy of being able to activate their body I found inscribed in many people’s faces shortly after they deboarded the plane, stretching their arms and legs with sighs of relief and pleasure before they walked on cheerfully. Others appeared to be rather annoyed at not being transported anymore, maybe woken up from their sleep and forced to move their bodies on their own. And still others let adrenaline mobilise their bodies to their maximum in order to catch their connecting flight. In one way or another, an essential feature of the (elite) passenger experience at the airport is inherently the fact that this experience happens in bodily motion.

Passengers at the airport are, however, rarely just bodies. They move around in different body-object configurations, or as Shilon and Shamir (2016) write, passengers are mutable assemblages of body, luggage and documents. In this regard, I too packed a carry-on suitcase and a handbag to accompany me together with my travel documents while on my path. As Bissell (2009) noted, through repetition, passengers naturally develop a particular body-knowledge and a set of strategies to lower the degree of encumbrance in moving with their ‘mobile prosthesis’ in certain environments. Places are then produced through embodied practices as ‘taskscapes’ (Ingold 2000) that are made significant precisely through the bodily effort of movement within them. In the role of an elite passenger, I also gradually developed this practical knowledge of moving smoothly, quickly and effectively through the (elite) airport spaces. I changed the form of my carry-on luggage several times to achieve sufficient lightness (Barry and Suliman 2020). I mastered the art of pulling out my belongings to the scanner tray in less than a minute (and earned many annoyed ‘aahs’ and ‘oohs’ by my fellow fast-track security users until I managed to do so). I learnt to recognise the speediest line at various checkpoints and the most efficient level of talk with security officials, all of that solely through my repeated interaction and the process of movement-making itself.

Towards the end of my fieldwork, after many days of completing the same routine walk from check-in to gate and back through immigration, my attempts to reconstruct my airport passage at the end of the day became harder and harder. I was no longer able to recall the same details as before, sometimes even the path itself. My passage through the frequently visited terminals started to be routine and habitual. My body incorporated the tasks of walking with a suitcase and following the usual path, presenting the boarding pass at checkpoints or organising my belongings quickly to fit into a scanner tray so much that I did them automatically, without any thinking. I was on autopilot, as Middleton (2011) described in the context of daily work commuting. Only unusual, outstanding or unexpected encounters caught my conscious attention. I remembered those clearly, whereas the rest blurred into some sort of a routine aggregate activity, such as ‘walking to the lounge’ or ‘returning to the arrival hall’.

Habit is considered a powerful force in the generation of meaningful places in humanistic geography. And while habits certainly produce practical, embodied competencies for moving around, emerging research suggests that habit may in fact be less individual and much more distributed across bodies and environments as a key part of mobility infrastructure (Bissell 2015). In this perspective, the speed and ease by which kinetic elites move through airport spaces does not rely solely on privileged access protocols but, simultaneously, on habit as a virtual infrastructure that carries their mobile bodies through the environment in a similar way to physical infrastructures (just like conveyor belts). The paths and passages carved out by repeated journeying are ‘as much habitual as they are architectural’. Thus, frequent travellers glide through the airport with ease and grace, ‘sheltered and cocooned by the virtual infrastructure of habit’ (Bissell 2015, 133). Yet, there is a sense of slowness in the speedy elite passage, particularly at the fast-track lines. A part of this comes from the privilege of ‘taking your time’, of being waited for (at least by authorities), whereas non-privileged passengers are being rushed.

The speed, pace and regularity of daily walks produce what Edensor has called a ‘mobile sense of place’, a linear perception of place formed by the footpath where ‘the rhythms of walking allow for a particular experiential flow of successive moments of detachment and attachment, physical immersion and mental wandering, memory, recognition and strangeness’ (2010, 70). The dwelling that co-constructs sedentary meaningful places here happens in and through motion (Sheller and Urry 2006), and a place is experienced as ‘the predictable passing of familiar fixtures’, producing a comforting sense of reliability and mobile homeliness (Edensor 2010, 70). Indeed, over time I started to feel comfortable and secure enough at certain terminals to switch off the decision-making part of my brain when I walked, allowing myself to freely contemplate what I had read or experienced before. Although this might evoke a sense of placelessness, of being trapped in no place and no time in particular—and if someone were to ask me where I was at that point, I would probably be confused—these were precisely the moments of dwelling-in-motion, in a place intimately familiar to me both particularly and conceptually.

Welcome to the Upper Class Wing

On Thursday morning, 16 June, after quickly passing through fast-track security, I turned right to my favourite lounge. I recognised one of the receptionists, a smiling Polish girl who similarly recognised me and greeted me warmly, asking how I was today and if I had not been their guest just two days prior. I nodded and, while handing her my boarding pass, I noted with a hint of powerlessness that she would likely see me often here in the next two weeks. She smiled with compassion, likely thinking I must be in the middle of a busy project that was forcing me to travel there and back. Then she wondered why I was there so early, noticing that my boarding pass indicated an early afternoon flight. I explained that I had brought some work I needed to finish, and, in any case, I could try my luck at the boarding gate if I decided to catch an earlier flight. My obvious competence made the right impression. She promptly offered to store my suitcase at the reception and asked if I wished to be signed up for a complimentary facial treatment in their massage room since I had so much time before the departure of my flight. Welcome to the ‘upper class’ at London Heathrow Airport.

With the purchase of an extremely expensive Business Class ticket, I now belonged among them legally, ensuring me of my right to access and make use of certain privileged spaces and to be treated like a ‘very important person’. This legal belonging had to be renewed and reclaimed every day by rebooking my ticket or purchasing another. The (elite) passenger presence at the airport is always fleeting and temporary and so was my belonging. The possession of a valid entry document, however, did not automatically induce the feeling of being truly and comfortably in-place. Only after I started to routinely participate in elite passenger activities, such as obtaining my boarding pass at the Business Class check-in counter in the morning, walking through fast-track security, chatting with lounge receptionists, waiting at the boarding gate or in the E-gate line in a specific time-space pattern, when my body built up the confidence to move around as a frequent flyer, knowing where to go and what to do or say, only at this point did I no longer feel like an outsider and truly became a passenger (Hernandez Bueno 2021), an elite passenger.

For humanistic geographers, the question of belonging and existential insideness defines meaningful places (Tuan 1977; Relph 1976; Seamon 1980). The same question accompanied me during my journeys through Heathrow’s terminals, and on many occasions, it demonstrated itself with a remarkable emotional intensity. Besides my legal right to access elite spaces, I gradually developed a synergic insideness of belonging to the rhythm of life, to the flows and the ‘place-ballets’ (Seamon 1980) of regularly visited terminals. I felt in-place within them. Simultaneously, there was yet another level of belonging that was being offered to me as a Business Class passenger—the belonging to an exclusive community.

Airspaces and, most significantly, airports are all highly segregated sites with a clear separation of kinetic elites enjoying access to privileged spaces and kinetic underclasses not entitled to enter them (Adey, Budd, and Hubbard 2007). Being now part of the elite flow, a great portion of my airport passage led through these segregated privileged spaces. Some shared the same materiality as their non-privileged counterparts and were being made exclusive solely by their access rules, procedural smoothness, extended hospitality and a handful of symbolic elements. Others were true oases of luxury, hidden away from the sight of the masses. Yet, all of them served the same purpose—to induce and pamper the elite identity of their users by visibly contrasting them to the discomfort of the surrounding crowds.

By distinguishing us from them in such a reactionary manner, the privileged spaces at Heathrow reminded me of the gated communities once described by David Harvey (1996) in relation to the idea of place. They, too, presented secure and bounded communities with their own names, distinctive social and physical qualities and, most importantly, visible and highly protected boundaries in the form of ropes, barriers, walls, signs, discreet lounge doors, all guarded by dedicated airport personnel to verify the entry right of each and every newcomer. The visible policing of boundaries in the airspaces is claimed to be, in fact, a part of the performance of the elite status that ‘offers the experience of being protected or of being kept out, depending on whether you are “in” or “out”, which in turn increases the pleasure and the desire, respectively’ (Thurlow and Jaworski 2006, 116). Elite passengers do not merely enter a space of solitary individuality and non-human mediation when they travel through the airport, as Augé (1995) has argued, they simultaneously enter a space where they are being continuously reassured of their importance, distinctiveness, elite social status and, once again, their belonging to the recognised and protected community of VIP travellers. The airport, thus, easily becomes a place where class identity can be formed and performed, an important resource in self-stylisation and elite identity, however transient this might be.

Take a little piece of Britain home with you

Near the arrival gates, I joined a scattered flow of passengers that had just deboarded the mighty Boeing 747-400 from overseas. I walked with them through empty corridors until my attention was caught by a distinct blue overhead sign announcing that I was soon to approach the UK border. As usual, I went straight to the E-gates, where I simply scanned my biometric passport and waited for the satisfying sound of the beep after the software matched my face to the passport chip. Green light, door open, and I was free to (re-)enter the territory of the United Kingdom. It felt more like beeping my staff card at the entrance door of my workplace than crossing a state border. Indeed, by possessing the ‘right sort of passport’ (Burrell 2011, 358), both politically and technologically, the airport microborder barely existed to me. Only the long queues of less-favoured passengers at the staffed immigration booths gave me a hint of an impression that we all stand at the frontiers of a sovereign state that has the power to admit or exclude us (Salter 2007), even the privileged ones, as Kitchin and Dodge (2009) ethnographically describe.

After bypassing the baggage reclaim area, customs and a very modest duty-free shop, I reached a door whose opening struck me every time I passed through them—the automatic door leading from airside to the semi-public areas of the arrival hall. Maybe it was the stark contrast between mundane corridors and sterile officiality on one side and the colourful and vibrant atmosphere on the other, perhaps it was the stares of waiting crowds lining the barriers to welcome their arrivers, or maybe it was the symbolic act of crossing the threshold to the kingdom as Mark Wallinger (2000) artistically captured in his slow motion video of the same name at the Terminal 1 arrival hall. The essence of arrival to somewhere very particular was, for me, best seen and felt here at this door. The idea of the airport as an abstract waypoint, disconnected from the outside world, whose geographical location becomes irrelevant (Chambers 1990; Fuller 2003; Laing 2008) seemed peculiarly odd in these intense moments of arrival.

Nonetheless, there is a transit experience that stands in contrast to border crossing and arrival. Passengers changing planes at Heathrow remain for a few hours in the transit zone of the airport and find themselves legally outside any nation-state territory (Laing 2008). Many of them, as Rowley and Slack (1999) argue, might have lost their sense of place and time as a result of long-distance air travel across multiple time zones. Could this induce the ‘no place in particular’ (Chambers 1990) experience given that LHR could easily be exchanged for any other three-letter code representing a similarly irrelevant airport en route to the final destination? Or, as Laing writes, is the passenger only waiting ‘to arrive to reconnect to geography’ (Laing 2008, 96)?

Research on airport choice, specifically in relation to frequent flyer programmes, provides some evidence that en-route transit airports are, in fact, carefully selected by passengers with multi-option choice (which elite passengers typically are) based on their previous experiences and personal preferences, loyalty to specific airlines and their hubs, available benefits and other factors (e.g. de Luca 2012; Seelhorst and Liu 2015). Passengers in the transit zone of airports also do not find themselves in some sort of an absolutely universal global environment. They, too, must interact with numerous country-specific elements that are naturally present at the airports, such as local language and manners, currency, indications of local climate, even little things like the flushing system of toilets that vary across the world. Moreover, as airports compete for the loyalty of passengers, there is growing evidence of intentional placemaking efforts by airport authorities to create a unique sense of place, distinct airport atmospherics in terminal interiors (Urry et al. 2016; Wattanacharoensil, Pipatpong, and Graham 2022; Nghiêm-Phú and Suter 2018; Fuller and Harley 2004), even to create a destination in itself (Nikolaeva 2006).

A significant portion of these efforts consists in the promotion of the national, regional or local identity of the surrounding area, mainly to the closest city, in order to shape the image of the airport as a gateway, the first and last point of contact with the destination (Wattanacharoensil, Pipatpong, and Graham 2022). In this way, Heathrow Terminal 2 features a black cab installation in the centre of its airside plaza, passengers can taste local cuisine and beer at a traditional-esque English pub in Terminal 3, buy all sorts of souvenirs connected to London or the United Kingdom at the Glorious Britain shop in Terminal 5, send a postcard via a classic Royal Mail postbox at Terminal 4 or take a picture with a double-decker bus driver, royal guard, police officer or street artist in front of the numerous billboards welcoming passengers at Heathrow.

Elite passengers are often exposed to more than one such place making strategy while transiting at international airports. Visiting a total of seven Business Class lounges on the airside of Heathrow terminals, I experienced both confirming as well as contradictory place making attempts, from offering porridge or a full English breakfast to the very specific design, facilities and cuisine that matched the traditions of the airline’s home country. As such, I found myself once in a bamboo-designed lounge with strictly Asian-origin personnel and ramen soup and rice dishes were served. Another time, the lounge was wallpapered with posters from Manhattan, where bartenders mixed all sorts of Martinis and visitors could have lunch at a build-your-own-burger station. Once I found myself among mainly German-speaking businessmen in an elegant no-frills lounge, and another time in front of a lounge door decorated with Indian flower garlands. Thus, and in relation to an actual travel itinerary and its progress, the perception of an airport as a geographically and culturally situated place can, in fact, be far more hybrid for an elite traveller than for unprivileged passengers.

Just 15 minutes. Every 15 minutes. Heathrow Express

Let me return again to the place from where I started—to the barriers that lead arriving passengers into the semi-public part of arrival halls. I stood there regularly to observe passengers who embodied any sign of privilege associated with elite travel. One type of elite traveler was truly not hard to spot: men in business attire pulling a small black suitcase, a frequent flyer card visibly attached to its handle, who moved around swiftly with a confidence and elegance that markedly matched the stereotypical picture of forty-something healthy male business executives (Crang 2002) seen on Business Class advertisements of many airliners (Thurlow and Jaworski 2006). Most headed straight towards the escalators and corridors that connected the airport terminal to the ground transportation infrastructure, that is, numerous parking lots and Heathrow Express platforms (itself just another form of elite transportation for city-bound travelers). No walking around or stopping to check information in their travel documents, no phone calls or ATM queuing, they barely even looked around as they followed their habitual trajectories, having apparently completed the same trip many times before. Some had a company driver waiting to greet them with a handshake while slowing down their speedy progress for a moment, but often without actually stopping—the driver was expected to join their path rather than the other way around.

Lassen describes this type of business travel experience as a ‘life in corridors’ that evolves in high-speed spaces where employees are constantly ‘on the way to the next meeting, next hotel, next bar and next country’ (Lassen et al. 2009, 179). For them, he argues, the corridors are like non-places where it is often difficult to distinguish between different locations within them. The airports, too, are experienced as mere nodes in the network of non-place-like corridors. A similar point has been made by Kesselring regarding the mobility praxis of knowledge workers, that a ‘life in transit makes actual geographical location irrelevant’ as the social or physical features of the environment are not factored into such mobility (Kesselring et al. 2009, 43). This deserves special attention as they both suggest it is the practice of extended aeromobile business travel that produces specific perceptions of airports which seem to be very close to non-places, as described by Marc Augé. Yet, their conclusions, besides being based on a simple binary between fully anthropological places and oppositional non-places, with nothing in-between, fail to acknowledge a wide spectrum of emotions that can, in fact, produce many more hybrid forms of place-related meanings and conceptions at different airports within the frame of usual journeys and beyond.

While frequently travelling knowledge workers undoubtedly represent a significant portion of the elite passenger flow at international airports, the group of airline passengers commonly labelled as ‘kinetic elites’ is far more diverse (Birtchnell and Caletrío 2014; Zuskáčová and Seidenglanz, 2019). The aeromobile experiences and place-related perceptions of kinetic elites can also be (re)shaped by their different bodily mutabilities, such as fatigue, jet lag, old age or illness (Bissell 2015), as well as by their personal values, lifestyle and attitudes towards air travel (Lassen 2009). How do, then, different elite aeromobile practices impact the perception of particular airports as places? How do different levels of the stylised elite identity influence this perception? Can the same frequently visited airport terminal gain different place-related meanings in the context of departure, transit and arrival? Is the same transit airport perceived differently on the outbound journey as when returning home? How do memories, emotions or phantasies connected to a city influence the perception of its airport (even during mere transit times)? Can the cultural stylisation of lounges somehow mix this all up in different contexts? Can fatigue be responsible for anything like a non-place experience in the airspaces? Or can it be that the detached experience described by Augé (1995), Crang (2002), Lassen (2009) and others is, in fact, based on a secure, comfortable and intimate at-homeness felt at familiar airports?

When I was leaving Heathrow after thirty days of (auto)ethnographic endeavor, I had more questions than answers more openings than closings appeared in front of me. These questions were, however, empirically informed, at least to some extent original and highly relevant to the ongoing debates on the place(less)ness of international airports. In order to get closer to a full understanding, these questions must now be addressed to those who truly lead an aeromobile lifestyle and possess authentic experiences of frequent elite travelling within airspaces such as airports.

Conclusions

Elite mobilities, as Birtchnell and Caletrío (2014) claim, are hegemonic in their impact on other forms of movement. What is now deemed normal owes its form to pioneering elites and their power agendas. The fictitious Pierre Dupont, who introduces the widely influential book on non-places (Augé 1995), is similarly an elite figure. And it was mainly for this reason that Augé’s ideas have also been heavily criticised. The over-generalising, Western-based privileged nature of his non-places fail to acknowledge the myriads of diverse ways in which different sites are experienced by different individuals in them—in the case of airports, the pilots, taxi drivers, holidaymakers, excited children, immigrants, refugees, homeless or members of neighbouring communities (Merriman 2009; Cresswell 2006; Gefou-Madianou 2010; Abranches 2013; Triebel 2015). Another stream of critique highlights the unique atmospheres that many contemporary airports intentionally create to attract passengers (Urry et al. 2016; Wattanacharoensil, Pipatpong, and Graham 2022; Nikolaeva 2006). The only context where the non-placeness of airports remains still very powerful is that of frequent elite travel (Crang 2002; Lassen 2009; Kesselring 2009). In this paper, I therefore focus specifically on this kind of aeromobile experience to examine how materialities and socialites as well as the mobile performance of the passage through the elite spaces and corridors of one of the world’s busiest airports might shape its perception as a place.

Armed with the provocative question ‘where am I?’ at each step of my own elite passage through Heathrow terminals, I gradually uncovered many more nuances of the place-related perception of international airports that go beyond the usual binary of a traditional place and a detached non-place. In my (auto)ethnographic vignettes, I depicted the unique event-like dynamics of each one of Heathrow’s terminals and contrasted the at-homeness of frequently used passages with the strangeness, alertness and discomfort of walking through unfamiliar environments. I revisited the well-discussed impact of habits on the production of places so as to portray the automatic movement of frequent elite passengers as dwelling-in-motion, enabled through the mastery of place-specific bodily practices within intimately familiar mobile surroundings. I reflected upon the stylisation of preferred passengers as ‘upper class’, visibly segregated in various privileged spaces, where their elite identity can be formed and performed around the sense of belonging to an exclusive community. I described how natural elements in a local airport identity together with intentional place making strategies create specific place-related settings for (elite) passengers in the two very different contexts of arrival and transit, which are, in any case, far from universal in their sameness. And lastly, I speculated as to how specific aeromobile practices of kinetic elites might result in unique hybrid constellations of place-related meanings for particular airports within the frame of their usual journeys and beyond.

While I aimed to capture important aspects of how airports impact the embodied and sensuous experiences of elite passengers, I deliberately bypassed other, similarly relevant questions that stretch beyond the spatially bounded actuality of the airport visit. The (elite) passenger experience does not start and end at the airport. Further elaboration is thus needed of how the progress of particular journeys, previous travel experiences and lifestyle choices as well as bodily sensations from the flight, the jetlag or extended aeromobility influence the place-related perception of particular airports by kinetic elites. With this (auto)ethnography, I help to flesh out the largely distant claims about elite aeromobilities as they are performed at airports while also opposing the general tendency of mobilities scholars to focus solely on one aspect of the (elite) passenger experience, such as embodiment and affect, habitual structures or place making strategies, to draw attention to their mutual interconnectedness, coexistence and coactivity.

Showing just how divided we move (Adey 2006) at the airport, I have joined here the vivid stream of airport ethnographies that provide growing evidence of actual practices and disparities that occur in the airspaces as well as intentionally created places for some that exclude others. Furthermore, in times of increasing concern about the global climate, when the still ongoing glamorisation of extensive air travel (Cohen and Gössling 2015) is being challenged by rising voices of ‘flight shaming’ (Higham, Cohen, and Cavaliere 2013), social science needs to pay close attention to the lifeworlds of this small but highly aeromobile privileged part of postmodern society. If we hope for any effective structural changes in this carbon-intensive industry, we first need to gain a deep and non-judgmental understanding of what is at stake for those whose mobile behavior we are targeting so as to propose and communicate acceptable solutions for the future.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the reviewers and editors of Mobilities, especially Julie Cidell, whose valuable comments and suggestions have helped shape this article. Special thanks also belongs to Daniel Seidenglanz for his unceasing support and encouragement to experiment with methods and ideas and to Robert Osman for many helpful discussions on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grant Agency of Masaryk University [grant number MUNI/A/1570/2020].

Notes

1 In this paper, I use the adjective ‘elite’, in line with the usual semiotics of airline advertisements and their frequent flyer programmes (Thurlow and Jaworski 2006), to refer to high-status airline passengers, the users of the privileged corridors, spaces and services at many international airports. The elite status of these passengers in any true meaning of the word (Birtchnell and Caletrío 2014) outside of this particular context is not being questioned here.

2 The terms aeromobilities and aeromobile refer in this paper to the practiced and embodied experiences of physical journeying within the airspaces (see Zuskáčová (2020) for more on aeromobile discourses).

3 In total, I passed through Terminal 1 and Terminal 5 each once, three times through Terminal 3, nine times through Terminal 4, whereas I conducted 16 of these individual passages at Terminal 2.