Evacuation: The Politics and Aesthetics of Movement in Emergency

In Evacuation, Peter Adey examines the politics, aesthetics, and practice of moving people and animals from harm during emergencies. He outlines how the governance and design of evacuation are recursive, operating on myriad political, symbolic, and affective levels in ways that reflect and reinforce social hierarchies. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, from the retrieval of wounded soldiers from the battlefield during World War I and escaping the World Trade Center on 9/11 to the human and animal evacuations in response to the 2009 Australian bushfires and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Adey demonstrates that evacuation is not an equal process. Some people may choose not to move while others are forced; some may even be brought into harm through evacuation. Often the poorest, racialized, and most marginalized communities hold the least power in such moments. At the same time, these communities can generate compassionate, creative, and democratic forms of care that offer alternative responses to crises. Ultimately, Adey contends, understanding the practice of evacuation illuminates its importance to power relations and everyday governance.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1 1. Footsteps: Diagramming High-Rise Evacuation  31 2. Mobile Medical-Military Machines  60 3. Evacuation and Euphemism: Memory, Lexicality, and Aphasia-From the Holocaust to Japanese American “Internment”  85 4. “The City is to Be Evacuated”: Roads, Race, and Automobility during the Early Cold War  115 5. Companion Evacuations at the Boundaries of Life  142 6. A Disengagement: Evacuation, Trauma, Colonial Vertigo, and National Reproduction  164 7. Seeing Evacuation Logistically  183 8. Burn  206 Conclusion. The End  232 Notes  255 References  265 Index

About the Author :
Peter Adey is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Mobility; Air: Nature and Culture; and Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects and coauthor of Moving towards Transition: Commoning Mobility for a Low-Carbon Future.

Review :
“Peter Adey’s intellectual curiosity and creativity have brought us something ‘outside the box’ on an important subject. The value and profundity of Evacuation are without question. Imaginative in scope and method, it will be a significant contribution to a wide variety of disciplines.” - Caren Kaplan, author of (Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above) “Evacuation is a brilliant exposition of evacuation as event, lurking background possibility, condition, technical object, claim, circulation, and much more. It shows how evacuation reproduces and disrupts existing orders and brings about new ones as it folds providential, catastrophic, and other relations with life. The scope of what Peter Adey achieves is quite remarkable-he makes present an event, claim, and condition that we might know, in this case evacuation, and demonstrates its power to make, unmake, and remake the world. A stunning work.” - Ben Anderson, author of (Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions)