ABSTRACT
Urban fire prevention has long been a site of conflict in which the principal protagonists have been developers, owners, and local governments pressing for minimal costs of prevention, with fire insurers and fire services advocating more rigorous measures. In the shadow of the Grenfell Tower disaster in the United Kingdom, an accord appears to have emerged in Australia promoting the environmental sustainability of buildings. However, the two sides prove to have quite differing conceptions of sustainability. For developers and their allies, sustainability is measured only to the point of delivery ‘cradle to gate.’ Fire insurers insist that the whole life of a building must be considered ‘cradle to grave’: which includes the resource implications of possible destruction by fire and replacement. Likewise, while developers seek to minimise material resources through the use of active fire prevention (sprinklers, etc.) insurers argue that this gives license to suboptimal building design and materials. Thus behind a façade of environmental responsibility, the politics of fire prevention continue unchanged.
