Place ontologies and a new mobilities paradigm for understanding awareness of vulnerability to terrorism in American cities

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that people interpret their risk from environmental hazards through places—such as urban neighborhoods. At the same time, heightened levels of mobility are theorized to be leading to a so-called “placeless society” and possibly nullifying theories of locality-based risk perception. The purpose of this study is to combine environmental risk-hazards scholarship with work in urban geography to explore the following question: is perception of vulnerability to terrorism influenced by place and mobility, and if it is, what is the relationship? Drawing on interviews with 93 householders in Boston, Massachusetts, I demonstrate that people perceive vulnerability via understanding the transportation environment as a place—not simply a conduit—and that these perceptions reflect larger societal structures, such as wealth and gender disparities, that combine with (im)mobility and human subjectivity to amplify or attenuate a person’s sense of vulnerability. These findings bring an understanding of subjective experience to the geography of transportation systems, which has not yet been theorized within the urban disaster literature.