Drehkreuze der Globalisierung

Airports are powerful institutions and infrastructures defining and shaping the relations and connectivities of a world of flows and mobilities. They are ‘glocal infrastructures’, built interfaces on the thresholds of terri-torial and global scales. The talk of fundamental airport dependencies signals a new wave in the transport-driven modernisation of society and the economy. Political controversies over the whys and wherefores of giant airports rage in the very centre of the ‘mobile risk society’, not on the periphery. At few other social “loci” do the local and the global interface so tangibly as at the great transfer points of international air traf-fic in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, or Madrid. This, it has been noted, has fundamentally changed the character of mobility politics and mobility policies. It has brought about and it propels ‘glocalisation’ and global interdependencies.