Are airports like cities? Affordances and people’s micro embodied interactions during the arrival experience

Airports are designed to work efficiently. Specifically, they seek to efficiently process and ‘control’ people’s movements across landside and airside spaces, as well as to entice consumption through the architectural engineering of atmospheres and passenger experiences using architecture (Adey 2008; Fuller and Harley 2004; Hubregtse 2020). However, studies of the design and human sensorial perception of spaces of mobilities have shown that the way people move through and inhabit such spaces transcends the intended functionality of their design (Jensen and Lanng 2017). This includes work that considers airports as not only machines of movement, control and profit, but also city-like spaces (Hernandez-Bueno 2021; Nikolaeva 2013). Based on the conceptualisation of the airport as an ambiguous and city-like space, this paper uses thermal camera video recordings, ethnography, and design mappings to analyse the passenger movements, practices, embodied interactions, and mobile affordances of Copenhagen Airport’s meet and greet area. Focusing on a micro scale, the analysis shows the comparability of people’s practices and ways of inhabiting the airport with practices common to urban public spaces. This facilitates broader reflection on how to speculatively re-design and re-imagine the airport like an urban ‘public’ space.