Spatial Policies and Freedom of Movement

Contemporary mobility is far more than the movement of people from one place to another. It also represents an interpretative lens through which to read social, cultural and political inequalities, and the ways in which these inequalities are expressed through selective practices that depend on how certain spaces are organised, controlled and made differentially accessible.

Drawing on the ERC project TheGAME – Counter-mapping Informal Refugee Mobilities along the Balkan Route, of which he is Principal Investigator, Professor Claudio Minca, professor of Geography at the University of Bologna, illustrates how mobility can be used as a lens to understand contemporary society.

Professor, looking at today’s European borders, what does the fact that some people move easily while others are stopped or slowed down tell us?
Differences in freedom of movement affecting different subjects within European space become particularly visible in certain places where different mobilities converge and, so to speak, ‘touch’. In my project on the Balkan Route, for example, we analysed specific sites where tourists’ and migrants’ trajectories intersect. In these spaces of convergence, the presumed frivolity of tourist travel is confronted with the drama of the uncertain and dangerous journeys undertaken by undocumented migrants, while at the same time revealing how mobility within European space is highly selective and often slowed down, if not entirely prevented. 

Another interesting aspect linked to the intersection of these two types of mobility concerns infrastructural nodes and public spaces in which migrants and tourists are present at the same time. In my research, I observed that refugee camps were often perceived by local populations as being in competition with tourism. This is particularly evident in relation to the availability of resources and pressure on existing infrastructure, as in the case of some Greek islands in the Aegean Sea. These ‘geographical conjunctures’ thus reveal the ways in which differential mobility across European borders and territories operates politically on different groups of people at multiple scales.

In your studies, the same places – hotels, camps, infrastructures – can become spaces of hospitality or of control. What does this ambiguity tell us about the concept of hospitality in our societies?

I am particularly interested in understanding the shared characteristics of spaces that, at different moments in history, have been used as detention centres, reception facilities for migrants, or tourist hotels and resorts. The same applies to the frequent use of hotels as places of accommodation for refugees. The concept of hospitality must therefore always be questioned, as it reveals how practices of reception are always spatially as well as politically conditioned and codified.

This raises urgent ethical questions about who is authorised to be considered a guest, a tourist or a refugee, and about how certain spatial practices reflect, implicitly and explicitly (as in airports or on certain beaches), different interpretations of hospitality, understood as a dispositif that qualifies bodies and subjects according to categories that include nationality, as well as gender, sexuality, ethnic belonging and even race.

In places such as Lampedusa or the Greek islands, tourists and migrants share the same spaces. What happens when such different mobilities meet, and what tensions emerge in public space?Places such as Lampedusa, where tourist-oriented areas coexist with the presence of groups of migrants arriving or in transit, or the refugee camps on the Greek islands of the Aegean, inhabited by thousands of asylum seekers, show how tourism can take on a voyeuristic attitude, in which migrants risk becoming objects of observation. At the same time, these groups may also compete for the use of certain spaces, especially when asylum seekers are allowed to leave the camp and reach the town or the nearest beach.

It is interesting to note that this voyeuristic position tends to collapse when tourists are no longer able to maintain a detached view of migrants, because the latter’s presence forcibly removes them from their comfort zone (as happened when migrants landed on the beaches of Kos and other nearby islands during the ‘long summer’ of migration in 2015). What is particularly significant about this interaction is that it exposes both tourists and migrants to the enormous gap in subjective freedom between those who are encouraged and facilitated to travel for pleasure and those who instead hope to continue moving without being intercepted – and thus to avoid the direct and indirect violence associated with the enforcement by authorities of the differential mobility discussed earlier.

You often refer to ‘differential mobility’. To what extent does this gap affect freedom of movement today and, more broadly, the quality of democracy in Europe?
Borders, as is well known, are spaces in which state action in classifying, containing and controlling populations deemed undesirable becomes fully visible. Borders are therefore not only a structural element in the reproduction of the modern nation-state, but also a political technology that selectively activates a specific form of ‘differential mobility’.

This powerful dispositif underpins the differential treatment of subjects and bodies moving across borders and territories, based on a series of categories that qualify them a priori and determine their presumed right to move. Consequently, the issue of rights is closely linked to our understanding of this ‘differential mobility’, insofar as the more general right to mobility is rightly considered by many to be a fundamental right in democratic societies.