Introduction
London as a global city prides itself on being prepared for various forms of disaster and emergency. Following high-profile terrorist attacks in 2017, in which the response of the city was considered to be exemplary, the response to the fire which engulfed Grenfell Tower , a residential tower block in one of the most unequal parts of the city, in June 2017, was severely inadequate. The impacts on residents many of whom were low income and/or BAME (Black Asian and Minority Ethnic) working class citizens not only included death, injury and displacement but have continued through pathologisation, lack of housing and loss of income. In the next chapter, I will consider the Grenfell Tower disaster explicitly in terms of how the specific form of ‘stay put ’ preparedness at Grenfell tacitly produced a disproportionate impact on the poorest residents. In this chapter, I focus on preparedness and why the subject of preparedness (who preparedness is designed for) is rarely the poorest and most disadvantaged citizen and in some cases not the citizen at all. The State is interested in the citizen as an abstract notion in disasters and emergencies and is more concerned with maintaining capitalism , social control and cohesion and ultimately in its own continued existence. Inevitably, the citizen must be failed by preparedness . Ultimately, preparedness is becoming unsustainable as its true purposes become clear and as I will show in the final chapter the ruling class of London have adopted their own private forms of preparedness frequently as a response to what they see as the consequences of events such as Grenfell and the social disruption arising from these incidents.
The residents of Grenfell Tower were subject to various kinds of preparation in responding to a potential fire in the building aside from ‘stay put ’. Plans for invacuation (where residents have to shelter in place), guidance notices and emergency response plans were devised, if not necessarily enacted, to plan for a tower block fire. These strategies are part of a wider apparatus of global preparedness . Governments across the world are constantly engaged in public information campaigns to make us aware about what we should do in disasters and emergencies. Depending not only on what is seen as the most frequent type of disaster in a particular country, but also on what governments perceive as being worthy of public information, we are given advice through various different channels for differing emergencies. Fire is one form of emergency but there seems to be no end to the types of disaster and emergency that we should be prepared for from the apocalyptic (nuclear war , global pandemic and catastrophic climate change), the natural (tsunamis, floods, forest fires and pandemics), the human made (terrorism and industrial accidents) and the esoteric (space weather). The vistas for preparedness are constantly expanding and the boundaries between types of disaster are becoming less clear. Emergencies such as flooding are linked to the wider crisis of climate change and cascade into failures of infrastructure. Preparedness for terrorist attacks evolves with changing threats and risks from fears of a ‘dirty bomb’ to preparedness for low tech attacks by ‘self-starters’ with knives, guns and vehicles. Financial crises reappear as infrastructure failures and riots. The permeability of boundaries around types of disaster, and threats, means that preparedness materials grow in volume and complexity over time. Alongside this expanding verbiage and imagery of preparedness comes a corresponding increase in the variety of media that is used to prepare us for disasters and emergencies. Preparedness has always been hungry for new sources of media and outlets. Even in the early 1950s, the US government was experimenting with new sources of media and information to educate the public about nuclear attack. The Federal Civil Defence Administration (FCDA) were particularly captivated by producing new and innovative forms of media including themed television broadcasts on nuclear war , filmstrips for schools and travelling exhibitions. The public information leaflet or booklet, even then, was an anachronistic form of public information (Preston 2015a). Now we have ubiquitous preparedness information through social media (Palen and Hughes 2018) responding to real-time events, school and workplace initiatives and cards that we can put in our wallet to remind us how to treat the victims of a terrorist attack. Preparedness is no longer seen to be a job just for the government but is also a non-profit and private sector business with advice on how to prepare from organisations, such as the Red Cross, advice on how to protect animals in a crisis and multiple online stores selling preparedness manuals and materials to concerned citizens and ‘Preppers’ alike.
In contrast to this multimedia spectacle, at Grenfell Tower the advice provided was more prosaic and minimalist. It depended almost exclusively on residents following a small amount of advice that was provided textually in terms of fire safety notices. That advice was to ‘stay put ’ in a tower block that was ostensibly designed to resist fire and where people would be safe in their own apartments. The minimalism of that advice resonates with what is happening across the whole public sector. Ironically as the security services consistently identify new terrorist threats and introduce more complex forms of transmedia preparedness the resources that the public sector, local councils and housing associations are using to meet more frequent events such as fires are consistently diminishing. Anecdotally, when I started researching preparedness at the turn of the century, I would be interviewing large teams of emergency planners in plush modern council buildings. Now even for large local authorities that department is one person in a room with some road cones. Preparedness has been downsized, asset stripped and distributed across existing roles even as its remit expands. The State wants us to be prepared for an increasing number of disasters whilst its resources to enable us to do so are stretched unbelievably thinly.
The Limits of Behavioural Science for Preparedness
The advice given to the residents of Grenfell Tower to ‘stay put ’ in the event of a fire was based loosely on behavioural science. This does not necessarily mean that the advice had a high degree of scientific certainty. In terms of preparedness , behavioural science is plagued by significant degrees of guesswork due to the idiosyncratic nature of disasters and emergencies and the scope for improvisation and collective action. As I will show in the next chapter, ‘stay put ’ is a strategy with many risks even in the safest tower block. Uncertainty in this field is often played down in the academy as preparedness is big business for academics, with grants and government contracts to be won. Although it can be said of most modern social science fields , preparedness is an area which is truly interdisciplinary, an almost compulsory aspect of contemporary academic endeavour. Primarily a subfield of psychology and sociology, preparedness is also of interest to anthropologists, educationalists, socio-physicists (who use physics and engineering models to predict and influence human behaviour), economists, cultural theorists and political scientists.
There is a subtle difference between behavioural science and preparedness in practice, although the two are obviously connected. Behavioural science makes predictions about behaviour in a given situation (to the extent this can be determined) whereas preparedness is designed to prepare people for an emergency and may (or may not) be derived from behavioural science. Of course, preparedness should ideally be derived from science but obviously not everyone (or even the majority) will react in a way informed by preparedness . Preparedness materials might inform, nudge or guide people towards a course of behaviour but they might not be followed in a didactic, literal form. Behavioural science should therefore consider how people might act in the absence of preparedness advice before considering its consequences. Cascading chains of events and multiple points where safety might fail make events such as tower block fires extremely hard to model behaviourally which makes unequivocal advice such as ‘stay put ’ a dubious strategy.
Given the expansion of preparedness materials across every conceivable situation, media, organisation, and its foundation in behavioural science it is still apparent that preparedness is far from reaching a point where there are clear and unambiguous principles that should govern what we should do in a given situation. Such a question is particularly apt in the case of Grenfell Tower , where there were questions about whether individuals were better off staying where they were (the ‘stay put ’ strategy), or evacuating, in the fire. Of course, the key feature of risk is that it is in itself ‘risky’ and preparedness will never be able to prepare us for every given situation. However, ambiguity in preparedness advice is often used strategically so as to redistribute risk from the State to the citizen. It is also used to open up preparedness for marketization. Some epistemological traditions would consider that the nature of human knowledge and information is such that certain modes of preparedness will never be able to account for unknown risks. Hayekian economics (Hayek 1962), for example, would consider that the future is inherently unpredictable by even the most knowledgeable central authority as human insight and behaviour is fundamentally private and unknowable. In this ultimately free market view it is impossible to predict what people will do in advance in a given situation. There is no State solution to preparedness , and government failure is more pernicious than market failures caused by incomplete information. In these circumstances it would be the market, rather than the State, which would be most effective in producing preparedness information. This mode of thinking, where State preparedness is completely redundant, is becoming particularly influential in terms of guiding public policy in disasters with increasing calls for self-reliance, resilience and ‘grit’. This discourse can then be used as a technique of responsibilisation, divesting the State with responsibility for what individuals might do in a disaster (Cretney 2017). One can see preparedness as a special case of State responsibilisation. The State’s presence is unavailable, or diminished, during a crisis so it passes the responsibility for some of its welfare functions to the citizen. Preparedness also allows the State to deflect responsibility from Capital and capitalists. In the case of Grenfell Tower, for example, it is possible that the ‘stay put ’ strategy might be used to blame the fire service rather than other agencies for the tragedy by isolating it from the wider structural conditions of the fire. The State can turn on itself (the police pursuing action against the fire service, perhaps) to maintain the continuation of Capital.
Precise statistical modelling of behaviour under extreme situations, which should be a pre-requisite of producing preparedness guidance, is beset with several problems. Emergent phenomena, such as the spontaneous intervention of non-state actors in disasters and emergencies (such as the participation of the Occupy movement in responding to Hurricane Sandy), improvisation and courage (the ‘Let’s Roll’ response by passengers on United 93, aware on 9/11 that their aircraft was, in all likelihood, going to be crashed into the ground) and the reciprocal ways in which certain emergencies change their nature due to public behaviour in response make it extremely difficult to model behaviour. In terms of the reciprocal nature of emergencies, game theory and related behavioural science theories of reciprocity, can help us to model the impact of preparedness strategies but the problems they are designed to meet are often intractable. For example, if in response to the expectation that people will run from a primary terrorist attack the terrorists plant a secondary device at the location where people are most likely to flee from, then this may change the nature of preparedness advice but it is almost impossible to convey game theoretic concepts in public information without heavily caveating that advice. Similarly, in the event of a food shortage the advice not to panic buy as this will lead to a shortage would be difficult without the message producing the effect it was desired to defeat. If the government tells you not to panic then panic might seem like a rational response, particularly if trust in government is low. The intractability of human behaviour ex ante in these scenarios makes it difficult to provide advice. Of course, human behaviour in disasters can be simulated ex ante and people can be asked about their responses using thematic interviews or real-life simulation exercises. Complex models of behaviour can also be produced ex post and advances in social psychology have enabled social scientists to move beyond simple models of behaviour, rejecting naïve conceptions of social contagion (Stott et al. 2016) and mass panic (Rogers and Pearce 2016) However, we are far from a behavioural, or social, science, that gives us firm guidance on preparedness .
If we take as an example what might seem to be a scenario of such scale and intensity that there might seem to be universal agreement as to what to do, the explosion of a nuclear weapon in a city, then we can explicitly see that there is actually very little consensus in terms of scientific or social scientific...