Temporality, emotion management and emergency governance in housing safety crises

This article uses archival methods to explore housing disasters and the governance of emergencies, using two cases – the Ronan Point collapse and the Ledbury Estate post-Grenfell Tower Fire – to locate a contemporary housing safety emergency within longer histories of high-rise unsafety. In placing these discrete events in conversation, the article uncovers commonalities in the power dynamics of naming and governing emergencies, and the circulation of emotions around the experience and management of housing safety emergencies, noting that the right to claim action commensurate with an emergency is structured by persistent social inequalities. Bringing together these different horizons of emergency responds to calls for research into the discursive and affective means through which past and future emergencies are made present, challenging the assumed ephemerality of emotions. Using the concept of ‘slow emergencies’, the article argues that experiences of time, inaction, and prolonged exposure to home unsafety reveals the structuring power of temporality, but also the potential for the generation of significant grassroots activism oriented towards the achievement of action.