City evacuations: their pedagogy and the need for an inter-disciplinary approach

We consider an overview of city evacuation policy with particular reference to the United Kingdom and using a conceptual framework which considers evacuations and invacuations to be pedagogical. Taking an historical perspective, with a focus on the United Kingdom, the chapter considers the reasons for a gradual move from a policy of city evacuation in WWII towards an ‘invacuation’ policy in the Cold War. It then explores more recent policies of ‘flexible response’ to a range of contingencies with mixed invacution / evacuation policies being proposed. We illustrate this with an examination of websites for evacuation / invacuation preparedness in UK cities. Recent trends in mobility, social media and communication technologies present increasing interdisciplinary problems for evacuation modelling.