The organization of transport terminal: panopticons, cathedrals, agoras or branded cities?

Space has become recognized in organization research as an important, and complex, social and material foundation of organizing (Orlikowski, 2007; Van Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010). Train stations, ports, airports and motorway service stations have always been characterized by the highly opposing concepts that affect their nature: Are they buildings or sites for socialisation? - Anthropological spaces or non-places? - Doorways or bridges? - Cathedrals or mechanical factories? - Transit areas or sedentary sites? - Condensed local cities or global? Agoras or Panopticons? Social expressions or shopping malls? The combination of these different dimensions strongly influences a building's architectural and engineering model, but also expresses an organizational, economic and business model for the businesses that manage them, as well as the quality of life of passengers and workers, and of the cities to which they refer. Our study makes use of the paradigm developed by Marc Augé (1992) as a theoretical framework, in which ports, highways, train stations and airports are structures built for fast movements. They are non-places, through which millions of people pass quickly without entering into a relationship; they ultimately lack three anthropological prerogatives, namely 1) identity (such as houses), 2) history (monuments), and 3) relational attributes (such as for city squares). In non-places, people define themselves through individual contracts (passports, boarding passes, tickets, credit cards), interacting via encoded information (signs, ideograms, directions) relating to distant organizations or institutions. More recently, airports, train stations, ports and service stations have been considered small branded cities. The agora (public space of social interaction of the Greek polis) has given way to commercial exchange: 'I exist as a citizen because I buy universally recognized branded products.