When Sympathy and Sorrow are not Enough: Catastrophes and the Politics of the Built Environment

Scott Campbell 


This essay explores how the interaction between catastrophes and the built environment embodies wider social, political, and economic realities.  It does so by examining the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which on the face of it are two very different catastrophes - one the function of crowd-mismanagement, the other of overwhelming natural perils.  However, this essay will demonstrate the close parallels that defined both events: firstly, by exploring the socio-political origins of both disasters, with specific attention paid to the financialisation of the built environment that lay the groundwork for the events that transpired; secondly, by investigating how the same mode of reason exacerbated existing social inequalities that manifested themselves during the disasters, and was even further amplified by the subsequent recovery agendas, which privileged social control and capital accumulation over challenging these inequalities.  The insights yielded are then applied to the more contemporary catastrophe of the Grenfell Tower Fire to evaluate if the same foundational dynamics are present, and whether the emerging political response will challenge, or seek to obscure, the formative causes.  This essay will serve to reveal our collective inability to confront the renewed visibility of long-gestated, endemic socio-political inequalities, and our preference to reach for the comforting narrative of catastrophe as an exceptional break with convention, rather than harrowing, unfiltered expressions of the inequalities that insidiously shape the lives of marginalised communities. 


On 15th April 1989, 96 football supporters died, crushed due to severe overcrowding, while attending the Liverpool vs Nottingham Forest FA Cup semi-final at the Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield.  On 29th August 2005, New Orleans suffered over 1,000 deaths, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast, overwhelming the city’s flood defences.  On the face of it, two quite different catastrophes – the former, a function of crowd mismanagement, the latter, the result of natural perils.  This essay, however, will demonstrate that there are close parallels that can, and should, be drawn between them: firstly, it will examine the socio-political origins of both disasters, and how financialisation of the built environment fundamentally contributed to the events that transpired; secondly, it will investigate how the same mode of reason that contributed to the social inequalities that manifested during these catastrophes, was amplified rather than challenged by the subsequent recovery agendas; before, finally, exploring how this analytical framework can be applied to the more contemporary catastrophe of the Grenfell Tower Fire in London, which resulted in the deaths of 72 people on 14th June 2017, evaluating whether the same foundational dynamics in the built environment can be identified, and whether the evolving political response will reflect, or obscure, the formative causes.  Each section will open by drawing upon my personal reflections on the catastrophes in-focus, to inform, contextualise, and limn the arguments explored – as a teenager stood on the terraces in the 1980s, witnessing the panoptical immurement of English football grounds; as a property catastrophe underwriter in the 2000s, scrutinising natural peril exposures to the built environment; and, more recently, as a London resident witnessing the systematic dismantling of the city’s social housing.

 

Cause and Effect: Catastrophes and the Financialised Built Environment


We often speak of catastrophe, disaster, and tragedy interchangeably; however, the meaning we assign demands greater precision.  Commonly, they are used to describe events that are deemed exceptional, unforeseeable, unique moments in time when the normal rules do not apply.  In part, this reflects the shock and trauma that such moments create, but it is also a defence mechanism by which society seeks to absolve itself from responsibility (Klinenberg 2015; Steinberg 2000).  The conceptual framing of this essay argues that catastrophe is never just of that moment – social inequalities, often long in gestation, shape both how catastrophes unfold, and the political responses that ensue.  A defining factor in the case studies to be explored is the neoliberal mode of reason that has colonised UK and US governance.  Again, neoliberalism is a term that demands precise definition: firstly, it is a project of deep-seated social transformation that seeks to engender a new hegemonic ‘common sense’ that elevates individualism, while concurrently denigrating collective provision (Brown 2015; Hall 1988); secondly, it endeavours to reengineer and reconstitute the state, rather than to replace it, to secure the optimal conditions for capital accumulation, both through the state bureaucracy serving capital’s needs, and through increasingly punitive social discipline, moral conservatism, and post-political governance  (Wacquant 2012; Wilson and Swyngedouw 2015).  A spatial dimension is integral and financialisation of the built environment represents a central pillar through which neoliberalism is realised (Brenner and Theodore 2002; Christophers 2018; Moreno 2014).  The intersection between catastrophes and this financialised built environment will form this essay’s analytical crucible, exploring how socio-economic inequalities are embodied in the built environment’s evolution, and how these same dynamics enable post-catastrophe ruptures to be seized ‘as opportune moments for bringing about the dramatic transformation of urban and community space under the auspices of “rebuilding better”’ (Barrios 2017a: 9).  That catastrophes produce competing perspectives (Barrios 2017b), reflects that the neoliberal imperative is ‘uplifting and “liberating”’ for the upper echelons, but ‘castigatory and restrictive’ for the more marginalised (Wacquant 2012: 74). 

 

The Origins of Catastrophe: Constructing the Cage


15th April 1989 - It was a crisp spring Saturday, and there was a palpable air of excitement at home.  My parents originated from Liverpool and, while I did not share the wider family’s allegiance to Liverpool FC, my own club had played on Friday night, and it was difficult not to get caught up in the anticipation.  The radio commentary was on, and it soon became clear that something was deeply wrong at Hillsborough.  There was turmoil in the Leppings Lane End, police had been deployed in front of the terrace, and the commentators were struggling to capture what was happening, grasping for the well-worn narrative of ‘crowd trouble’, but seemingly feeling uneasy doing so.  After six increasingly disquieting minutes, the game was abandoned; bodies started to be carried onto the pitch.

Football has long represented a core construct of English working-class culture (Bale 1992; Fishwick 1989), but, by the late 1970s, it had become characterised by crowd disorder, and by the authorities’ disproportionate responses to what was essentially a performative phenomenon (Marsh 1978; Armstrong 1998).  This is not to underestimate the severity of specific incidents, most notably the Heysel Stadium Tragedy where disorder involving Liverpool and Juventus supporters caused a wall to collapse, killing 38 Juventus supporters (Scraton 2016), but it is to recognise that the state’s response formed part of a wider pattern of aggressively confronting working-class culture (Bennett 2017; Hall et al. 1978).  Football grounds had always manifested socio-spatial segregation – middle-class stands, working-class terraces – but this notably escalated during the 1980s, as the police sought to exert control: fences were erected, pens constructed, and CCTV cameras installed, the first instance of the intrusive surveillance culture that has since saturated British society (Armstrong and Giulianotti 1998).  The objective was to create ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1977: 139), to stifle the ‘unscripted participation’ (Armstrong 1998: 135) of working-class support.  Hillsborough was recognised as one of the country’s best-appointed grounds (Inglis 1987), but while it did not share the engrained neglect of either Heysel or Bradford City’s Valley Parade, where 56 people died in a fire in 1985 (Fletcher 2015), much of Hillsborough’s investment had been directed to comfort in the stands, and containment, at the expense of safety, on the terraces.  This punitory built environment, coupled with a police organisational culture ‘rewarded and applauded by the Thatcher government’ (Cooper and Lapsley 2019: 12), for its state-sanctioned violence during Britain’s industrial disputes (Gilmore 2019), were to be instrumental in how the disaster unfolded. 

There was crowd congestion, and the kick-off should have been delayed, but the police leadership panicked, opening the large access gates that saw supporters flood into the ground, and funnel into the two already overcrowded central pens behind the goal (Figure 1).  Despite the police command centre sitting directly above the end, the response was to deploy officers to prevent supporters from escaping onto the pitch, some truncheoning the hands of those trying to climb to safety (Armstrong 1998; Scraton 1999; Taylor et al. 1995).  Finally, the severity of the situation was recognised, and supporters allowed to escape, only for the authorities to initiate a conspiracy of deliberate misdirection within hours of the disaster.  The police claimed that supporters had forced the gates open, and that many were drunk, a claim that they failed to substantiate by conducting blood-alcohol tests on the 96 deceased, including 22 children (Cooper and Lapsley 2019).  A national newspaper ran a front-page entitled ‘The Truth’, based on disinformation leaked by the authorities (Cooper and Lapsley 2019; Scraton 1999), accusing supporters of stealing from dead bodies, urinating on police officers, and attacking medics administering first aid on the pitch (The Sun 19/04/89).  Despite the clear discrepancies in the police narrative, the stark reality facing the deceased’s families was that to understand what had occurred, they would have to overturn lies deliberately ‘perpetuated by agencies of the state’ (Cronin 2017: 254).

In common with Liverpool, New Orleans has often been cast as a city of folk-devils, personified by its racial demographics, distinctive cultural heritage, long tradition of anti-federal government politics, and its unique geographical location.  The latter of these was central to the natural perils that the city faced in Katrina, the former three were each to play a fundamental role in why it ‘provided an occasion for racial and economic inequalities to be sharpened and ordained by policy and practice’ (Horowitz 2020: 140).  New Orleans’ topography had worsened considerably during the twentieth century as coastal erosion was accelerated by attempts to reduce Mississippi River flood-exposure (O’Neill 2010); however, by 2005, 20% of the coastal levee-system approved in 1965 was still not complete, and the design flaws of much of what had been built were to be exposed in Katrina, as were the significant funding cuts applied to the US Army Corps of Engineers and Louisiana’s flood protections (Johnson 2011).  The flooding that ensued was on an unprecedented scale, but ‘many dimensions of the disaster were not meteorological at all but rather the consequence of human agency and ideological prerogatives’ (Johnson 2011: xix).  Evacuation strategies and disaster planning foundered at city, state, and federal levels (Figure 2), notably the failure to deploy the city’s bus fleet to assist evacuation in a city where 30% of the population relied on public transport – this meant that many of the city’s poorer residents were unable to evacuate at all, a decision that was later characterised by the authorities as their ‘choice’, and many who tried to do so on foot, were turned back by the police or armed vigilantes (Horowitz 2020). 

For those trapped in the city, things only deteriorated, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency seemingly incapable of providing provisions, and the National Guard focusing on protecting property rather than saving lives (Graham 2010). The media coverage portrayed the city as being plunged into a feral state of rampaging gangs, widespread looting, and snipers targeting emergency workers, the reality of much collective bravery and co-operation ignored (Solnit 2009).  This false narrative swiftly gained traction, leading to humanitarian efforts being suspended in favour of a militarised ‘retaking of the city’ (Prenner 2010), resonant of state violence in Detroit and St Louis (Binelli 2013; Johnson 2020), and which saw nine unarmed civilians shot dead by the authorities in the week following landfall.  The flood damage itself was primarily concentrated on middle-class areas of the city, both white and African American, reflecting the impact of flawed post-war housing policies that saw a racially segregated middle-class exodus from the centre, mirroring wider US urban trends (Logan and Molotch 1987); the important distinction being that New Orleans’ new suburbs were below sea-level.  There were ‘no straight lines connecting racism or poverty to flood depths’ (Horowitz 2020: 7) – however, the connections were distinctly linear in the failings of the emergency response and would be further engrained when the reconstruction plans emerged.

 

The Aftermath of Catastrophe: Exploiting the RupturE


29th August 2005 – As an underwriter, catastrophe events could often feel somewhat abstract – a question of damage to the built environment and infrastructure, rather than to people and their lives.  However, in the days that followed the flooding of New Orleans, the social and racial inequalities exposed by the paucity of the emergency response, the militarisation of the city, and the media coverage were anything but abstract.  When I visited the city in 2009, I began to explore the dynamics of the city’s recovery, balancing my dispassionate professional concerns with a growing personal unease – as I visited abandoned districts, and heard regular references to ‘improving demographics’, it became clear that this was a city that was being rebuilt for capital, not as a home for its displaced people to return to.

New Orleans’ reconstruction was defined by two distinct, but concurrent, phases both of which were embedded in the neoliberal mode of reason. The first, was a concerted dismantling of the social infrastructure that had survived the hurricane, specifically social housing, healthcare, and education.  Social housing had long been a source of contestation within the city, but the city’s social homes had withstood Katrina largely undamaged.  However, the federal authorities swiftly removed the remaining residents, switched off services, and erected barbed wire fencing to prevent people returning to their homes.  The authorities were bringing to fruition a sustained campaign to dispossess the city’s working-class community under the cover of the catastrophe; the plans for demolition were unanimously supported by the city council, as residents were tear-gassed outside City Hall (Arena 2011; Goetz 2013 / Figure 3).  Charity Hospital was integral to a city where over 20% of the population lacked healthcare insurance.  The hospital survived largely unscathed, however, federal disaster policy created a strong financial disincentive to reopen, as the larger the loss, the more funds that Louisiana State University could access to build a new private facility.  After a decade-long stand-off, which left a critical shortfall in the city’s healthcare provision for its most vulnerable residents, two new public hospitals finally opened (Ott 2015).  The city’s public schools were transferred wholesale by the state into a new ‘Recovery School District’ through which privatised charter operators assumed control of individual schools.  Over 7,500 teaching professionals, some 70% of whom were African American, were dismissed as the city’s education was privatised (Dixson et al. 2015). 

Figure 1: Hillsborough Disaster, Leppings Lane End (The Guardian).

Figure 2: Hurricane Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward (pbs.org).

The second, was the city’s plans for reconstruction, which saw starkly conflicting visions emerge.  The notion that catastrophes represent opportunities is firmly engrained in contemporary society – an emotional reaction that something good must come from tragedy, but even more so an animation of the financialised belief that progress is achieved through ‘creative destruction’, a catalyst for ‘geographically uneven, socially regressive, and politically volatile trajectories of institutional/spatial change’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002: 349). While an initial plan to shrink the city, largely by abandoning African American neighbourhoods, was discarded in the face of resistance, the city authorities increasingly relied upon technocratic framing and procedural consultation processes to legitimate its objectives and cauterise dissent (Adams 2013; Barrios 2017a).  This process was distinct from the ‘disaster capitalism’ (Adams et al. 2009) – channelling state funds to for-profit contractors to deliver aid, encouraging convoluted sub-contracting relationships that drove-up recovery costs, and deregulating the labour market to undermine worker protections (Sorkin 2011) – that pervaded the initial recovery effort, and speaks to an even more fundamental disconnect.  While for the city’s residents, the priority was enabling the return of those displaced, the authorities’ redevelopment plans ‘ignored the attachments and sensibilities of subaltern New Orleanians’ (Barrios 2017a: 154), and prioritised financialised spatial, architectural, and aesthetic outcomes.

In Liverpool, the Hillsborough families’ hopes lay with Lord Justice Taylor’s public inquiry.  The 1990 report repudiated the myths around supporter behaviour, and attributed blame to the failure of police control and ground design faults (Taylor 1990).  However, the culpability of the authorities was obscured by the report’s key recommendation to enforce all-seated provision at football grounds; the report primed both the families’ long fight for justice and the wider financialisation of English football.  For the families, and aligned social movements, this was to prove a bitter struggle, as the Director of Public Prosecutions declared that no prosecutions would be made, shortly ahead of the coroner declaring the deaths accidental, nurturing the illusion that this was a blameless tragedy.  Subsequent appeals were rejected, and yet the memories of the deaths were not allowed to fade – a memorial at the club’s Anfield ground, the club’s support proclaiming weekly through the words of ‘The Fields of Anfield Road’ that ‘Justice has never been done’ (Cronin 2017:260), and Jimmy McGovern’s visceral dramatisation, ‘Hillsborough’ (1996), maintaining public visibility.  The turning-point came when the Secretary of State for Culture, Media, and Sport, Andy Burnham, spoke at the twenty-year anniversary memorial service, and was greeted by 28,000 people demanding ‘Justice for the Ninety-Six’ (Cronin 2017: 256 / Figure 4).  Burnham mobilised a new inquiry, and the Hillsborough Independent Panel reported in 2012, reiterating that policing failure, not supporter behaviour, was at the root of the disaster, that known deficiencies in the design of the Leppings Lane End had not been addressed (the tunnel gradient leading to the central pens, the deployment of lateral and horizontal fencing, and the height of the safety barriers and security fences), that 41 of those who died could have been saved if the emergency response had been effectively co-ordinated, and that the police had conspired to hide the truth by systematically falsifying witness statements (Scraton 2013).  A fresh coroner’s inquest reported in 2016, deeming the deaths unlawful, and prosecutions remain ongoing.

Concurrently, football itself was impelled into an unprecedented social transformation by the requirement for all-seater stadia.  Taylor had recognised that terracing itself was not unsafe, but his proposals were rooted in the government’s law and order framing – all-seater stadia would act as a controlling mechanism for the police, and were geared towards social exclusion, ‘purifying the community’ (Sennett 1977: 311).  That containment remained the guiding principle was exemplified by the Government’s failed proposals that all supporters must carry identity cards, another example of football acting as a gateway for the ‘penal locomotive’ (Wacquant 2012: 75) that has gripped neoliberal Britain.  A sustained supporter campaign thwarted this plan, but not all-seater stadia, which were given a forceful tailwind with the 1992 arrival of the Premier League, which was ‘irretrievably embodied by Thatcherism and neoliberalism’ (Turner 2021: 353).  Satellite television revenues propelled the sport to a new level of financialisation to which all-seater stadia were central, as seating generated increased revenues, and created a more television-friendly backdrop.  Football had entered a sanitised age where the ‘carnivalesque was not to be tolerated’ (Armstrong 1998: 126), young and working-class supporters would be socially and financially disenfranchised, and the divide between the professional and grassroots of the sport would grow to extraordinary levels (Giulianotti 2011; Goldblatt 2014; Tempany 2016).

Figure 3: New Orleans Social Housing Protest (The New York Times).

Figure 4: Hillsborough Twenty-Year Anniversary Memorial Service (The Guardian).

Responding to Catastrophe: Progression Through Unlearning

11th June 2019 – I was seated in the West Kensington and Gibbs Green Community Hall, which was packed with resident activists and campaigners from across London.  The past decade had laid bare to me the relentless, mechanical aggression of the financialised city, from the Heygate Estate to Cressingham Gardens, and the now familiar realities of councils’ singularly focusing on estate demolition over refurbishment, withholding maintenance services, and systematically seeking to uproot communities that they should have been protecting.  However, despite the speakers all being embroiled in long-term battles to save their homes and communities, the hall crackled with the positive intent of shared strategies and experience.  A London that, once again, recognised housing as a social good did not seem quite so remote a possibility.

When catastrophe strikes, it is invariably positioned as a disruption that no-one could have foreseen or prepared for.  However, unpacking two discrete and disparate catastrophes has demonstrated that, while each has distinctive aspects, their respective lifecycles display clear parallels: firstly, the built environment is an inherently political construct, and its spatial morphologies reflect the distortions created by financialised and social discipline being applied to specific communities, a marginality that catastrophe only exacerbates (Dikec 2007; Wacquant 2014); secondly, the responses of political authorities are rooted in seeing cities as ‘intrinsically problematic spaces – the main sites concentrating acts of subversion, resistance, mobilization, dissent and protest’ (Graham 2010: 391), resulting in ever-increasing deployment of urban surveillance and social control strategies (Minton 2009); thirdly, when capital accumulation is privileged over the social good, the potential for built environment failure increases (Elinoff 2017; Graham 2009); and, finally, as communities emerge from catastrophes, the inevitable calls to ‘build back better’ are aligned to the interests of capital, rather than the values of the recovering communities, amplifying rather than ameliorating inequality (Barrios 2017a; Marcuse 2006).

When considering the more recent Grenfell Tower Fire (Figure 5), these same dynamics can be clearly delineated.  From the ongoing public inquiry, key elements have emerged: the tower had been cladded in panels that the manufacturers knew to be highly flammable, which had been wrongly approved by privatised building inspectors, and that the council had deployed for reasons of cost.  Conflagration swiftly ensued from an electrical appliance ignition, and a compromised emergency response was unable to bring it under control (MacLeod 2018; New Statesman 11/12/20).  The initial response sought to render the catastrophe as an unfortunate chain of events, but the reality is far more insidious – a process that has seen working-class communities forcibly decanted from inner-London, social housing and its residents relentlessly stigmatised, housing reduced to an investment-asset to be sweated, building controls diluted to improve investor returns, and local authority budgets ravaged, creating a spiral of speculative municipal entrepreneurialism (Beswick and Penny 2018; Hodkinson 2019; Rolnik 2013; Romyn 2020).  Where this path was leading is engrained in every step taken, in every community devalued, in every short-cut implemented; as with Hillsborough and Katrina, ‘nobody wished for these failures, but many had worked hard to produce the circumstances that brought them about’ (Horowitz 2020: 115).  Criminal prosecutions could result, but it is important to remain cognisant that the courts do not scrutinise the values that incubated the formative causes; indeed, the legal system is all too often a representative of those very same interests, ‘a manifestation and reinforcement of structural inequality’ (Scraton 1999: 280). 

And it was these values of financialised and social control that prioritised containment over safety at English football grounds, that worked to exclude the displaced from returning home to New Orleans, and which deemed it acceptable to encase Grenfell Tower in highly combustible cladding; themes of exclusion and corruption that are explored by Alexander Nanau’s documentary ‘Colectiv’ (2019 / Figure 6), which follows a newspaper’s corruption investigation relating to the deaths of 37 burn victims in Romania from the use of fraudulently diluted medical disinfectant.  It is imperative that we interrogate the social values and political policy-making that contribute to catastrophes and recognise that we can only progress through unlearning the ‘reactionary common sense’ (Hall 1988: 48) that forty-years of neoliberal governance have engendered, rendering visible the ‘social morphology and political economy of vulnerability’ (Klinenberg 1999: 242).  The authorities will undoubtedly seek to confine their Grenfell Tower response to the technocratic – the cladding and the emergency response – and to allow themes of ‘failure-centrism’ (Murawski 2018: 909) around vertical working-class housing to go unchallenged (Graham 2015; Roberts 2017; Smith and Woodcraft 2020).  In the meantime, the daily lives of many communities will continue to be subject to unacceptable levels of insecurity and marginality, unless the wider causation is confronted, and the importance of public land ownership, the centrality of social housing to economic redistribution, and the role of planning in delivering social equity as opposed to capital returns, urgently reconsidered.

Figure 5: The Grenfell Tower Fire Aftermath (flickr.com).

Figure 6: Colectiv (Rotten Tomatoes).

Conclusion

This essay has sought to demonstrate how the interaction between catastrophes and the built environment embodies wider social, political, and economic realities.  By examining the origins and aftermaths of the Hillsborough Disaster and Hurricane Katrina, together with the more recent Grenfell Tower Fire, it has explored how the overarching financialised mode of reason has wreaked a slow violence, which manifests itself not only in a distorted and spatially segregated built environment, but also in political responses that seek to exploit the ruptures of catastrophe to further the agendas of capital accumulation and social discipline.  The histories explored reveal our collective inability to confront the renewed visibility of long-gestated, endemic socio-political inequalities, and our preference to reach for the comforting narrative of catastrophe as an exceptional break with convention, rather than harrowing, unfiltered expressions of the inequalities that insidiously shape the lives of marginalised communities.  Social movements have fought important campaigns to expose the roots of these disasters, and to resist the financialised exploitation that has followed, a vivid reminder of when ‘sympathy and sorrow are not enough’ (Governor of Louisiana, post-Hurricane Betsy in 1965, cited Horowitz 2020: 63).

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Steinberg, T (2000) Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in the America, New York: Oxford University Press

Taylor, Lord Justice (1990) The Hillsborough Stadium Disaster, 15 April 1989: Final Report, London: HMSO

Taylor, R and Ward, A and Newburn, T (1995) The Day of the Hillsborough Disaster: A Narrative Account, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press

Tempany, A (2016) And the Sun Shines Now: How Hillsborough and the Premier League Changed Britain, London: Faber and Faber

Turner, M (2021) ‘The Safe Standing Movement: Vectors in the Post-Hillsborough Timescape of English Football’, The Sociological Review 69:2, 348-364

Wacquant, L (2012) ‘Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology 20:1, 66-79

Wacquant, L (2014) ‘Marginality, Ethnicity, and Penalty in the Neo-Liberal City: An Analytic Cartography’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 37:10, 1687-1711

Wilson, J and Swyngedouw, E (2015) ‘Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political’ in Wilson, J and Swyngedouw, E (ed.) The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1-24

Newspapers

New Statesman (2020) How they built Grenfell (newstatesman.com)

 

References (Film and Music)

McDougall, C (1996) Hillsborough, Granada Television

Nanau, A (2019) Colectiv, Alexander Nanau Productions and others

Snapcase (1997) Progression Through Unlearning, with acknowledgements for use of the phrase taken from their album of the same title, Victory Records

 

Illustrations

Figure 1: Hillsborough Disaster – Rex Features (1989) ‘Hillsborough inquest verdicts set to be quashed’. [Online]. [Accessed 30 April 2021]. Available from: The Guardian

Figure 2: Hurricane Katrina – Georgiev, M (2005) ‘Waiting for Rescue Lower Ninth Ward residents stranded on the roofs wait for a rescue boat on August 29, 2005’. [Online]. [Accessed 30 April 2021]. Available from: pbs.org

Figure 3: New Orleans Social Housing Protest – Cleano, L (2007) ‘In New Orleans, Plan to Raze Low-Income Housing Draws Protest’ [Online]. [Accessed 30 April 2021]. Available from: The New York Times

Figure 4: Hillsborough Twenty-Year Anniversary Memorial Service – Byrne, P (2009) ‘Fans queue to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster at Anfield’ [Online]. [Accessed 30 April 2021]. Available from: The Guardian

Figure 5: The Grenfell Tower Fire Aftermath – Chiral, J (2017) ‘Grenfell Tower’. [Online]. [Accessed 30 April 2021]. Available from: flickr.com

Figure 6: Colectiv – Nanau, A (2019) ‘Still from final scene’. [Online]. [Accessed 30 April 2021]. Available from: Rotten Tomatoes