The islanding effect: post-disaster mobility systems and humanitarian logistics in Haiti

Introduction

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, and along with them civic order, markets, and everyday life. ¹ In the face of large-scale mobility systems failure, we see laid bare the institutional scaffolding and regulatory regimes that govern the spatialization of particular territories, including all the gaps and uneven distributions of social rights and ‘network capital’ ² that leave some groups most vulnerable to harm. Building on previous considerations of the collapse of mobility systems during the 2005 impact of Hurricane Katrina in the city of New Orleans, ³ in this article I examine how the analysis of post-disaster mobility systems can contribute to our understanding of the devastation of Haiti following the earthquake of 12 January 2010, and the ongoing dilemma of our unfulfilled basic needs. ⁴

Haiti, along with other Caribbean islands, is a crucial site for a number of complex transnational processes including cross-border flows of tourists, migrants, refugees, remittances, laundered money, smuggled goods, gun violence, and political unrest. A thorough account of the (im)mobilities accompanying the earthquake in Haiti must be placed in the context of the well-established view of the Caribbean as a historically ‘mobile region’ that is constantly in flux. ⁵ The new mobilities paradigm – which concerns not only physical movement, but also potential movement, blocked or paused movement, immobilization, and forms of stillness, dwelling and place-making ⁶ – can offer a new approach to thinking about post-disaster recovery in island settings in relation to wider transnational mobility systems. Islands may appear to be contained spaces par excellence, bounded by water on all sides; yet, at the same time, islanders dwell thanks to many different kinds of coming and going, pausing and waiting, producing a choreography of uneven spatialities and temporalities. ⁷ An approach highlighting mobility justice in post-disaster situations focuses our attention on who is able to exercise rights to mobility and who is not capable of mobility within particular situations. It allows us to ask how disasters re-shape mobility systems, which is also an important question with respect to slower moving processes related to the impacts of, and adaptation to, climate change and natural disaster vulnerability in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) worldwide. ⁸ It also intersects with important recent work by Alison Mountz on the mobility of nation-states as they seek to enforce border exclusion in ways that ‘fix movement on islands’; nation-states close, bound and control flows through new practices of detention, processing and exclusion ‘with the port of entry operating as a mobile island that inhibits others’ mobility.’ ⁹

The complex character of mobility systems stems from the multiple fixities or moorings often on a substantial physical scale that enable other things to be fluid; and such systems are culturally shaped and politically governed by ‘mobility regimes.’ ¹⁰ Haiti’s post-earthquake mobility systems – including cratered, rubble-strewn roads and patched-up runways, radio transmitters and satellite dishes, airport terminals and docks, oil pipelines and internet connections, motorcycles and Tap-Tap buses, shipping containers and cell phones – together perform ongoing re-arrangements of place and scale as they make and break connections between people and places. We can refer to these systems as affording different degrees of ‘motility,’ which is a crucial dimension of unequal power relations across differently positioned individuals, cities, regions, or nations. Motility can be defined as ‘the manner in which an individual or group appropriates the field of possibilities relative to movement and uses them’ according to Kaufmann and Montulet. ¹¹ Who is able to ‘appropriate’ the potential for mobility is both a political question (what rights to mobility exist in a particular context, and how are they exercised and protected) and an ethical question (what capabilities of mobility are valued, defended, and extended to all involved). ¹² Building on political philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, mobility can be considered a fundamental capability for human thriving, and hence for recovery from disasters. ¹³ When network capital is already unevenly distributed, a disaster may itself impact on the capabilities for mobility of some groups more than others; but beyond that, the disaster response and recovery effort may further reproduce uneven capabilities in ways that have yet to be acknowledged or understood in most of the existing approaches to humanitarian intervention and global disaster management. ¹⁴

The destruction of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, and nearby towns such as Léogane, led first to the displacement of more than 1.5 million survivors, then to huge flows of foreign aid, disaster responders, and freight through the country’s main international airport – temporarily placed under US military control – and by air into Santo Domingo and then by road from the Dominican Republic. In contrast to this mobilization, the vast majority of Haitians were unable to leave the country to seek medical care, relatives or shelter. The crisis was contained within Haiti, in part through the deployment of the US military and UN peacekeepers to the scene. Further crises in the coordination of mobility systems continued to unfold, including the ongoing failure to move displaced people out of temporary shelters into transitional housing; the inability to remove rubble at a significant rate; and the frictions in moving supplies into and around the country. While Cresswell’s emphasis on the ‘politics of mobility’ focuses our attention on the disadvantages of the ‘mobility poor,’ ¹⁵ there is an equally troubling and complex politics of mobility in which the post-disaster mobilization of those with network capital produces new infrastructures, mobility systems, and logistical flows that further distort access for the very people they seek to help, especially when those people are held within the borders of an island-state from which exit is tightly controlled.

In this article I will argue that there is an islanding effect in which mobility regimes in post-disaster situations bring highly motile foreign responders and assistance to some of the affected population, while holding the ‘internally displaced’ in place, in an ongoing process of marginalization, serial displacement, and containment – as if they were marooned on an island of misery, even while surrounded by the coming and going of well-equipped frequent flyers. The very same logistical efforts that enact post-disaster recovery simultaneously produce disconnections and diminish capabilities for mobility for the victims. After introducing a comparative analysis of post-disaster (im)mobilities in New Orleans and Port-au-Prince in the first section, the next two sections offer a close analysis of two crucial post-earthquake reconfigurations: the militarization of air mobilities and the humanitarian use of aerial visioning technologies in the emergency response. It is argued that US military control of the Toussaint Louverture International Airport and the use of aerial surveillance technologies and GIS for geo-mapping disaster management reinforced uneven mobility regimes. The disaster response itself supported the deepening of mobility inequalities, the re-making of uneven spatialities, and the re-creation of subjects with differential network capital and mobility capability.

Disaster (im)mobilities

Urban spatiality in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with its palatial houses up on the hills and rambling slums filling the gullies, ravines and flood plains, is produced through dynamic processes of assembling and disassembling various heterogeneous elements. As in other cities, urban space emerges as a dynamic relation between the corporeal and the technical, the architectural and the infrastructural, the representational and the symbolic, as well as the atmospheric and the affective. Even in the absence of catastrophic collapse, urban spatial form changes (or perseveres) through political contestation over the systems of governance and control through which power, material resources, and space itself are redistributed. ¹⁶ In contemporary Port-au-Prince one can observe such political-spatial struggles taking place all the time, but especially so in the aftermath of disaster when the ligaments of urban form are torn asunder and must be actively renegotiated (or forced back into place). Natural disasters demobilize and remobilize. They strike at mobility systems but also engender their own unique mobilities (and immobilities) as people seek to flee the onset of an impending catastrophe, to resituate themselves in its bewildering aftermath, or to locate their dispersed families, food, water, and shelter.

At the same time, emergency responders, relief workers, and armed peace keepers and soldiers begin to move into the affected area and take control of infrastructures of mobility such as roads, airports, ports, and communication networks. Given the already splintered provision of infrastructure in less developed cities, collapsing mobility systems are likely to have very different effects on the wealthy and the poor, on urban and rural populations, and (in the Caribbean and Latin America) on lighter elites and darker masses. Those with high network capital are able to appropriate their own potential for mobility whether to flee disaster, or to come to the rescue; those with low network capital are usually caught in a vortex of displacement, temporary shelter, and containment within the disaster zone. Thus we could hypothesize that the impact of systems failures will fall most heavily upon the poor, marginalized, and racialized sectors of society who already lack network capital and are excluded from many forms of access and motility. ¹⁷

It may be instructive to begin with a comparison of the disaster in Port-au-Prince to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans. The entrapment of people in flooded New Orleans in 2005 painfully instantiated the inequities of access to mobility. It quickly became evident that evacuation plans relied on systems of automobility, and those without cars had no alternative means of evacuation when public transit systems were closed down. The closing of bridges (in some cases by force), the survivors stuck in the Louisiana Superdome, the images of flooded roads and people waving at helicopters from their rooftops, all brought to collective realization the horror of homes, hospitals, neighborhoods, and an entire city cut off from rescue: an island of despair, despite the resources of the United States. In post-earthquake Haiti this ‘islanding effect’ of the isolation experienced due to uneven access to mobility was even more stark.

After the Haitian earthquake approximately 150,000 Haitians left the country (from a total population of 9 million), yet most of these were either US citizens of Haitian origin or wealthier Haitians who already held passports and visas. ¹⁸ At least another 500,000 people abandoned damaged urban areas to find shelter in the more rural areas of the country. Yet food and services were already scarce in the countryside and smaller towns. Nine months after the earthquake about 1.3 million people still lived in tents and informal shelters in the Port-au-Prince metro area, indicative of the lack of access to any better options. They lived in highly dangerous and vulnerable conditions due to the lack of bodily security, sanitation, clean water and hurricane-proof shelter. ¹⁹ The affective misery of such living conditions contrasted palpably with the conditions in which humanitarian workers were able to move about, live in hotels, and return to comfortable homes (see Figure 1). ²⁰ The flow of money into various post-disaster recovery funds, both governmental and charitable, never made it to the people on the ground. ²¹

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Figure 1.

Shelters in Salvation Army Camp in former Soccer Stadium, Port-au-Prince, June 2010. (Photo credit: M. Sheller.)

During disasters further problems subsequently arise with the incapacity of waste-removal systems, while the detritus of destroyed buildings and the rubble of former homes piles up in the streets. In New Orleans this left mountains of ruined refrigerators, household effects, and rotting garbage amidst the swirl of toxic waters. In Port-au-Prince, the massive engineering failure evident in the collapse of structurally unsound buildings left millions of cubic meters of rubble across the city, a crushing weight upon the survivors and a constant traumatizing reminder of death. There have been neither enough trucks to remove the waste, nor enough landfill sites in which to deposit it. Rebuilding remains a paradox of moving/re-moving. The even more deeply disturbing abandonment of the dying and dead at hospitals and morgues in New Orleans, as well as some bodies simply left out in the streets, was even more shockingly compounded in the massive loss of life in Haiti. ²² The unavoidable break-down of mortuary processes, last rites, and funerary rituals of death reminds us of how dependent we all are on processes of circulation to maintain basic human dignity, to keep disease away, and to mourn the dead respectfully. In Haiti the living and the dead mingled, and the government brought in bulldozers to dispose of uncounted tens of thousands of bodies in mass graves.

The symbolic and discursive meanings of mobility also crucially connect these two cases, as in the debate over whether victims of Hurricane Katrina should be called ‘refugees’ or not. ²³ This debate played upon the unstated American fear of refugees as outsiders flooding our shores, an imagery associated especially with so-called Haitian ‘boat-people.’ We know, for instance, that the US military prison (known as Camp X-Ray) at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which is still being used to hold suspected terrorist captives (brought there through secret CIA flights called ‘extraordinary rendition’), was originally controversial for its use in holding thousands of Cuban asylum seekers and Haitian refugees intercepted following the first coup against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in the early 1990s. ²⁴ This ‘politics of containment,’ as Hallward refers to broader US policy towards Haiti, was the beginning of the dehumanization of the term ‘refugee’ in American popular culture. Guantánamo operates as an extra-legal ‘state of exception’ that is specifically connected to state regimes of control over mobility and immobility, and the people held there – first refugees, now terrorists – are treated as non-persons outside normal international law, whose capability for mobility is denied. ²⁵

In the face of precarity and statelessness, the embrace of the name ‘Fugees’ by Haitian diaspora artists Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill was an effort to counteract the criminalization and dehumanization of Haitian refugees (although ironically it was Jean’s long-term US residency that disqualified him from his run for the Haitian presidency in 2011). Yet the post-Katrina rejection of the term refugees by African-Americans, especially, indicated the extent to which refugees remained a stigmatized group. The same could be said for the victims of the Haitian earthquake, who came to be known as ‘Internally Displaced People,’ or IDP’s, an effort at neutrality that nevertheless was conscripted as a device of dehumanization. Whether as refugees or as IDP’s, people without homes, without a place in the world, somehow come to be perceived as less than human, as incapable of helping themselves, and as a problem for others to deal with. So it is not simply that these people are lacking in mobility, while a kinetic elite is hypermobile; this over-simplifies the situation. Refugees and IDP’s are also mobile, but their forms of movement are disrupted, involuntary, subjected to coercive force by others, and punctuated by incarceration, waiting, temporary immobilization, and sudden flights under unsafe conditions. Meanwhile, many Haitian transnationals continue to live in a state of suspension or marginality, at times belonging neither here nor there. ²⁶

In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, mobility systems failures were further compounded by the emergent gaps between scales and temporalities of movement, as tasks of coordination and logistics foundered in the face of complex intractable barriers. Disaster logistics often produce highly skewed and uneven mobilities, in which the outsider has the power to move, to bring in supplies, to access information, or to come and go at will, while the local victim experiences negative network capital, decreasing access to motility, and high levels of random and turbulent serial displacement. Observations of non-governmental organizations working in Léogane, Haiti, and meetings of the United Nations WASH cluster (aid groups working on Water and Sanitation) indicate that many meetings were conducted in French or sometimes English, with no provision for Kréyol translation, thus excluding the majority of Haitians from full participation. Thus, one of the perversities of post-disaster recovery is that outsiders’ network capital and access to mobility further marginalizes those whom they seek to help. ²⁷

One of the most wrenching examples of this was plain to see for almost any aid worker who went to Haiti after the earthquake: along one of the major thoroughfares leading out of the city towards Carrefour Feuilles went a parade of the SUV’s of the ‘blancs’ (whites/foreigners), the belching heavy goods vehicles, the UN armored personnel carriers, the overloaded Tap-Taps (buses), and the usual traffic of creatively modified pick-up trucks. The traffic all passed close to a median strip on which had sprouted a temporary settlement, stretching for close to a mile. Along this narrow median strip there was a long line of tiny shelters cobbled together with tarps and scraps of metal or wood. And in those tiny shelters people were struggling to live – bathing, cooking, feeding babies, sleeping – within feet of the fearful phalanx of huge vehicles full of alleged rescuers, who passed them by with nothing but shocked faces. A pathetic barrier of old tires had been placed in the gutter by some, to afford a few inches of protection from the meter-high wheels churning past. This is as good an image as any of the paradoxes of disaster (im)mobilities (see Figure 2). ²⁸ Scenes such as the Salvation Army Camp or the highway median shelters, along with the innumerable collapsed buildings and blocked roadways, created an ongoing atmosphere of jarring failure of the aid efforts, as the coming and going of highly equipped outsiders continued to have little impact on improving the day-to-day living conditions of the victims of the earthquake.

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Figure 2.

Tent camp along median strip on National Highway 2, Carrefour Feuilles, Haiti, July 2010. (Photo credit: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times/Redux.)

Disasters create situations of mobility restructuring. Beyond the good intentions of humanitarian action, it is in the process itself of rebuilding that the foundations are laid for new mobility regimes, ones which accrue upon the mobile network capital of the relief effort itself. Local, regional, national and transnational mobilities are all implicated in the collapse of mobility systems caused by natural disasters, but have uneven rates of recovery that bring different groups of actors into play with differing mobility capabilities. Disaster mobilizations also include questions of which actors are mobilized, which flows of capital are conceived, and what kinds of redevelopment processes are envisioned (these ranging from export-processing factories, tourism, and neoliberal restructuring imagined as bridges to the global economy, to plans for decentralization, diversification, and agricultural protection imagined as foundations for a self-sustaining local economy). Systems of mobility and their governance are not only spatially uneven and temporally polyrhythmic, being restructured and rescaled at differing tempos, but the conflicting temporalities of management, coordination and governance also have strong political implications for different future development projects.

We have yet to catalogue and fully understand the ways in which the onslaught of aid (and military intervention) may in and of itself produce inadvertent inequalities in mobility, new distortions in infrastructure, and uneven spatial structurations in which the victims of the disaster again lose ground. To even begin to understand the politics of post-earthquake mobilities in Haiti, we first need to situate it within a wider Caribbean mobility landscape, which (crucially) also includes resistance to the dominant mobility regimes and their islanding effects. Mobilities cannot be described without attention to the necessary spatial, infrastructural, and institutional moorings that configure and enable movement, not only in the immediate post-disaster setting but also in its wider historical and political contexts. This includes the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern mobilities through the region including monetary flows (e.g. migrant remittances, foreign direct investment, exchange rate mechanisms, debt financing), ‘offshore’ production processes (e.g. free trade zones, export processing zones, back office services), and legal and illegal exchange processes (e.g. agricultural and industrial commodity markets, informal commercial importing, and the underground ‘narcoeconomy’). ²⁹

Monetary remittances from the Haitian diaspora, for example, were already crucial to the wellbeing of many families in Haiti (constituting from one-quarter to one-half of national income), but became perhaps the key means of survival following the breakdown of local economies after the earthquake. According to World Bank economist Dilip Ratha, a 20 percent surge in remittances was expected for 2010, bringing in an extra US$360 million above normal remittances levels of US$1.5 billion. ³⁰ Although we often think of money as fungible, frictionless and fast moving, even in the midst of disaster, a report on ‘Haitian Monetary Ecologies and Repertoires’ six months after the earthquake finds that many Haitians nevertheless faced challenges ‘in their efforts to send, receive, exchange and store money’ including through the use of mobile phones. Even monetary mobilities, according to the study, face barriers due to bureaucracy and power, time and cost, and security. ³¹

In the following sections I turn to two examples of the re-shaping of mobility capabilities in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. The first concerns use of the country’s main international airport and the militarization of control over rights to air mobility; the second concerns satellite vision and control over mapping technologies such as Google Earth. Both examples are entwined with military technologies and air power; both concern what Deborah Cowen ³² calls the ‘blurred seamspace’ between military and civilian logistics operations; and both acutely problematize the differential network capital of different actors involved in the disaster response in Haiti. They show us how in this case the urban character of the disaster was compounded by an islanding effect in which the borders of Haiti came to serve as a proxy for containment. Mobility systems allowed for porous borders that could enable outsiders easy access, and a limited flow of goods into Haiti, even as the islanding effect created a hard fortress for those within. The point is that such effects are not inevitable, but are produced by post-disaster decision making that is built on social exclusion and uneven mobility capabilities.

Air travel as aerial power

While many Americans only paid attention to Haiti in response to the shocking devastation caused by the earthquake, the US government has played an important role in Haiti for many decades. Haiti was subject to a US military occupation (1915–34) and more recently US support for several coups. ³³ The US War on Drugs was also crucial, with Haitian President René Préval signing the 1997 Préval/Albright accord which permitted the US Drug Enforcement Administration to enter Haitian territory – ‘sky, earth and sea’ – in the pursuit of drug traffickers, but effectively also bolstered the interception of refugees. As Mountz argues,

Mobile states at once center and displace the border, reconstituting ports for those on the move onshore and offshore. Interception at sea reflects this movement well. State authorities travel offshore to meet, board, deter, deflect, and detain those trying to reach sovereign territory, there, interception and remote detention is largely concealed from public, media, and human rights monitors . . . the border is obviously moving, proliferating, dispersed. ³⁴

Haitian migrants seeking a better life became associated with criminality, and especially after 9/11 both kinds of illicit mobility were subjected to new forms of transnational policing and border enforcement, not only in the United States but throughout the Caribbean region, where tens of thousands of Haitians have also sought refuge in island-states like Guadeloupe, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos, as well as the neighboring Dominican Republic. ³⁵

On the traffic-clogged streets of Port-au-Prince, air travel significantly continues to embody popular dreams of mobility and success: one of the common themes seen on the heavily decorated Tap-Tap buses, embellished with brightly-painted wooden panels along their sides, is the cut-out silhouette of a modern airliner perched along the roof. Spanning the length of the bus, with baggage and passengers piled atop, accompanied by written messages of good fortune and foreign travel along their sides, this virtual vernacular version of flight is the closest most Haitians will get to air travel. For many of those waiting outside the gates of Toussaint Louverture International Airport, their embodiment as black, Kréyol-speaking, and not part of the elite is enough to bar their access to passports, visas, and ease of passing through a border checkpoint. Ironically l’ouverture (meaning ‘the opening’), is not so much an opening as a closing, and the only way off the island for many is by rickety boat, often paying hefty fees to human traffickers and risking their lives. Even once they get off the island, many live as undocumented migrants, effectively stateless, while others are returned to Haiti as deportees.

Haiti is the least developed country member of the insular Caribbean; thus, there are especially stark contrasts between the luxury kinetic elite, the transnational diaspora who travel back and forth regularly, the relatively marooned island citizen who has little access to travel, and the undocumented migrant who has even less. But we should not forget the large number of undocumented migrants who do cross international borders, the drug traders who evade border security, and the illicit flows of goods and money that link together the transnational diaspora and their home. Into this context of deeply uneven motility (including huge deficits in the capability for mobility among much of the Haitian population, exacerbated by the earthquake’s destruction of infrastructure) the earthquake injected a new dynamic situation which allowed for another US military intervention that was only retroactively authorized.

The release of secret US diplomatic cables by the organization WikiLeaks reveals that 150 US troops of the 82nd Airborne Division had already landed in Haiti on 16 January, and that Haitian President Préval was pressed into signing a ‘joint communique’ requesting the assistance of US troops the following day. Despite the presence of UN MINUSTAH forces in the country, and no evidence of violence or political instability, almost immediately after the earthquake the US government:

had already initiated the deployment of considerable military assets to Haiti, according to the secret State Department cables. At its peak, the U.S. military response included 22,000 soldiers – 7,000 based on land and the remainder operating aboard 58 aircraft and 15 nearby vessels, according to the Pentagon. The U.S. Coast Guard was also flying spotter aircraft along Haiti’s coast to intercept any refugees from the disaster. ³⁶

Independent news organizations including Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera were soon reporting that the US had taken over the airport, and were not allowing crucial aid flights to land, instead giving priority to military cargoes containing armed troops and cargo such as body armor:

The enormous influx of US military personnel, weapons and equipment into the airport prompted a chorus of protest from mid-level French, Italian, and Brazilian officials, as well as the aid group Doctors Without Borders. They were outraged that planes carrying vital humanitarian supplies were prevented from landing, or delayed, sometimes for days. ³⁷

Diverted humanitarian assistance had to land in Santo Domingo, where they took what they could fit into buses on a 10-hour journey back across the mountains into Haiti.

The militarization of humanitarian aid is closely linked to the capabilities of air power as a form of dominant mobility. Caren Kaplan points out that historically the drive for ‘air power’ afforded huge military advantages to those who controlled the ‘cosmic view’ from aerial vision technologies, so that military air power is closely tied to modes of visualization and surveillance. ³⁸ US aerial power has been central to the military geo-politics of the Caribbean region. As a site ‘imbued with power and control,’ Adey suggests, ‘the airport is now a surveillance machine – an assemblage where webs of technology and information combine.’ ³⁹ New architectures of aerial security such as the US Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001 and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are not only associated with the ‘wars’ against terrorism and drug trafficking, but also are tightly coupled with biopolitical governmentalities of bodies (passports, biometric data, digital photography, backscatter x-rays). Peter Adey shows how these have their roots in colonial power relations, including histories of population management, spatial differentiation, and bio-politics, linking together early 20th-century aerial survey methods (developed in places like Northern Rhodesia, Palestine, British Guiana, and Borneo) and airport biometrics as used today, as two instances of an ‘aerial gaze.’ ⁴⁰ This imperial-aerial gaze enables neo-colonial governance not only through the mapping of territories and the regulation of mobilities across borders, but also through the bio-political management of racialized bodies enrolled in self-disclosure at the disciplined border check-point. Control of Haitian air and sea space (under the guise of humanitarian assistance) effectively became a means to prevent the mass movement of refugees off of the island, just as elements of the New Orleans population were cordoned off and forcibly contained after Hurricane Katrina.

While islands are traditionally conceived of as surrounded by water, airports and air travel serve as the most important sites of contemporary human and non-human mobilities across the Caribbean region, an archipelago of politically fragmented island-states and extended statehood systems. As I have begun to explore elsewhere, research on the socio-cultural dimensions of air travel and airports has generated the new field of ‘aeromobilities research,’ yet has focused mainly on metropolitan centers of power and nodes in a well-connected global network. ⁴¹ Now there is also an emerging view of air space as a site of complex materialities and uneven flows of information, communication, and rhetorics concerning mobility, security, and borders. Louise Amoore analyses the biopolitics of border security in terms of expert practices of border-making and securing through the routinization (almost automation) of judgments about who (and what) can pass or is stopped. ⁴² The ease with which foreign humanitarian responders were able to mobilize passports, vaccinations, air tickets, and other network capital to arrive in Port-au-Prince stood in stark contrast to the wide array of insurmountable hurdles that made it nearly impossible for most of the earthquake-affected population to leave. Meanwhile, approximately 200,000 undocumented Haitians in the United States were given ‘temporary protective status’ for 18 months, after which deportations quickly resumed.

Who controls Haitian air space, and who or what flows through it, or does not? Other controversies erupted over the transporting of orphaned children out of the country, the frenzy of missionaries arriving in the country, as well as the lack of mobility for many who needed medical assistance. There was a conspicuous absence of any large scale airlift of injured and homeless people to safety, or the relaxation of migration controls especially for family reunification. This apparent immobility, spatial isolation, or what I call ‘islanding’ of the disaster-affected population, coincided with a huge influx of highly mobile international responders along with implementation of aerial surveys of damage and GPS-enabled satellite data collection systems. These relative (im)mobilities in the post-earthquake situation are crucial to mapping critical geographies of mobility. Deborah Cowen, in particular, has noted the critical logistics geographies associated with the militarization of supply chain logistics. ⁴³ Humanitarian response during disasters is a crucial instance of logistics operations on a global scale that are deeply enmeshed in infrastructures for the flow of people, goods and information that increasingly blur civilian and military roles. In such emergency situations, I argue, rather than suspend the right to mobility of victims of the disaster for the alleged purpose of ensuring smooth logistical operations, the ethical humanitarian response should instead be working to ensure the capability of all involved to access mobility in order to meet their own basic needs. This would ensure what I am calling mobility justice.

Geo-mapping as uneven network capital

Caribbean-US borders are associated with both drug trafficking and illegal immigration, thus becoming key sites of ‘securitization,’ ⁴⁴ especially when viewed as the United States’ Third Border since President George W. Bush’s ‘Third Border Initiative’ of 2001. The region became subject to new US homeland security legislation under the Aviation and Transportation Security Act of 2001, which led to more intensive screening of airline passengers, baggage and cargo. ⁴⁵ In 2007, the USA for the first time required passports for all travel to international destinations in the Caribbean. Humanitarian travel in and out of Haiti draws on these secured infrastructures and mobility regimes to enable access to the country, even while the same mobility regime prevents earthquake-affected populations from leaving. Such secured flows of mobility and associated virtual fences are dependent on integrated information and communication systems, and technological infrastructures for tracking, surveillance and visual detection. ⁴⁶ In this section I consider how the routinization of the operation of transnational aerial vision technologies is crucial for understanding further aspects of the uneven mobilities and islanding effects of post-disaster response.

Beyond the securing of the airport and military control of air space, disaster response in Haiti also depended on forms of securitization, data collection, and high-tech visualizations assisted by satellites and aerial photography, which in other ways highlight key questions of immobility, turbulence, and aerial friction. ⁴⁷ Alison Mountz has explored the ‘stateless zones’ both within airports and ‘beyond sovereign territory’ where a kind of ‘transnational panopticism’ is exercised through technologies of vision and knowledge. ⁴⁸ Such panopticism also exists in the use of aerial photography, satellite imagery, remote sensing, and drone surveillance to establish knowledge of a particular territory. While there has been some critical discussion of the breaching of international borders and especially the weaponization of unmanned aerial vehicles in sites of war such as Afghanistan and Iraq, there has generally been consensus that such technologies can be used for the good in responding effectively to large-scale disasters. Aerial remote vision technologies help experts to assess the territorial extent of the disaster’s direct impact, the whereabouts of the injured and isolated populations, and as the response unfolds they play a crucial part in mapping where humanitarian assistance has been provided and where it is still needed.

Aerial visualization begins from relatively mundane forms in the everyday view from the airplane window, a now routine form of vision to which not all people have access. ⁴⁹ In what ways does the island-ness of Hispaniola, viewed most powerfully from the air, shape external imagination (and imaging) of the earthquake and the affected population? We can first consider an aerial view from an American Airlines plane flying into post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, as an indicator of the differential empowerment of foreign aid workers and displaced people living in temporary encampments (see Figure 3). Who has access to this view from the air, and who does not? What technologies and forms of seeing does it depend on? And what are their implications for those on the ground? While many US travelers take it for granted, this is an aerial view that few Haitians will ever have of their own city, and it grants certain kinds of visual power through the aerial gaze, which Caren Kaplan has traced back to practices such as ballooning, aerostatic observation, and the emergence of militarized aeromobility. ⁵⁰

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Figure 3.

An aerial view of a internal displacement camp on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, May 2010, from an American Airlines Plane. (Photo credit: M. Sheller.)

A further degree of empowering visioning technologies depended on satellite imaging coupled with Google Earth, which was used extensively for disaster response in Haiti. After the earthquake the global media were awash in satellite images of the damage, many drawing on the GeoEye satellite (Figure 4). ⁵¹ Satellite technology coupled with Google Earth now adds an entirely new dimension to aerial vision, allowing the technologically-empowered a virtual mobility to zoom in and out of topographical satellite maps of Haiti geotagged with information, photographs, and other GIS data, including data as humble as the placement of latrines. The small-print at the bottom notes that the imagery for this GeoEye and DigitalGlobe draws on data from SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, and GEBCO satellites – a powerful array of earth-observing low-space orbital optics. ⁵² The implementation of disaster response in Haiti has involved a huge mobilization of information technologies to track and map the distribution of aid, the actors involved, and the actions taken, generating forms of network capital such as access to location-free information and connection to networks at a distance.

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Figure 4.

Screen capture of Google Earth WASH Cluster map of emergency response in Port-au-Prince and Leogane, Haiti.

After the earthquake a community formed known as the Global Earth Observation Catastrophe Assessment Network (GEO-CAN), in order to use crowdsourcing techniques to have engineers and scientists around the world compare before and after satellite images and later aerial photographs of building damage. Sources of imagery included the World Bank WB-IC-RIT aerial missions, aerial missions flown by Google, Pictometry, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), ‘as well as large volumes of high-resolution satellite imagery being transferred into the public domain by DigitalGlobe and GeoEye.’ This variety of high resolution and very-high resolution imagery was complemented by ‘LiDAR data (WB-IC-RIT aerieal mission,) and later by oblique aerial imagery (Pictometry data) and in-field survey photos.’ ⁵³ In other words, very sophisticated aerial mobility and informational mobility were brought into play to support a global network of experts with high network capital. While extremely valuable, arguably these externally-controlled modes of surveillance, aerial visioning technologies, and GIS integration into real-time mapping nevertheless reinforce the very technologies for border control and infrastructure management that work together to reinforce social inequalities, re-make uneven spatialities, and re-create subjects with differential mobility capital.

Only some groups have access to surveillance technology and its powerful aerial views, informational databases, and related mobility and communication technologies. ⁵⁴ For example, while I was able to navigate the back-roads of Léogane by downloading highly detailed local maps of Haiti using a free iPhone app called Gaia Earth (coupled with a relatively costly AT&T international data plan), I observed that very few Haitians had broadband access or the kinds of mobile smartphones that allow those with network capital to make use of mobile geo-mapping technologies, including few members of the government, local community based organizations, or even Haitian professional classes, especially given post-earthquake electricity shortages. This enabled outsiders to create ‘centers of calculation’ in which information was channeled and controlled via disaster management organizations, technologies, and infrastructures based outside of Haiti. ⁵⁵ Open information platforms such as Ushahidi (haiti.ushahidi.com) did at least give more Haitians access to remotely input reports into mobile information systems, and opened up access to these reports through open source platforms. ⁵⁶ Based in part on their model, the crowd-sourcing of information has become a crucial element of current recommendations for disaster management which assists in enhancing more ethical mobility capability.

Aerial surveillance and information gathering by external institutions such as the World Bank was often lauded. A July 2011, New York Times article begins:

The Piper PA-31 Navajo took off into the sultry Miami morning and streaked southward toward the Caribbean. High over Haiti, the cameras inside began to snap. Behind this reconnaissance mission was, of all things, a financial institution: the World Bank, symbol of globalization and, to many, the hubris of wealthy nations.

But this was hardly some clandestine operation. On the contrary, the aerial photographs taken that January morning in 2010, shortly after a powerful earthquake leveled much of Port-au-Prince, were soon uploaded to the Web for all to see, along with an invitation to help World Bank specialists assess the damage and figure out how to aid Haiti. ⁵⁷

It is notable that the aerial reconnaissance described here is controlled by a global financial institution, which has access to Haitian air space; that the data will be open ‘for all to see,’ meaning those with the network capital for internet access and ability to read aerial photos; and that it will be analysed by their own ‘specialists,’ rather than by Haitians themselves. The article states that ‘More than 600 engineers in 21 countries analysed the data collected over Haiti, and their conclusions – essentially what to rebuild and where – have since been used by the Haitian government, relief organizations, companies and myriad others.’ ⁵⁸ Yet, engineers working in Haiti have called for much stronger local participation in decision-making and planning processes, and participant observation suggests that such participation is not taking place at any level. ⁵⁹ The World Bank’s alleged opening of data for good purposes instead appears to wrest control over Haitian air space, territorial data, and decision-making away from Haitians, giving power instead to ‘myriad others.’

This is not to say we should stop all humanitarian data-collection in Haiti, but that we need to more carefully consider the ethics of data collection, data sharing, visualization technologies, and the uses to which they are put in restructuring spatial relations and mobility systems that were already grounded in (neo)colonial and militarized relations of power. Nor is it simply a claim that technologies such as Google Earth, and GIS systems in general, are by default cultural representations of power holders that (like earlier forms of colonial cartography) reinforce empire via the disembodied master gaze. ⁶⁰ Rather, through the lens of critical mobilities theory, this article has aimed to show how the specific use of such visualization technologies in the production of network capital can have direct effects on the production of space and network capital, here specifically in the process of post-disaster decision-making, planning, and rebuilding. These applications of virtual mobility via informational mobility are not innocent, but are directly related to the operationalization of mobility regimes that enable foreign travel into Haiti and foreign control of logistics, while largely preventing Haitians from leaving their country, marginalizing their own self-representations, and interfering with their self-determination of rebuilding processes. Only if such technologies are put into practice with the aim of maximizing mobility capabilities for all will they contribute to greater mobility justice, which ultimately can reduce future vulnerability to disaster.

Conclusion

Complex mobility systems rest on differentiated subjectivities, uneven spatialities, and unequal distributions of network capital that in the aftermath of disaster increased the capability of foreigners to move into and around Haiti, and to transmit information into and out of Haiti, even while decreasing the mobility capabilities of the majority of Haitian citizens. Especially in the aftermath of disaster, as has also been noted in controversies over rebuilding New Orleans, recovery decisions may have long-term impacts on spatial inequalities and mobility rights. While many Haitians are calling for greater participation in the rebuilding process, ⁶¹ the very technologies of mobility used to control and coordinate the post-earthquake recovery can end up excluding or marginalizing those whom they are meant to serve. A kind of extra-territorial system of informational mobility, logistical mobilization, and mobility of personnel is penetrating the weakened Haitian state-space and civil society, re-making the territory to fit the needs of outside mobility regimes. This is a task made notionally easier not just by an allegedly manageable island geography, but also by the islanding effect that I have argued isolates or marginalizes some populations in the post-disaster situation via deeply limited rights to mobility and reduced capabilities for mobility.

First I have argued that practices of air travel, border security, and movement of goods and people are reconfigured in the midst of augmented aerial gazes and emergent forms of aerial power. These were directly implicated in the uneven network capital that was evident in the post-earthquake situation. The militarization of air space and the ‘blurred seamspace’ of the airport suggest that we need to develop better understandings of the aerial mobility regimes that are transforming neocolonial sovereignties, and reconfiguring Caribbean aerial subjects. Second, however, I have also argued that the very same logistical efforts and rhetorical moves by which some well-meaning international actors – including foreign governments, aid agencies, financial institutions, and NGO’s working on the relief and recovery efforts – claim to connect Haiti into new mobility regimes and communication infrastructures simultaneously may be producing disconnections and islanding effects, even if inadvertently. ⁶²

New understandings of post-disaster (im)mobilities, must address the ethics of differentiated mobility, the mechanisms that foster and impede mobility rights, and the ways in which the militarization of aerial mobility reduces the flourishing of mobility capabilities. Further research is needed into the ways in which island geographies perhaps contribute to this islanding effect, affording particular forms of management of air space and sea space that enable a biopolitics based on highly controlled routes of egress and access. At the same time, we need further study of the ways in which island inhabitants circumvent or short-circuit these islanding processes (such as escaping detection, sending remittances, smuggling goods, using the internet to build transnational connections, or using mobile phone connectivity to facilitate local networking and movement). Only with awareness of the injustices of dominant mobility regimes will people be in a position to challenge them with what Steve Graham calls ‘countergeographies’ that might put technologies of mobility and communication in the service of anti-military urbanism. ⁶³ We also must extend our understanding of urban spaces beyond cities themselves, to understand the uneven connectivity of islands and other seemingly peripheral places to metropolitan networks. Islanding is a flexible practice, that may occur both within urban geographies (such as New Orleans) and transnationally to some populations.

Haiti, of course, shares its island territory (Hispaniola) with the Dominican Republic, along a border that at times has been open, and other times violently closed. It is also a border that has been visualized in the aerial gaze, marked by aerial viewers as the line along which deforestation on the Haitian side is visible to the naked eye. While many Dominicans reached out to help Haiti after the earthquake, and its airport in Santo Domingo remained one of the main access points onto and off of the island, the emergence of a cholera epidemic linked to Nepalese UN peace keepers led to the closure of the border, reminding us that diseases too make use of vectors of mobility with no respect for the borders of states or islands, bodies or cells. We are all permeable. No island is an island; but any territory may be subject to processes of islanding, whether an entire city like post-Katrina New Orleans, or an entire country like Haiti. This critical analysis of post-disaster (im)mobilities, aerial power and satellite geo-mapping from the perspective of mobility ethics suggests that ensuring mobility justice will entail moving beyond simply a politics of the de jure right to mobility, to instead ensuring that the de facto capability of mobility is protected and extended as a common basis for social justice. Only in acknowledging that humanitarian action has the power to circumscribe islands through the making, unmaking and remaking of mobility regimes will we begin to create processes of social inclusion that will truly ensure post-disaster resilience.