Fire Safety in Informal Settlements: A Gendered Framework of Fire Justice

Abstract

People living in informal settlements, whether in urban or tented environments, face daily risks of injury and loss of life or property due to preventable fires. Currently, research and practice in the field of fire risk and prevention within informal settlements centres on technical interventions and solutions. While developments in materials, response and urban planning, for example, are an important aspect of reducing the effects of fire, the gendered framework for fire justice presented in this paper challenges the dominance of such technical solutions which neglect social dimensions of vulnerability to fire risk. Rethinking fire risk through gender can ensure strategies and systems of fire safety are situated, and informed by the range of people who experience fire and burns risk. The multidisciplinary framework engages with critical feminist approaches to disaster, vulnerability analysis and education, arguing for a gendered framework of fire justice that presents new possibilities for how fire risk and safety are understood and responded to by the range of stakeholders and actors who seek to reduce the instances and impact of fire on already marginalised populations, including those living in informal settlements.

Assembling fire: beyond engineering solutions

“…We do not simply argue that fire ‘should not be stuck in a category’, but wish to demonstrate how constraining a concept or issue to pre-conceived or hierarchical categories has an effect on how someone will deal with that issue practically. In the case of fire, its categorization within chemical and physical hazards have called mostly for engineering solutions to fires in humanitarian and development settings (see Twigg et al ., 2017; Hirst and Underhill, 2023). The consequence is methodologies that fail to consider different knowledge, the everyday lives of people or cascading consequences of fire risk.…”

“…This has implications for how initiatives to promote fire safety are enacted within humanitarian agencies. As a phenomenon whose impacts are lived with, fire must be understood as socio-technical (Twigg et al ., 2017; Hirst and Underhill, 2023), with all the complexities that can mean. Liberating fire from its patriarchal and technocratic disciplinary limitations is key to democratising knowledge of fire risk, safety and recovery, a critical element of reimagining fire in a way that can open doors for equitable and inclusive participation in the creation of appropriate and effective interventions.…”

“…In this paper, therefore, we call for not just the integration of fire studies into DRR, but question what the liberation of fire in critical disaster studies can offer so that the inclusion of fire is not perpetuating existing limitations of its understanding. We do so by showing how narrow, technocratic views of this hazard (see Twigg et al ., 2017; Hirst and Underhill, 2023) have resulted in fire and its effects being neglected in DRR literature, and suggesting that Assemblage Theory could be used to dismantle this rigid view of fire by properly acknowledging its complexity. Finally, we argue that the case of fire can enable its practical application within a contemporary and critical project of DRR and help us imagine what liberation of fire might mean for critical disaster studies.…”