Splintered Mobilities as Viral Vector: Mobility Justice and Racial Kinopolitics

Mimi Sheller

Journal of Urban Technology, 2022, vol. 29, issue 1, 161-167

Abstract: Covid-19 has made self-evident the insidious effects of infrastructural splintering, especially in the United States, which are the outcome of the very processes first identified by Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin 20 years ago. Splintered infrastructures have left behind unequal access to safe streets, public transit, urban green space, social distancing, and remote work, revealing deep racial, ethnic, and class disparities in risk exposure and vulnerability. Inequitable mobilities within splintered infrastructural contexts are key contributing factors to the vast racial and ethnic disparities seen in SARS-CoV-2 exposure and death rates in the United States. This brief commentary on the intersection of infrastructure studies and critical mobility studies argues that a racial justice perspective offers an understanding of the materialities of injustice at multiple sites and scales that have shaped the pandemic in such uneven and detrimental ways. Focusing on the US context, it centers the racialized kinopolitics of American history at the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. Beyond the unmaking of splintered urbanism—or a dream of universal infrastructure—pandemic recovery requires mobility justice as a reweaving of fugitive planning represented by critical ideas such as commoning, Marronage, and the undercommons.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/10630732.2022.2026162 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjutxx:v:29:y:2022:i:1:p:161-167

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjut20

DOI: 10.1080/10630732.2022.2026162

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Urban Technology is currently edited by Richard E. Hanley

More articles in Journal of Urban Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().