ABSTRACT
This is where an outbreak would probably hit, where the international airports are.398a
Monumental terminals of glass and steel designed by celebrity architects, gigantic planes, contested runway developments, fl ights massively cheaper than surface travel, new systems of “security,” endless queues-these are the new global order, points of entry into a world of apparent hyper mobility, time-space compression and distanciation, and the contested placing of people, cities and societies upon the global map.398b
One of the key features of globalization, regardless of how it is defi ned, involves the increased and intensifi ed level of connectivity between diverse sites across the world. It must be kept in mind however, that such connectivity is predicated upon fl ows that essentially give material form to the interconnections between those sites. Thus as Callon and Law observe, “The notion of connection is not enough. Something has to circulate too. There has to be movement between points of action at a distance for mobilization to be possible. If one place is to be ‘globalized’ then it has to be linked to others.”399 These connecting fl ows can take many different forms, as: commodities, information bytes, ideas, capital, labor, and as will be the focus of this chapter: pathogens, people, and airplanes. As many of the chapters in this volume attest, the movement of such fl ows can only be main-
tained through the establishment of physical infrastructures that are consciously designed to facilitate their movement from one node to the next through various networked systems (e.g., sewage systems, the electrical grid, communication satellite networks, roadways, and so on). The disruption of fl ows in any of these networks dramatically reminds us of our inherent dependence on these networked systems as we are forced to deal with the unexpected and sudden disruptions of everyday routine practices that arise in the wake of interrupted fl ows. Network failure often leads to a great deal of public scrutiny as demands are made to discover the “cause” of the interruption of fl ow. As a result, various government-sponsored investigations are commissioned, but more often than not, these tend to focus on technical matters or operator failure rather than on the organizational and political context within which the (dis)functioning networked infrastructure was embedded. However, the social context is very important to consider because as we will see in the case of the global outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the ability to mobilize resources to address network failures can be either inhibited or facilitated by these very factors.
