Airports As Seen Through The Eyes Of The Landside–Airside Boundary

Can we challenge the way we have written the history of airports and the form in which we understand them today and perhaps tomorrow? In this work I use the landside-airside boundary as a lens to see through the airport and its history. In doing so, I try to look for new answers that may throw some light on the obscure (vaulted) sociotechnical processes of change that have turned the airport into an "unresolved problem." In this regard I frame the discussion of boundaries from several perspectives including security, permeability and containment, invention and reinvention, culture and imposition, literature and scholarship, its physical and nonphysical representations, technological change, and so forth. Just the identification of these "entities" may also add to Thomas Hughes's model of Large Technological Systems, because the landside-airside boundary shows how systems are constructed in a different sequence from Hughes's model. As I show in this study, only three cases have altered the "linearity" of standard airport design: New York LaGuardia, Washington Dulles, and Tampa International Airport. These cases sum up the only full reinventions of airports through history, and by unfolding their own unique stories, I try to reveal how an airport gets born. Can we prove that the landside-airside boundary is the single most important feature that shapes an airport