Footsteps: Diagramming High-Rise Evacuation

Evacuations have been necessary in tall buildings. Tall buildings have posed risks to urban populations, especially the poor and working classes, who have been most exposed to high-rise factory and tenement building disasters. Focusing most on North America, the chapter explores how evacuation and emergency escape emerged in the context of garment workers seeking redress from inadequate urban infrastructures that condemned them to high-rise fire disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1902. The chapter argues that assumptions about who is evacuating and who is deserving of evacuation have tended to privilege universalized, asocial bodies. Feminist approaches to the mobile subject have challenged these assumptions in longer-term redress.