Across Southeast Asia, air traffic is growing at an extraordinary rate. That increase can largely be attributed to the emergence of low-cost aviation networks that serve a vastly enlarged clientele of air travelers: migrant workers, students, retirees, pilgrims, and tourists on the threshold of the middle class. With that in mind, the talk investigates how Southeast Asian airports — along with the cities that they serve — have been redesigned to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding flying public. Through fieldwork conducted in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, it probes the development of architectural typologies and low-tech transport systems that cater to passengers who lack the basic knowledge and technical infrastructure that is needed to fly: such as a credit card, internet access, familiarity with check-in procedures, or a way to get to the airport. These low-cost infrastructures have fundamentally reshaped the social and spatial dynamics of contemporary Southeast Asian cities; and have significantly reordered the functional interdependency of those cities by accelerating cross-border flows of labor, consumption, capital, and knowledge. At the same time, there exists a palpable tension between the populist narratives espoused by budget airline operators and the airport designs produced by state planning agencies, who have only belatedly and begrudgingly responded to the socioeconomic diversification of air passengers.

Ultimately, the talk uses airport design as a means of investigating the perilous disconnect between the valorization of cross-border mobility and regional economic integration, advocated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its constituent member states; and the aesthetic goals of urban planners, who are keen to mobilize the symbolic value of airports as evidence of their cities’ global connectivity and cosmopolitan stature, yet are loathe to acknowledge the increasingly plebeian nature of the airport’s clientele that has resulted from the liberalization of cross-border transportation and migration regimes.