‘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.