Paper short abstract:

This paper will examine the management of non-human lives and nature at Frankfurt airport, Germany’s largest international hub. We will show how economic, cultural, or legal values are not pre-given but emerge from practices that give rise to politics of compensation.

Paper long abstract:

Boundary drawing is a characteristic for the modern airport. In order to make air traffic flow, multiple geographic, legal, economic, national, acoustic, security-related borders and boundaries must be coordinated, sometimes even created. This boundary drawing includes contestations over valuation between airport operators, biologists, nearby residents and protest movements. Airports can be understood as multiple borderlands (Anzaldúa), producing inclusions and exclusions, centers and margins of different kinds. Our collaborative research project studies the management of non-human lives and nature at Frankfurt airport, Germany's largest international hub, which is almost completely surrounded by forests of high biodiversity. In this talk we will focus on valuation processes of non-human life at the margins of Frankfurt airports. Valuation of these areas of lands, the forests and their biodiversity have been constantly made and unmade, politically intervened in, negotiated or temporarily settled through "compensations". Our research investigates those specific valuation practices by means of archival research, ethnographic site visits, interviews and photo documentation. Drawing on these materials we show how nature and non-human lives are valuated differently depending on time and place and how they are coordinated and negotiated or separated from each other. Even if woods are firmly fixed on a spot, practices of valuation have made them rather flexible and moveable. We will argue that values (of all kinds such as economic, emotional, cultural, or legal) are not pre-given they rather emerge historically from different practices, which are still matters of conflict today and settlement can be violent.