‘Fall girl’: Vertical evacuation and the aesthetics of emergency

Abstract

When the Conservative Member of Parliament and Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg complained on London’s LBC radio that the 72 victims of the 2017 Grenfell fire did not use common sense and simply leave the building, and that he could not understand how it had ‘anything to do with race or class’, he fell into a trap which is now at least 150 years old. This has seen the art and act of evacuating – especially tall buildings – blamed on the evacuees themselves. It is also revealing of an aesthetics of erasure which silences a classed, raced and gendered politics which has served to render certain subjects and bodies as not only victims, but culpable. The vertical evacuee has been considered too slow, too big, too indecisive, too passionate, too weak, too much, too many – too inadequate. In this paper, and in building on a wider politics of verticality and mobility, I pull on several threads of the gendered and raced geographies of high-rise vertical evacuation focusing particularly on the solidaristic movements and expressions of the workers. The paper explores the history of tall building evacuations, focusing on early high-rise factory fires, their investigation, and subsequent changes to fire regulation, building technologies and working practices in North America which affected predominantly young, female and migrant working labour.

Introduction: Verticality, radicalism, resistance

“…Across the contributions, power verticals emerge in myriad guises in the form of power asymmetries which seem to overdetermine forms of urban development; but are often accompanied – and challenged – by forms of vertical, horizontal or transversal resistance. From the regulatory schemes that are written into planning law to curtail urban development (see Burte, 2024) or encourage high-rise construction with detrimental effects on residential populations (see Ebbensgaard, 2024), the power verticals on display throughout this special issue find expression in policing strategies, legal proceedings and evacuation procedures (see Adey, 2024). By drawing attention to the subtle workings of power in and through crooked vertical and horizontal planes, the papers in this volume direct attention towards manifestations of resistance in the everyday lives of those bodies that refuse to evacuate according to standardised safety procedures (see Adey, 2024), that mitigate the limitations posed in over-crowded, dense migrant enclaves (see Sheehan, 2024) or which inhabit vertical landscapes in ways that contradict or pervert hegemonic habituses of verticality (see Filiz, 2024; Harris and Wolseley, 2024; Roast, 2024).…”

“…From the regulatory schemes that are written into planning law to curtail urban development (see Burte, 2024) or encourage high-rise construction with detrimental effects on residential populations (see Ebbensgaard, 2024), the power verticals on display throughout this special issue find expression in policing strategies, legal proceedings and evacuation procedures (see Adey, 2024). By drawing attention to the subtle workings of power in and through crooked vertical and horizontal planes, the papers in this volume direct attention towards manifestations of resistance in the everyday lives of those bodies that refuse to evacuate according to standardised safety procedures (see Adey, 2024), that mitigate the limitations posed in over-crowded, dense migrant enclaves (see Sheehan, 2024) or which inhabit vertical landscapes in ways that contradict or pervert hegemonic habituses of verticality (see Filiz, 2024; Harris and Wolseley, 2024; Roast, 2024). By foregrounding the everyday encounters with and embodiments of variously competing and overlapping power verticals – and the rendering ordinary or mundane of its effects – this special issue advances an agenda for thinking more radically with verticality in urban studies.…”

“…The attention that urban scholars have paid to the power dynamics sustaining vertical warfare and high-rise construction has been as much concerned with the technical procedures that give shape to volumes (Elden, 2013; McNeill, 2020; Weizman, 2002) as with the conditions of possibility for social life to unfold within them (see this volume, Adey, 2024; Burte, 2024; Ebbensgaard, 2024; Sheehan, 2024).…”

“…The vulnerability of bodies caught in vertical fire-lines therefore opens up questions about the role that architectural vertical spaces can play in facilitating a dismantling of the power vertical. By highlighting the tensions between the politico-legal processes that orchestrate and govern volumetric space (from evacuation procedures during fire emergencies explored by Adey (2024); to the normalisation of harmful living conditions in London examined by Ebbensgaard (2024)) and the lives of people who occupy the vertical spaces of regulation (migrants, garment workers and social housing tenants), this special issue reveals diverse ‘imaginaries that might not only describe but offer alternative volumes to inhabit’ (Adey 2013: 52). By exposing the inherent insufficiencies of power verticals, this collection of papers develops more affirmative accounts of how people make sense of their often-adverse conditions of vertical habitation.…”

“…In ‘Fall Girl’, Peter Adey (2024) foregrounds the improvisatory solidarity of female workers in the face of failing evacuation procedures during high-profile high-rise fires in garment factories. In the Rana Plaza fire in Dhaka that in 2013 killed more than 1100 people, mostly women, the trapped garment workers were forced to leap from windows and slide down makeshift chutes or crawl down lines stitched together with garments.…”