When Disaster Strikes - Part 2: Why Some Cities Burn (And Others Don't)

The Fire That Rebuilt London

On September 2, 1666, a fire started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane. By the time it burned out four days later, the Great Fire of London had destroyed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and most of the buildings of the City of London. Miraculously, only six deaths were officially recorded—though the actual toll was certainly higher.

The fire was not a surprise. London had burned before—seriously in 1135, 1212, and countless smaller conflagrations. Medieval London was a city of timber and thatch, narrow streets and overhanging upper stories, open flames for cooking and heating. Everyone knew the city would burn again.

What made the 1666 fire different was what came after.

Within five days of the fire’s end, Christopher Wren presented Charles II with plans for a completely rebuilt city: wide streets, brick and stone construction, fire breaks, and rational planning. Other plans followed. For a brief moment, London would be rebuilt as a modern, fire-resistant city.

It didn’t happen.

Property owners demanded their old plots back. The urgency of rehousing 100,000 displaced people overrode planning. Political constraints prevented the compulsory purchase that replanning would require. Within a few years, London had rebuilt—on the old street pattern, with only marginally improved fire resistance.

The difference? Building materials were mandated. The new London was brick and tile rather than timber and thatch. Fire spread more slowly. But the fundamental urban form—the crowded housing, the narrow streets, the mixed land use that put warehouses next to homes—remained.

London didn’t choose to become fire-resistant. It chose to become less combustible while remaining just as vulnerable.

The Political Economy of Fire Prevention

Why do cities burn? The technical answer is simple: fire requires fuel, heat, and oxygen, and urban environments provide all three in abundance. But the policy answer is more revealing: cities burn because fire prevention is expensive, fire victims are often politically weak, and the costs of prevention are borne today while the benefits accrue tomorrow.

The Cost Distribution Problem

Fire-resistant construction costs more than fire-prone construction. The difference varies by era and technology: perhaps 15% in medieval Europe to use stone instead of timber; perhaps 10% in modern construction to meet stringent fire codes versus minimal standards.

Who bears these costs? In most systems, the building owner—which means ultimately the occupant, through higher rents or purchase prices.

This creates a political economy: wealthy neighborhoods, whose residents can afford higher costs and have political voice to demand safety, get fire-resistant construction. Poor neighborhoods, whose residents cannot afford higher costs and lack political voice, get whatever is cheapest.

The result is predictable and consistent: fire burns poor neighborhoods more than wealthy ones. This is not random. It is policy.

The Enforcement Problem

Building codes exist in most jurisdictions. Enforcement is another matter.

Enforcement requires inspectors, and inspectors cost money. It requires political will to shut down non-compliant buildings, even when their occupants have nowhere else to go. It requires resistance to corruption, since builders and landlords have strong incentives to bribe their way past requirements.

Where enforcement is weak, codes are meaningless. The buildings that collapse in earthquakes, the factories that burn with workers trapped inside, the tenements that turn into infernos—all existed in jurisdictions with codes on the books.

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York killed 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women. The factory had locked exit doors, inadequate fire escapes, and no sprinklers. All of this violated existing codes. None of it had been enforced.

The Fire Department Paradox

Fire departments are popular institutions. Politicians love to fund firefighters; communities celebrate them as heroes. Yet fire departments, by enabling recovery from fires, can actually reduce pressure for fire prevention.

If you know firefighters will save your building, you’re less motivated to make it fire-resistant. If insurance will cover your losses, you’re less motivated to prevent them. If the government will help you rebuild, you’re less motivated to build safely in the first place.

This creates a perverse incentive: resources flow toward fire response rather than fire prevention because response is visible, heroic, and politically rewarding, while prevention is invisible, bureaucratic, and often resisted by property owners who don’t want to bear the costs.

The Great Fires and Their Lessons

History offers numerous case studies in the political economy of urban fire. A few stand out for what they reveal.

Rome, 64 AD

The Great Fire of Rome destroyed two-thirds of the city over nine days. Nero’s response—whether he actually fiddled is debatable—included both reconstruction and deflection of blame onto Christians.

The reconstruction included genuine reform: wider streets, building height limits, fire-resistant materials requirements, mandatory courtyard spaces. Rome became a less combustible city.

But note who ordered these reforms: an emperor with absolute power. Roman fire reform didn’t require negotiation with property owners, compensation for displaced residents, or democratic deliberation. It required only imperial decree.

Democratic systems rarely produce such decisive post-disaster reform because the costs fall on specific groups who can organize opposition while the benefits are diffuse and future-oriented.

Chicago, 1871

The Great Chicago Fire killed around 300 people and left 100,000 homeless—roughly one-third of the city’s population. The fire burned for two days, destroying four square miles of urban development.

Chicago’s response became legendary: the city rebuilt quickly, and rebuilt better. Within two years, much of the destroyed area had been reconstructed in brick and stone. Fire codes were strengthened. The city that emerged was more modern, more fire-resistant, and more commercially sophisticated than what had burned.

But the Chicago story has a less celebrated dimension. The fire burned primarily in working-class and industrial areas. The reconstruction benefited property owners who could rebuild, insurance companies that limited their payouts, and speculators who bought up damaged property cheaply.

Many of the displaced never returned. They couldn’t afford the new construction costs, couldn’t wait for slow rebuilding, couldn’t compete with investors who saw opportunity in the ashes. Chicago’s “phoenix” narrative is a story of creative destruction—emphasis on destruction for those who lost everything.

San Francisco, 1906

The 1906 earthquake and fire killed over 3,000 people and destroyed 80% of San Francisco. The disaster exposed both the city’s physical vulnerabilities (buildings that collapsed, water mains that broke) and its social ones (Chinatown residents were treated as expendable; attempts were made to relocate them entirely).

San Francisco’s reconstruction was relatively progressive for its era: building codes were strengthened, fire department capacity was expanded, and urban infrastructure was improved. But the fundamental pattern of the city—including the social geography that put vulnerable populations in vulnerable locations—was largely preserved.

More striking was what didn’t change: earthquake-resistant construction standards were not adequately implemented. The city knew it sat on fault lines, knew another earthquake was coming, and still prioritized speed and cost over safety. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake would reveal how many of those lessons had been forgotten.

The Selective Geography of Burning

The pattern is consistent across cities and eras: fire burns the poor more than the rich. This is not accident but structure.

Why Poor Neighborhoods Burn

Building quality: Fire-resistant construction costs more. Poor neighborhoods have older buildings, less maintenance, cheaper materials.

Density: Poor neighborhoods are more crowded. Fire spreads more easily when buildings are close together and occupancy is high.

Infrastructure: Fire hydrants, wide streets for fire truck access, working sprinkler systems—all are less common in poor neighborhoods.

Response time: Fire stations are less common in poor areas. When fires start, they have more time to spread before help arrives.

Enforcement: Building code enforcement is weaker where residents lack political voice. Violations accumulate.

Insurance: Poor households and landlords in poor areas are less likely to have insurance, which reduces incentives for prevention.

The American Urban Fire Pattern

In American cities, the pattern overlays with racial geography. Redlined neighborhoods—where banks refused mortgages, where investment was systematically withdrawn—are also the neighborhoods that burn.

The 1967 Detroit riots involved extensive arson. But the fires spread readily through neighborhoods that were already fire-prone: older buildings, reduced services, deferred maintenance, accumulated code violations. The conditions for catastrophic fire existed before anyone struck a match.

This pattern continues. Urban neighborhoods with high fire rates are predictable by demographic data: poverty rates, housing age, population density, and the racial composition that in American cities correlates with all of these.

The Factory Fire Problem

Industrial fires reveal the political economy of disaster with particular clarity. Factory workers cannot choose their workplace fire safety. They depend on employers to provide it and governments to mandate it.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Legacy

The 1911 Triangle fire occurred in a building that the owners knew was unsafe. They had refused to install sprinklers, locked exit doors to prevent worker theft, and ignored fire escape inadequacy. They were acquitted of manslaughter.

The fire killed 146 workers. Public outrage was enormous. Within a few years, New York had the most stringent fire and workplace safety codes in the nation.

But note the sequence: 146 people had to die to generate the political will for reform that fire safety experts had been demanding for years. The Factory Investigating Commission formed after Triangle made 60 recommendations; many were adopted only because the dead made opposition politically impossible.

The Global Factory Fire

In the developing world, the Triangle pattern continues. The 2012 Ali Enterprises factory fire in Pakistan killed over 250 workers in a building with locked exits and barred windows. The 2012 Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh killed 117 in similar conditions. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse (not fire, but the same logic) killed over 1,100.

These aren’t failures of knowledge. Everyone knows how to make factories safe. They’re failures of political economy: the costs of safety fall on factory owners and ultimately consumers; the costs of unsafety fall on workers who have no alternatives and governments that prioritize investment over regulation.

International brands that source from these factories face pressure after disasters but not before. The cycle continues: disaster, outrage, reform promises, attention fade, next disaster.

Can Cities Learn?

Some cities have genuinely transformed their fire vulnerability. What does it take?

The Japanese Model

Japanese cities burn less than their density would predict because Japan has made fire prevention a national priority since the devastating fires that followed the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake (which killed over 100,000 people, mostly from fire).

Japanese fire policy includes:

• Stringent building codes with real enforcement
• Massive investment in fire department infrastructure
• Community-level fire prevention organizations
• Regular fire drills and public education
• Urban planning that creates fire breaks

This is expensive. Japan spends far more on fire prevention than most countries. But the investment is driven by national trauma: the fires of 1923 and the firebombing of World War II created a cultural commitment to fire safety that has persisted for generations.

What It Takes

Genuine transformation of urban fire vulnerability seems to require:

Catastrophe severe enough to overcome opposition: Minor fires don’t generate reform; major fires sometimes do.

Political capacity for comprehensive response: Democracies struggle because losers from reform (property owners who must pay for fire-resistant construction) can organize opposition.

Sustained commitment over decades: Fire-resistant cities are built one building at a time over generations of consistent code enforcement.

Cultural transmission of disaster memory: Societies that forget their fires rebuild their vulnerabilities.

Most cities lack these conditions. They experience periodic fires, suffer the consequences, adopt modest reforms, see enforcement decay, and eventually burn again.

The Fire Next Time

Fire policy illuminates a general truth about disaster: technical solutions exist, but political economy determines whether they’re implemented.

We know how to build fire-resistant cities. We’ve known for centuries. The Romans knew. The Edo Japanese knew. Modern fire engineers certainly know.

What we lack is not knowledge but political will: the willingness to impose costs on property owners, to invest in enforcement, to prioritize safety over speed and economy, to maintain vigilance over generations.

Until that political economy changes, cities will continue to burn—selectively, predictably, and with casualties concentrated among those least able to protect themselves or demand protection.

The fire doesn’t choose its victims randomly. Political economy chooses them in advance.