Negotiating place: beginnings, belongings and mobilities at Auckland airport

Abstract

As an institution and social space, the airport is imagined, produced and experienced according to the mutually constitutive and relational forces of the local and the global. Investigating this notion through the example of Auckland Airport, this thesis carries out a case study of its historical and contemporary spacings, economies and uses. An understanding of the airport as a place of interconnections is central to this analysis and forces a consideration of the open, contingent and dynamic nature of place more generally. Place, as this thesis demonstrates, is not fixed or static but always in process. Operating at the intersecting trajectories of cultural geography, mobilities research, and critical and cultural theory, a range of methods and materials are therefore used. Drawing on historical documents, corporate marketing strategies and transcripts from interviews, this study performs a discursive, textual and institutional analysis of Auckland Airport.