“ I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the next century. The great airports are already suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.
— J.G. Ballard: Airports
(via Aaron Straup)
I’m always kind of intrigued by the suggestion that the world’s megacities are now becoming more connected to each other than they are to the rest of their respective countries. And, having spent quite a lot of time in them in the past year, I think that Ballard’s quite right that there’s nowhere you get a sense of that better than in airports.