Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
travel for distances up to 500 km. The driving force behind these systems has
been primarily economic, particularly the need to shuttle well-paid executives
among corporate o
ces (Hugill 1993). Not surprisingly, the heavy European
emphasis on such systems was tied to the creation of a single internal market
under the EU. High-speed trains invariably shrank the relative spaces between
large cities by skipping over smaller intermediate nodes (Knowles 2006).
Concomitantly, changes in air transportation unleashed geographies of
centrality and peripherality, awarding signi
cant competitive advantages
to locations with optimal air accessibility (Cooke and Morgan 1998). As
numerous observers have demonstrated, the structure and function of the
world system's urban hierarchy is intimately associated with global patterns
of aviation, including the di
fi
flying among cities
(Smith 2001). Improvements in maximum air velocities reached an apex with
the Anglo-French Concorde, which, traveling at twice the speed of sound,
made much of the world accessible to London within eight hours'
ff
erential times and costs of
fl
fl
ight
(Hugill 1993), but su
ff
ered economic and environmental costs that rendered it
unpro
table. Air travel did not simply conquer distance by the improved
speed of planes: rather, an entire social and technical infrastructure was
deployed that facilitated movement, including international agreements on
air space and air tra
fi
c control systems (Cresswell 2006).
The geographies of aviation, and the associated relative patterns of acces-
sibility they represent, were signi
cantly reshaped by the wave of neoliberal
deregulation, starting with the American market in 1978. As governments
worldwide withdrew from the sector, airlines responded by resorting to hub-
and-spoke patterns domestically and the use of partnerships internationally.
Hubs owe their importance more to their strategic location within airline
markets wherein customers must undertake circuitous journeys than they do
to the size of their local market (Fleming and Hayuth 1994; Knowles 2006;
Derudder et al. 2007). Such changes improved air service in many large,
already well-connected hubs, but simultaneously generated “pockets of pain”
in places that were marginalized or underserved by this process (Goetz 2002;
Zook and Brunn 2006).
Cresswell (2006) points out that airports both produce and are produced by
global time-space compression, forming nodes that simultaneously regulate
and facilitate the movement of bodies, and that within them move not only
nomadic business elites who dominate the international economy but also
vast numbers of others, such as workers, academics, tourists, immigrants, and
refugees. As regulators of movement among countries that di
fi
erentially
codify ideologies of mobility, airports are a form of dispersed border in the
postmodern age. While most large airports are in the U.S., given its huge
domestic market (Table 5.1), internationally they connect commercial and
fi
ff
ectively
absent from this pattern, testimony to its relatively marginal position within
circuits of high value-added production.
Improved long-distance
financial centers; in contrast, most of the developing world is e
ff
fl
flights were also important to the growth of global
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