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Around the world, the number of air passengers has quintupled since 1980. During the same time, air traffic in the Pearl River Delta--the urban region that includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou--has risen by a factor of 50. Scholars have typically studied that expansion by analyzing mega-projects like 'starchitect' passenger terminals and high-speed airport railways. Yet they have ignored the emergence of parallel transport systems designed to plug less privileged people and places into the infrastructure of global mobility. Cheaper, rattier, and more geographically diffuse, these networks cater to passengers whose movement across international borders is limited by their income, citizenship, or place of birth. These incipient air travelers, and the so-called "transborder" systems that they use, have radically reordered the cross-border flow of goods and people in the Pearl River Delta. Focusing on Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA), the dissertation examines how the airport has been redesigned to accommodate larger and more diverse passenger flows. Tracing the movement of different types of passengers--the retiree, the toddler, the migrant worker--it demonstrates how each traveler’s trajectory is determined by intersecting political, logistical, and financial considerations. The dissertation also investigates a network of airport check-in terminals that allow passengers to fly through HKIA without applying for a Hong Kong visa. Located deep inside Mainland China, these "upstream" check-in facilities cater to passengers who have difficulty obtaining a visa; such as Chinese tourists with a rural hukou, or African businessmen. A sealed ferry transports passengers from Mainland China to HKIA, where they are shuttled via an underground train to their departure gate. Isolated from other passenger flows, upstream travelers thus technically never enter Hong Kong. Through interviews, photographs, and digital mapping techniques, Airport Urbanism documents how HKIA--as well as the boundary between Mainland China and Hong Kong--have been reconfigured to abet the global circulation of capital and labor. In so doing, the dissertation posits airport infrastructure as a useful lens for interpreting broader changes in the regulation of cross-border mobility and the spatial articulation of national frontiers.

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The United States as a whole is embarking on the historic task of implementing high-speed rail (HSR) throughout the country in an attempt to improve regional mobility, including congestion at some of the nation’s busiest airports. However, despite the wide overlapping of service that both air and HSR provide and the goal of reducing airport congestion, little discourse has occurred on the topic of how these two modes might interact in an intermodal context. This report explores how air travel and HSR might cooperate in the US, which is defined as an explicit attempt by the two modes to utilize each other in order to transport a passenger to their final destination. It will document potential benefits of cooperation, survey how cooperation works elsewhere in the world, and investigate the current climate within the US for cooperation, including a review of current HSR plans and analysis of air travel data. This information will form the basis for suggested airports for the integration of HSR and air travel, and for how US airlines might utilize HSR. Lastly, lessons learned will form a list of best practices to follow in order to better insure a cooperative and successful relationship between HSR and air travel. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Transport Policy and Planning / Master / Master of Arts in Transport Policy and Planning

published_or_final_version / Mathematics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Since its opening in 1931, the Vancouver International Airport has been a site where significant representations of the city, its geography and its population have been made. Instead of being utilitarian structures the airport terminals have been purposefully designed and decorated with art chosen specifically to communicate Vancouver's distinct qualities and culture to travelers. As culture is never static and changes continuously, the representations have also shifted over time. By considering the specific history of Vancouver's airport in conjunction with the wider history of Canadian and international airport development, patterns (such as the continuous use of symbols from native cultures to represent aspects of the colonizer's culture) and tensions (such as Vancouver's relative position as a major Canadian urban centre and the growth of visible immigrant populations) which accompany the representation of locality at the airport become apparent. Henri Lefevbre's understanding of space as an active social product, David Harvey's assessment of the impact of globalization upon the local and Siegfried Kracauer's interpretation of architecture as illustrative of broad social trends underpin my analysis. The adoption,of an historical and theoretical framework within this thesis is directed at developing an interpretation of the current art program at the Vancouver International Airport which can move beyond the point where debate regarding "authenticity" and the agency of the native artists or their communities constricts the discussion. Through an examination of airport design, both theoretical and actual, the genesis of and reactions to art programs executed at the airport since the 1960s, as well as aspects of the city's social history, I illustrate that the current art program is representative of more than a superficial thematic strategy. Instead, it points to a complex and ongoing struggle to define and represent Vancouver both to its residents and the rest of the world.

No description available.

In this thesis we have made an analysis of the Swedish domestic market, and concluded different limiting and enabling factors that are important to examine when creating an aircraft specification for an aircraft suitable for use on this market. The authors focus on three different parts that are considered important to be included in the specification; aircraft size, aircraft dimensions and aircraft performance. Aircraft size has been established through the use of a model and by a literature study, while aircraft performance and dimensions have been established primarily through market studies. The Swedish domestic market is today primarily built up by regional airlines and the large actor Scandinavian airlines; this has also been the situation historically. The regional airlines operates on a point-to-point basis while Scandinavian airlines operates on a hub-and-spoke-network. The aircraft size has been found to depend on a number of different factors. Passenger demand and competition are the most important while type of operations and environmental impact also plays a large role. To create stronger competition towards other airlines and other forms of transportation, the flight frequency has been deemed a key factor. Studies show that airlines rather face rising demands by increasing the frequency than by increasing the aircraft size. Aircraft dimensions and aircraft performance are mainly restricted by airport constraints such as runway length, airport fire-fighting category and pavement strength. An aircraft specification has been developed, and the importance of flight frequency and airport constraints found on the Swedish market have been taken into consideration. The large variations in demand, and also the variations in type of operations in the Swedish domestic market have made it impossible to create a single aircraft type, however, by creating three different size versions of the aircraft it will be adapted to the different demands that have been found on the market.

No description available.