High-Speed Rail Stations and Airports: Symbolic Infrastructures of Mobility as “Places of Globalisation”

Abstract

In the current era of mobility, airports and high-speed train stations have turned into necessary infrastructures of any world city. Beyond connecting places physically and energizing economically the cities in which they are located, they play a prominent role in the consolidation and maintenance of world cities, as they are also symbolic facilities, linked to dominant leisure-consumption practices. This more immaterial perspective is emphasised, especially in the face of the greater presence of non-aeronautical uses in these places, which has caused a change of conception in their architectural design, in the leisure-consumption activities that are developed in them and in the attempts to project territorial identities in a world context where homogenisation patterns printed by globalization are generalised. Therefore, in the face of those anthropological conceptions that define them as “non places”, they can be referred to as “places of Globalisation”, that are defined, or are at least heavily influenced, by the contemporary emphasis on leisure, consumption and global mobility.