Postmodern Pyroscapes – Wildfires as a Crisis of Modernization

One might think that settling wherever one desires corresponds to the American dream of shaping one’s own destiny. Tragically, this dream is fragmented by the structural inequality that pervades US society, resulting in unequal opportunity and uneven development. This becomes a matter of life and death in a disaster and shapes who can respond and recover and who can’t. The 2020 California wildfires are a case in point, compounded by the coronavirus pandemic. How did institutional modernization within a postmodern urbanized region facilitate this disaster, and what can be done to remedy such a perfect storm?

Wildfires rage in California and its neighboring states time and again. Since climate change contributes to an increase in the frequency and intensity of these wildfires, more communities are impacted in heavier ways and more firefighters need to be on duty for longer periods of time across ever greater stretches of land on fire. The people of the American West deal with massive disasters all the while the underlying environmental, spatial, institutional context is fragmenting, changing, mutating. However, we can only start talking about possible remedies once we disentangle the relevant socio-cultural ingredients. This also offers planners and designers of the built environment an opportunity to better understand how their work relates to the cycle of disaster management and its phases of planning, preparedness, response, recovery and reconstruction.

The institutional aspects of this cycle are firmly rooted in the structure of US government and its federal, state, and local levels and are related to legislature, funding and skilled personnel who implement plans and programs. The aim is to enable those who are impacted by disasters triggered by wildfires to respond, recover and rebuild in ways that prepare them for possible future disasters. The spatial aspects encompass where people live and work: from the vast landscape to the individual home, from buildings to blocks, from neighborhoods to settlements, conurbations and cities to metropolises. The social aspects begin with individual resources and extend to evacuation provisions and available funds for rebuilding, against the background of physical harm, psychological trauma, and political marginalization.(1) Is this mutating system even capable of recovering after the wildfires in a way that is sustainable and enables adaptation to future disasters?

Why wildfire disasters happen

On 16 November 2020 then-President-Elect Joe Biden publicly expressed his intention to make US cities more climate resilient, to benefit communities of color and minorities living in these cities, to build back better. His speech was music to the ears of a global audience, breathing a sigh of relief. By then, a record area of land had been on fire in the Western US states, impacting hundreds of thousands of people. Biden’s speech struck at the heart of the dilemma that disaster management in the US is faced with: A recovery that supports adaptation to future climate and environmental crises is contingent upon enabling socially vulnerable population groups – among them minorities – to cope with them. The precondition is to accept that a return to normal is insufficient, that inclusion is adamant for sustainable planning to succeed, and that cities bear the brunt when post-disaster rebuilding fails.

However, in the case of wildfires, it is necessary to look beyond the borders of the city. The postmodern geographies of settlement, with Californian urbanization as its prime example, show clearly how modernism chewed up the historic city – initially modeled after its European predecessors – and spewed it out across the countryside, creating the urbanized region in its wake.(2) This American rendition of “living in the park”, a mass produced image of the Jeffersonian ideal of rural land ownership, constitutes a postmodern arrangement of functionally separated and socially stratified urban fragments across the wilderness. While it may have brought the spatial logic of its time to its highest possible fruition, this form of quasi-, sub-, or post-urbanization appears inadequate to address current environmental challenges such as wildfires, drought and climate change. The broken pieces of this mutating system desperately seek reconciliation.

California’s geography is “built to burn, to burn explosively”.(3) With nearly 40 million residents, it is the most populous state of the US and the third-largest by area. It comprises two of the nation’s major cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The climate, while mostly Mediterranean, is very diverse, ranging from subtropical to polar. The terrain is similarly diverse and includes rainforests and arid deserts as well as mountains and agricultural landscapes that display a dangerously high demand for water. For the most part, wildfires occur close to human settlements and tend to be caused by human action. Only a fraction is due to natural circumstances such as lightning. The most extensive wildfires to date have occurred since the turn of the millennium, during years with notably high temperatures and unusual drought.(4)

Institutional aspects

When wildfires impact human settlement, firefighters respond, confirming the general rule in disaster management that “the trigger determines the measure”.(5) For this purpose, a highly developed system of emergency and disaster management exists in the US, with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) representing the federal level. The USFA was created by the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act, passed by Congress in 1975.(6) Its aim is to prevent the loss of life and property among residents and firefighters alike. The corresponding institution on the state level is Cal Fire.

The early institutional approach to response, predating the USFA, was focused on fire suppression, based on logic, language, and tools adopted from the military. In time it became clear that this approach couldn’t succeed. Eliminating every and all fires led to an increase in combustible material or “fuel” that would only exacerbate the conditions that led to fires breaking out in the first place. Therefore, the policy of fire restoration was introduced. This meant to prevent “bad” fires and promote “good” fires that better correspond to environmental circumstances. A hybrid approach is commonly employed that focuses firefighters’ responses to areas that require protection while declaring “boxes” of areas that are designated to burn without intervention.(7)

Spatial aspects

Wildfires are a dire threat to California’s built environment. Since sparks and embers traverse the space between forest fires and human-made structures, the focus of attention has shifted from the place where fires break out to the place where sparks and embers land. This not only refers to architectural elements such as flammable roofing materials or openings and vents of any kind, but also vegetation in proximity to facades or combustible ground covering. Fires can break out along these structures and landscape elements either directly or by the heat adjacent fires generate.(8)

“Hardening” existing structures by retrofitting them can make them more fire-resistant. Suitable items for this purpose include fire-retardant roofing or facade materials, vents with protective covers against embers or external sprinklers. FEMA offers pre-disaster grants that provide financial assistance to homeowners who plan to retrofit their homes in order to harden them against fire. However, if only one homeowner in a neighborhood decides against such adaptation measures, all others remain at higher risk despite their best efforts. Concepts such as the “home ignition zone” (HIZ) or the “housing environmental risk zone” (HERZ) underscore the importance of reducing risk through common measures such as building codes, zoning, or creating green buffers. This already points out the necessity of thinking built and unbuilt environment together when planning and preparing for wildfires, which the concept of “wildland–urban interface” (WUI) already indicates.(9)

Without a doubt, the challenge is a human-made one. For one, formerly rural land has been continuously urbanized. More and more houses that encroach the landscape increase risks leading to a characterization of the countryside as “bits of cities with peculiar landscaping”.(10) Further, the way communities deal with fire has changed fundamentally, as has the role fire plays in their culture. The indigenous population and earliest settlers practiced burning as a way of living in their environment. The advent of modern environmental measures led to fire suppression becoming the dominant paradigm. When policymakers realized that this actually contributed to and exacerbated the fire risk in combination with rampant urbanization it was too late. Now, given the challenge of “getting the right fire on the land” there is not enough room for “good” fires to burn.(11)

Social aspects

The Californian fire disaster reveals the social contradictions between settlement and fire practices within a risk-prone environment. Even under the best of circumstances disasters still disrupt the lives of those impacted by it. Those barely having the wherewithal to manage under everyday circumstances are hit even harder by disaster. Social vulnerability and its root causes, embedded within structural inequality that hampers the access to opportunities and hence, locational choices, housing tenure, access to mortgage loans or insurance coverage, can indicate why populations are impacted by disaster to differing degrees. This also affects evacuation, which is contingent on the ability to leave one’s home behind, to stay someplace else for a specific period of time and eventually return and rebuild. In California, hundreds of thousands of people were required to evacuate their homes – a near-impossible task if funds or places to stay aren’t available.

Should people be able to return to their homes, the problem of rebuilding damaged or destroyed homes remains. Return may be impossible or delayed indefinitely due to lacking safety on site. Alternate housing may become necessary if homes are completely uninhabitable. Properties need to be cleaned up, debris removed. FEMA’s post-fire Hazard Mitigation Grant Program is intended to support homeowners after a fire has occurred and enable long-term planning and preparedness efforts.(12) The need to adapt is an urgent one, since fires and related damages are increasing and disaster hazards may overlap and inhibit the effectiveness of responding institutions.

As the 2020 environmental disaster unfolded, coronavirus posed an additional risk with the potential to unleash a compound disaster where multiple triggers coincided – not only affecting evacuees in shelters, but incident command and first responder encampments as well. Due to the pandemic, Cal Fire reevaluated its hybrid approach. In order to limit the need for evacuation shelters, the decision was made to prevent fires from breaking out in the first place. Based on the logic of the trigger determining the measure, fire response was compartmentalized and differentiated against the virus response. Thom Porter, then-Chief of Cal Fire, informed House Democrats in Washington, D.C. that the plan was to stage an “aggressive initial attack [to keep] fires small”,(13) despite the fact that fire suppression isn’t sustainable – even in an exceptional case.

Future-proof fire culture

The California wildfires reveal a fragmented patchwork of cultural practices: institutions respond to the wildfire disaster, yet are caught between the suppression of “bad fires” and the promotion of “good fires”. Residents are caught between how they want to live and what the environment requires to live sustainably. Making communities and structures resilient against fire is contingent on individuals’ and homeowners’ access to resources. While retrofitting and rebuilding grants are available, the circumstances of evacuation and the destruction of homes makes return and recovery difficult. At the same time, the response takes a modernist step backward where fire suppression is employed to reduce the risks posed by coronavirus – all of this occurring within a toxic and polarized information environment where the reality of climate change and how it increases risk are cast aside as one fiction among many competing ones. Recovery under these circumstances is a daunting task.

Stephen Pyne, Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University and internationally renowned expert on wildfires, sees room for improvement related to how we envision a fire culture of the future. For Pyne, dependency on fossil fuels and the machinery it thrives on are an integral part of the risk equation. Where possible, fires should run their course if they are a part of the natural cycle of life in the wilderness. People should accept that fires need to occur, and adequate environmental planning can support prescribed or “good fires”. Where fires are intolerable, such as in cities, they should be suppressed. However, these measures can only demonstrate their effectiveness in combinations that are tailored to the specific context. The idea is for the environment to “participate” in the design of living environments.(14) This perspective requires rethinking the interrelation between the built and unbuilt surroundings. In this regard, as Pyne insists, pre-modern cultural approaches to fire can offer insight and inspiration for an integrated, reflexive modernization of the urbanized Californian landscape.

Living with mutating disasters

In disaster management, the trigger determines the measure. Current approaches to managing wildfires are, however, confronted with a continuously changing context. Urbanization continues to spread out across the landscape while climate change results in an increase of disasters. The result is a failure to reflexively modernize in the context of the landscape: too much space is occupied by human-made structures, strewn across postmodern urbanized land, and too little space is available for good fires. All of this is compounded by the coronavirus pandemic, which necessitated disaster managers to walk a step back on the modernization ladder and return to fire suppression to avoid high risk virus transmission in the context of evacuating the impacted residents. The wildfire disaster assumes the form of a crisis of modernization affecting every aspect of life, where modernization itself seems to be mutating due to changing space, changing society, changing disasters, and a changing climate. At least fossil fuel culture and combustion engines deployed to fight fires in a quasi-militaristic fashion will be phased out in California’s near future in order to limit their impact on climate change.(15)

This crisis is further exacerbated by disagreements on cultural change, by economic interests, and by the path dependency of institutional routines, with gears shifting in different directions all at once. Reconciling these competing and contradictory worldviews can support building back better and reducing risk for vulnerable populations. The Californian wildfires also show that there is nothing natural about what are still far too often called “natural disasters”: they impact what societies value, be it undeveloped or agriculturally used land, villages, settlements, cities or metropolises or the urbanized regions along the US Pacific coast. Local populations must decide their course of action, based on information and inclusion. When leadership change occurs on federal levels, there is hope that at the very least the discussion on appropriate measures can enter rational realms once more.

1 Kammerbauer, M. (2013): Planning Urban Disaster Recovery. Spatial, institutional and social aspects of urban disaster recovery in the USA – New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Weimar: VDG/ Schriftenreihe Bau- und Immobilienmanagement; Kammerbauer, M., Wamsler, C. (2017): Social inequality and marginalization in post-disaster recovery: Challenging the consensus? International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 24: 411-418.

2 Soja, E. (2007): Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography. In LeGates R., Stout F. (eds.), The City Reader, 189-200.

3 www.spiegel.de/international/world/fire-historian-on-the-west-coast-wildfires-california-is-built-to-burn-to-burn-explosively-a-44380d6a-b9e6-468c-9090-e7aad3a366b7

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California; www.munichre.com/de/risiken/naturkatastrophen-schaeden-nehmen-tendenziell-zu/waldbraende-und-buschfeuer-klimawandel-als-aenderungsrisiko.html

5 Dombrowsky, W.R. (1998): Again and again: Is a disaster what we call a disaster? In Quarantelli E.L. (ed.), What is a disaster: Perspectives on the question, 19–30.

6 www.usfa.fema.gov/about/index.html

7 https://e360.yale.edu/features/our-burning-planet-why-we-must-learn-to-live-with-fire

8 www.steamboatpilot.com/news/writers-on-the-range-houses-must-be-built-to-withstand-wildfire/

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland–urban_interface

10 www.steamboatpilot.com/news/writers-on-the-range-houses-must-be-built-to-withstand-wildfire/

11 https://e360.yale.edu/features/our-burning-planet-why-we-must-learn-to-live-with-fire

12 www.usfa.fema.gov/current_events/102220.html

13 www.scientificamerican.com/article/firefighters-will-attack-blazes-quickly-to-avoid-coronavirus/

14 https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/517044-whats-causing-western-wildfires-and-how-to-stop-them; https://e360.yale.edu/features/our-burning-planet-why-we-must-learn-to-live-with-fire

15 www.tagesschau.de/ausland/verbrennungsmotoren-verbot-kalifornien-101.html

Originally published in 2020 in Topos 113 and moderately revised in 2026.