This text outlines the distinctive shapes of the physical and social infrastructure of the airport. It is a sustained attempt to consider the airport both as a place and as a cultural icon of the late 20th century, combining informal anecdote and speculation with discussions of contemporary cultural theory, architecture, social history, film, and literary criticism. While it is a commonplace to say that cities increasingly resemble airports - cross-cultural spaces that are a gathering of tribes, races, and disparate languages - it is also true that airports are in many ways like miniature cities; both form complexes of intersecting transport systems, economies, buildings and people. But, as John Thackara has pointed out, there is one crucial difference: "Cities have inhabitants. At airports everyone is transient". Within these spaces of dim amenity, urban traffic is smoothly converted into air traffic, and the individual traveller is transformed into a "package" - anonymous, pacified cargo to be shifted around the globe as swiftly as possible.
The area between check-in and baggage reclaim the author identifies as the "airspace", a region that stretches from airport to airport, and across time zones. In this space, authority is absolute, machinery replaces individuality, and the body, steered by instructions, undergoes a controlled acceleration or decleration - departure and arrival - to which resistance is both minimal and futile. The book argues that the airport functions as a particular space of fear and uncertainty, a place as alienating as a police station or as disquieting as a general hospital. Now that air travel has eliminated geographical distance, the space between, the "airspace", must be regarded as a distinct area on any map of modernity.