Description
Presented 'Exploring energy poverty and domestic fire risk asoverlapping crises' at the Spatialising Urban Crisis Workshop held at the University of Manchester.
The Grenfell Fire, as described by Cooper and Whyte (2018, pg.8) as a “powerful
emblem of austerity Britain”, has created further impetus to delve into the inequalities and injustices that shape domestic fire risk. This research responds to calls for conceptualising fire risk as a structural issue, in efforts to challenge individualisation of risk narratives and consider the broader ignition contexts of such events (Clark et al., 2015; Halvorson 2017). One aspect of fire safety that is unexplored in the literature, bar some examples in South Africa (Kimenia et al., 2014; Van Niekerk et al., 2022), is the relationship between energy poverty and domestic fire risk. This research aims to respond to this gap by exploring this relationship and the way in which the fire service constructs ‘vulnerability’, with prevention staff at Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service. Acknowledging vulnerability as structurally driven and place specific renders it deserving of inquiry that seeks to elucidate causality and identify the multidimensional
elements of its construction. Methods include mapping exercises with fire safety
advocates who carry out home visits to “high risk” residents, in order to understand how these overlapping crises spatially present in everyday lives and domestic spaces. I argue that the concept of ‘vulnerabilising assemblages’ (Wiesal and Power, 2023) can illuminate the interlocking harms of fire risk. This approach can be utilised in efforts to answer why the energy poverty-fire safety interface emerges and how it has remained undetected within academic and policy spheres
| Period | 26 Jul 2025 → 27 Jul 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Workshop |
| Degree of Recognition | International |