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 is 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 alterative responses to crises. Ultimately, Adey contends, understanding the practice of evacuation illuminates its importance to power relations and everyday governance.

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

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