Thèse réalisée avec le soutien du Conseil Régional d'Île-de-France. ; This thesis questions the meaning of the experience of four main international airports: Paris Charles-De-Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol, Frankfurt am Main and Dubai International. The main hypothesis is that these four hubs, far from being non-places, are on the contrary places of power and privileged laboratories to observe new relationships to place and to territory in mobility. These very complex places of interchange are analyzed through the lens of the non-idealized public spaces and through the actors at the heart of their day-to-day operations, in a comparative approach of the four field works. Airport public spaces prove to be powerful operators of visibility, intelligibility, performance and categorization of a very large spectrum of mobilities, such as touristic, business or transnational mobilities. Studying the design and the practice of these global places par excellence on a micro-scale, the PhD shows how much experiences and heterogeneous categorizations of mobilities are put to the test in these microcosms and make sense at a far larger scale than the one of these spaces themselves. This work stresses therefore the major role mobility places in the expression of powerful forms of individual and collective affirmation and segregation on the move. At the heart of globalization and metropolisation processes, airports turn out be revelators of the territorialities in network in construction through and in mobility. ; La thèse interroge l'aménagement et l'expérience de quatre grands aéroports internationaux : Paris Roissy-Charles-De-Gaulle, Amsterdam Schiphol, Francfort-sur-le-Main et Dubai International. Elle fait l'hypothèse que ces quatre hubs ou plateformes de correspondance, loin de constituer des non-lieux, sont au contraire des lieux de pouvoir et des laboratoires privilégiés d'observation de nouveaux rapports au lieu et au territoire dans la mobilité. Pôles d'échange ou lieux-mouvements de grande complexité, ces commutateurs ...