why study super-rich mobility?

Today, understanding mobilities means also taking into account the virtual mobility that goes along with the IT revolution. However, this can also give rise to some powerful illusions – namely, that individuals are mainly beneficiaries of this revolution and play an active role in it. However, in reality, these technological changes put pressure on people and force them to find a way adapting.

Contemporary mobilities are one of the most intangible aspects of the virtual world and, at the time, one of the most practical, hands-on aspects of the real world. But what is happening in the virtual world is also occurring in the real, physical world, where the decisive role of connections and imperative of accessibility come into play. Hence, the role of ‘non-places’ (by choice or obligation) and ‘hyper-places’, which are the specific places of all manner of connections through which one ‘must go’ in order to access mobilities.

As a result, the world of contemporary flows organises mobilities, which the individual - rich or poor - can appropriate, albeit more or less effectively, in both the real and the virtual world.

Given how intertwined the two are, the mobilities of the rich and the poor help us understand that it is the mastery of the connections that determines their mobility within a world of flows that is increasingly controlled and secured.

Just as we might have spoken of a city as having several speeds – with globe-trotters who feel at home everywhere, others relegated to immobility in non-places and still others (such as the ones living in peri-urban areas in France) upon whom mobility is forced – we can also speak of globalised urbanisation at different speeds.

Which means understanding a couple of things. Firstly, the best speeds are not necessarily the fastest (see the role of maritime speed); success is actually about putting together a whole range of speeds (this is what multimodal mobility is), and being able to switch back and forth from one to the other.

To this we can add a second point – that today there is a disjuncture between the global and the local, which may serve as an indication of future mobilities trends— namely, that globalised mobilities can become cut off from local ones. This not without consequences: slogans such as “global, green, connected”, trumpeted by countries like Singapore and Dubai, overlook one word — “democracy.”

There is a link between the mobilities of the rich and those of the poor which requires that we take into account the different types of governance, and thus the importance given to the informal sector.

The informal sector - which belongs neither to the market nor to the public sector - represents between 60% and 70% of the territory on a map of global urbanisation.

With regard to ‘forms’ of governance, three possible cases, among others, may be cited.

• The first is that of powerful states which exhibits contrasting faces: while democratic  France ignores its urban fringes, its abandoned areas and its forgotten peripheries (as if they were “on the margins” of the state/city), undemocratic China controls and stigmatises its migrant populations from the inside by means of statuses introduced for this very purpose. The hukou, an urban residency card created in 1958, is pivotal in this.
• Along with this informal urbanisation - which is either controlled or deliberately ignored by the State - there are informal spaces (which is not to say they cohabit or coexist) near areas protected and secured by public power. A quasi-caricatural example is the juxtaposition of gated communities, condominiums and favelas in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
• The third scenario is the one wherein informal areas attempt to enter the formal (legal) urban framework by becoming ‘springboard districts’, building on all manner of activities. An example of this are the gecekondu (“built overnight”) districts of Istanbul.

Reflecting on these three scenarios, which underline the diverse nature of the links between the market, the State and the informal sector, gives way to two final thoughts. To begin, the suitable never goes without the unsuitable, as Michel de Certeau asserts in L’invention du quotidien (published in English as “The Practice of Everyday Life”). And being ‘suitable’ (“global, green, connected”) is not enough to be democratic.

It may be nothing new, but one can conclude from all of this that the future of democracy requires that we maintain these links between the suitable and the unsuitable – as far as mobilities are concerned!