Governing Future Emergencies

Lived Relations to Risk in the UK Fire and Rescue Service

Nathaniel O'Grady

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319719900
• eBook ISBN: 9783319719917
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

The 21st century has born witness to myriad changes in the way the world is secured from the many emergencies that continually threaten to disrupt it. This book concentrates on two such changes. First, it takes stock of the ever-increasing development and diversification of data and digital technologies that security organisations have at their disposal. Secondly, it examines how these digital devices have fostered a new direction in which security agencies primarily conceive of emergencies as so many risks of the future. Emergency governance has undergone what might be called an anticipatory turn here, with digitally rendered and imagined scenes of future contingency becoming cause and justification for intervention in the here and now. Rather than scrutinising this turn at its most spectacular heights in the domains, for instance, of warfare or counter-terrorism, the book explores the facilitation of risk governance through digital technologies in a more quotidian incarnation; namely by tracing the steps that the United Kingdom's Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) take to govern fire emergencies whose potential has been identified but have yet to unfold. Delving into the FRS, the book maps out a digital infrastructure that includes various software, institutional processes, multiple forms of risk calculation but also human beings, relations and consciousness and an array of material spaces in which these things exist. Accentuated here is how these components assemble to produce projections of future emergencies on a number of sensorial registers. This infrastructure is shown, in turn, to inform and shape a catalogue of refined modes of action through which interventions on future emergencies are made in the present. Engaging in depth with this infrastructure, the FRS provides an understanding of risk as a lived relation, risk as an organisational ethos whose liveliness is founded upon and reverberates through the relations existing between those people and things operating in the FRS to make sense of potential fire emergencies. Using the concept of lived relation as a foundation, the book develops a critical understanding of anticipatory governance by grasping its resonance with issues emanating in the wider field of security, showing how security figures as a set of practices that rely upon and cultivates affective conditions, that enrols the force of elements like fire into its institutional arrangement, that draw on an array of knowledges to exercise power and, in the process, that instantiate new forms of subjectivity.

© The Author(s) 2018

Nathaniel O'GradyGoverning Future Emergencieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71991-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Nathaniel O’Grady¹

(1)

Geography and Environmental Management, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

Nathaniel O’Grady

End Abstract

1.1 Introduction

February 2012. I’m in the passenger seat of a large SUV. In the driver’s seat is Mike, a firefighter for the Fire Department New York (FDNY) for over 25 years and chauffeur for one of the Department’s chief officers. He’s driving me back to my hotel in Manhattan from a meeting at the FDNY’s headquarters in Brooklyn. Lasting for three hours my meeting had centred on the forms of data and methods of analysis the FDNY harnesses and deploys to make sense of fire emergencies as risks of the future and the various strategies that, in turn, are used to intervene before these risks have a chance to occur in the present. Mike and I have been shooting the breeze since I got in the car, him asking me how my meeting with the Chief went, me asking him what it’s like to work for the Chief and discussing what kinds of knowledge a firefighter needs, an issue which troubled Mike, because of what he saw as new guys in the Department lacking the necessary ‘street smarts’ to secure the city from fires. Amidst the mid-day flowing traffic of the Brooklyn Bridge, Mike peers to the left, beyond my seat, onto the space where the twin towers once stood to the emerging scaffold of what would become One World Trade Center and says, almost to himself, ‘I was there that day’. 9/11 hadn’t been on my discussion itinerary for that day but out of courtesy, and knowing the drive would take some time yet, I replied ‘oh yeah?’

‘Yeah I was on my vacation when I saw what was happening on the news, the Chief called me up and we went over in the car… it was horrible… we lost a lot of good people that day… we still can’t hire because people’s families, their wives are too scared about what might happen’. I’d been apprehensive about discussing ‘that day’. It had haunted my time in preparation for and during the trip. In the weeks before I’d re-read the Commission report into 9/11 (2004) and watched too many Youtube clips of 911 calls made by those in the tower as masses of smoke billowed above them. I’d even been to the yet incomplete memorial ground (and incomprehensible souvenir shop) the day before my visit to the FDNY headquarters. With all this weighing on my mind I mumbled my preference not to talk about 9/11 further. We’re exiting the Bridge now and, caught between my discomfort and a desire to continue the conversation, Mike attempts to lighten the situation, changing the topic somewhat: ‘You wouldn’t believe the kinds of fire dangers coming from these buildings’ nodding towards the myriad labyrinth of high-rise buildings in Chinatown. ‘We don’t even know what the buildings are because all the signs are in Chinese!’ he laughs, then continues ‘and anytime we ask them they don’t speak English!’

My meetings with his supervisors had been fruitful, but the conversation I had with Mike himself was in some ways just as important. Although in completely different ways, they had both revolved around the same thing. Mike lamented a past global catastrophe that happened on his watch and how traces of its trauma shape what is, and what is to come, for cultures of emergency response. He also joked about the potentially serious events that might or might not prevail in the areas of his patrol. His seniors, on the other hand, had explained in depth the technologies, strategies and institutional arrangements that underpin the Department’s attention towards the ever-imminent risk of fire emergencies that form a constant spectre over New York. What both situations reveal is how, in what still can be called a post-9/11 security context, fire governance and indeed emergency response in general are more oriented than ever before towards the future and take steps to govern this future before it unfolds in the present. Fire emergencies that disrupt cities across the world have, in many places at least, become an object of anticipatory governance in other words. The term anticipatory governance will be loaded with more significance the further the book goes. For the meanwhile, anticipatory governance might be taken to refer to an organisational ethos and set of practices in which the same legislative, political and strategic emphasis is bestowed on attending emergencies in real time as is placed on intervening based on an emergency’s perceived potentiality and futurity.

A brief glance at relevant academic literature suggests that, in organisationally and strategically tuning itself to enact anticipatory forms of governance, fire governance has become rationalised and activated in a similar way to other forms of security. As Claudia Aradau and Rens Van Munster (2011) argue, for instance, attempts to attend future catastrophes, from terrorist attacks to climate change, have significantly stretched the imaginative capacities of governments whilst simultaneously allowing for ever more speculative renditions of the future to influence the modes of action used to intervene on emergencies in the present. These imaginaries of future catastrophe find points of normalisation in various security techniques and technologies. They incubate at the border between nation states (Amoore 2006; Leese 2014) and where people and things are in transit (Bellanova 2017; Cowen 2014; Salter 2013). Flows and connections found in the material world of cyber-space are increasingly thought of as taking up a larger proportion of concern around future emergency issues (Simon and de Goede 2015; Dunn Cavlety 2013). At the same time, a range of other events known in the UK under the nomenclature of ‘civil contingencies’ are all in part governed in anticipation of their occurrence through forms of preparedness, resilience, prevention and protection for instance (Adey and Anderson 2011, 2012; Chandler 2014; Cooper 2006; Coaffee 2013; Evans and Reid 2014; Grove 2014).

Acting in anticipation of the event itself, the operation of fire governance is increasingly shaped, facilitated and indeed legitimated through risk. Perhaps, in an unsatisfactory way, risk might be summarised as a means by which to express the probability that an event or set of events might come to unfold based on analysis of a presently perceived state of affairs that has been adjudged to build up through time. One place where this incarnation of risk was exemplified in its enactment was in the meeting I had with FDNY Chiefs in Brooklyn. Here, we discussed software and data sharing arrangements amongst New York’s municipal authorities and how they differed from the UK’s, the forms of calculation used to make sense of fire’s future and the resources that could be deployed in advance of the event of fire itself. In these conversations, the risk of fire was understood as something that could be identified by capturing trends emanating from its occurrence over time. Risk was acted out in various exercises that imagined different kinds of fire scenarios that analysis revealed could blight the future. Calculations concerning the risk of fire could be represented in maps, charts and graphs whilst simultaneously being articulated by its variance in relation to different ‘types’ of people divided from one another according to demographic categories of wealth, residence, ethnicity and so forth.

But the role of risk in the organisational parameters of fire governance was also present in my chat with Mike as we made our way back to Manhattan. What my conversation with Mike attested to was how, as something that has come forth to organise emergency response and security governance, risk cannot be confined simply to its appearance as a calculative mechanism that tells of the probability of future events, appearing through black-boxed processes enclosed in software and projected in translated form onto a computer screen. Mike showed instead how risk is something that in some way is embedded in, emerges from and affects the daily lives of those that govern and those that they govern. From Mike’s perspective, Chinatown is of course risky due to its location in Manhattan, one of the most densely populated places in the world, and the myriad uncertainties concerning the kinds of business taking place there. But the risk of the place also told of his previous encounters with the area’s residents, many of whom he does not share a common language with. In the first place, furthermore, his risk assessment was made not only to evaluate potential dangers but to allay a potentially awkward situation that was developing with me.

Literature has pointed to this before to argue that risk should be conceptualised as a social construction (Amoore and de Goede 2008; Lupton 1999). Rather than reflecting a future that may or may not come to unfold, risk here refers to a set of knowledges concerning the vulnerability of the world, knowledges that are situated within and generated through relations that proliferate between people in their daily lives. Research has purported to this notion in various ways, from showing how the rhythms of risk’s absence and its presence shape mining communities in North-East England (Bickerstaff and Simmons 2009) to how its prevalence is always conditioned by mass media and spatial proximity (November 2008). The way risk arises to make sense of the future is shaped, furthermore, by wider political and technological circumstances in which it is deployed. As Louise Amoore argues in her book, The Politics of Possibility (2013), the risk calculus of our times has shifted in its focus from one operating purely on the basis of seeking to render the most probable futures to one that desires to grasp, and in turn govern, what is merely possible. In contrast to probability, articulating future p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Genealogies of the Future: The Emergence of Fire Governance in the UK
• 3. Assembling Interfaces to Make Sense of the Future
• 4. Exercising Uncertainty: Aesthetic Renderings of Future Emergencies
• 5. Big Data, Subjectification and Preventing Fires
• 6. Be Prepared, To Protect: Detournement and the Forces Behind Governmental Logics
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter