Re-Assemblying Airports: A New Conceptual and Empirical Geography of Auckland International Airport, and the Emerging Auckland Aerotropolis

Abstract

“… We are more than an airport … We are a business district … Over 12000 people work in the business district … We have 444 hectares of land to be developed … That’s over 500 rugby fields … There is a lot to discover in the district … Work … Play … Rest … Dine … Shop …” (quote from big-screen video display within Auckland Airport’s arrivals-hall) Auckland’s Airport is undergoing a fundamental transition as its owner Auckland International Airport Limited (AIAL) reduces exposure to repeated airline industry crises and recognises its potential as a regional economic actor. In short Auckland Airport has become a pivotal space of regional transformation and AIAL a leading economic actor in this transformation. This thesis uses an assemblage approach to explore this space and the work of AIAL, and in turn to demonstrate how Auckland Airport is shaping a new Auckland space economy and how the assemblage approach can help to shape a distinctive new economic geography. The approach re-conceptualises the airport as more than an infrastructure builder and services provider. Building on a critique of the airport-cities literature and a nascent assemblages literature in economic geography, the thesis describes and analyses the development of Auckland Airport and its complex economic relations with a globalising Auckland. Auckland Airport is re-drawn as a relational assemblage of actors, practices, investment trajectories, spatial strategies, and objects in ‘becoming’ - a (neo-liberalising) entrepreneur, urbandevelopment authority, economy-builder, national soft-power asset. The airport-assemblage is thus crafted of shifting, multiscalar, and co-constitutive networks of rationalities, relationalities, and agencements. The thesis argues the case of the Auckland ‘Aerotropolis’, highlights the changing nature of airport-city relations, the practice-based nature of globalising process, and the value of an assemblages approach to capture relationality in the making of economies, something that economic geographers have long struggled to achieve. Within a context of emerging global cities, ‘the airport’ is shown to be an integral node of glocalisation, whose capacities and potentialities depend upon and are built upon highly networked states of being. It is both site and constitutive of new relational economic spatialities that are shaping Auckland.