GP Columnists
Airports and Butterflies
Airports are monuments to globalization. It is not only the overtly globalizing function of airports – to service the planes which traverse the globe in vast numbers – but the garish shop fronts hawking omnipresent global brands. As every international traveler knows, the shopping mall sameness of airports everywhere in the developed world means that from the inside you could be just about anywhere.
Yet amid the throng, there are some differences. Changi Airport in Singapore for instance, has long been recognized by travelers as one of the best places to spend transit hours – a status acknowledged again when it was named the best airport in the world earlier this year.
In 2008, Changi added to its appeal by opening ‘the world's first Butterfly Garden in an airport’. Passengers who visit the Changi butterfly house are met with a lush two level garden linked by a spiral stairway that is quite beautiful. A six meter artificial waterfall provides a pleasing background roar as butterflies of various kinds flap past, or rest on flowers, fruit and foliage. The elegant arching roof is a tastefully designed combination of glass and steel.The effect of the Butterfly Garden is simultaneously ultra-modern and primal. Periodically the urgent moan of planes taking off and landing can be heard over the tumult of the falling water, adding to the complex nature of the experience. According to the designers’ blurb:
The butterfly garden is designed to be a tropical nature retreat for passengers of Changi Airport Terminal 3’s Departure and Transit Mall to have a quick rest and relax from travelling.
Admission is free to the Butterfly Garden – at least ‘free’ to those who have already paid for international air travel. In that sense, the garden is an extension of the geography of exclusion that is implicit in the social logic of airports, and perhaps an example of a ‘neoliberal dreamworld’ of the kind described in a recent anthology edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk.
Airports are exclusive places. Only passengers and staff are allowed through security: the former self-selected by their ability to pay and the latter in the role of service-provision to the former. Inside each airport, ‘frequent flyers’ are rewarded for the loyalty of their consumption with membership of lounges which provide various comforts. Generally inhabited by those who could afford to buy their own drinks, loyalty lounges are a straightforward application of Mathew 25:29: ‘to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance.’ One sign in the Changi Butterfly Garden reads:
Butterflies in this butterfly garden are bred, and never caught in the wild. As man-made structures replace the spaces where these butterflies once lived, we find ways to conserve their habitats to avoid the extinction of these beautiful creatures.
What once was common has now been enclosed for the exclusive felicitation of the elites who can afford air travel.
Almost entirely disembedded from their social, climatic and environmental surrounds, airports are aloof and apart from the cities that host them. In that sense, airports are typical of the processes of globalization in which consumers do not experience the real world costs of production. In terms of carbon emissions and overall ecological footprint, every airport throws a shadow that extends far beyond its perimeter.
Airports are both product and agent of the global processes of hyper-consumption that drive the ‘replacement’ of the natural world with ‘man-made structures’. But what the visitor to Changi Butterfly Garden encounters is not the ugly consequences, but a transcendent experience of close communion with falling water and living things. Just like the butterflies in their garden, transit passengers at airports are confined to a beautified hothouse, kept oblivious to the world outside.
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