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Natural disasters bring to the fore the astounding interdependence and fragility of the complex mobility systems and infrastructural moorings that make up contemporary transnational geographies. Cities – and especially entire islands – suffering catastrophic events are illustrative of how the dynamic intertwining of transportation, communication, provisioning, and scheduling systems can rapidly unravel. Through an analysis of the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, this article examines how natural disasters demobilize and remobilize; how they strike at mobility systems and trouble mobility justice; and also engender their own unique mobilities (and immobilities). Through an analysis of the uneven network capital expended as humanitarian mobility into post-earthquake Port-au-Prince (with comparison to post-hurricane New Orleans) it is shown how post-disaster logistics simultaneously produce disconnections, limit capabilities for mobility, and introduce what is theorized as an ‘islanding effect’ on the victims of the disaster. This is further delineated through close analysis of two crucial post-earthquake reconfigurations: the militarization of air mobilities and the humanitarian use of aerial visioning technologies and GIS in the emergency response. US military control of the international airport and use of aerial surveillance and geo-mapping for disaster response reinforced existing uneven mobility regimes, which subject marginalized and racialized populations of the Caribbean to enhanced border control, migrant interdiction and criminalization. Through the disaster response itself, rapid deployment of these new (im)mobility infrastructures deepened spatial inequalities, diminished mobility justice, and reproduced subjects with differential mobility capability. The article also considers counter-geographies and resistance to the injustices of post-disaster mobility regimes.
Mimí Sheller (Thu,) studied this question.