6. THE WEEKEND  Where do Edge Town residents go for recreation? If Edge Town has a cultural centre – a ‘downtown’ where its mishmash geography is at its most concentrated – then it is the environs of the airport. A stroll from the tube station to Heathrow’s perimeter fence, through a car park and a field of allotments, confirms the extent to which normal rules do not apply here. Cattle graze nonchalantly among spectacular rigs of aviation electronics and shimmering landing lights; an overgrown footpath next to a park ends abruptly at a flashing sign warning of ‘aircraft crossing’ – and all this as jet plane after jet plane roars overhead. Or … silence. Every few hours, Heathrow's traffic controllers switch the runways used for landing and take off, compounding the hectic drama of the landscape. All at once, a place of deafening noise goes eerily calm – or the calm suddenly explodes. Situated in this tumultuous landscape, directly underneath the airport’s final approach flight paths, are ‘sensor parks’, fenced-off patches of land containing monitoring and display systems which respond to the electro-physical flux of their environment. These systems sense and display information about each plane as it approaches, passes overhead and lands, and also connect with centralised airport systems to find other information about the plane. The structure of the sensor park provides support for a host of screen-based and electromechanical displays, which offer numerical representations of the data collected from the sensors. Planes are ranked according to various sets of characteristics, creating league tables of an unusual kind. Noisiness (sound level) is compared with shininess (the amount of light the body of a plane reflects), glide slope wobble (the smoothness of the plane’s decent) with passenger ‘eclecticity’ (the eclectic ethnicity of the passenger list), and so on. These league tables are shown beside the latest data to arrive at the sensor park, providing a rapidly changing reference chart of thought-provoking comparisons. From the perspective of the viewer at the perimeter fence, the read-outs on the elevated display units are superimposed on the scene of the landing planes. It’s like watching sport on television when race times, speed or world record information is flashed up over the live video signal, fusing the physical event and its informational indices in one concentrated info-vista of noise and numbers.  Site plans  Sensor park  Park component plan  Landing sequence plan  Landing sequence animation  Info-vista animation
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