In "Topology of Flames" Roane partially excavates the wider matrix of infrastructural volatility that followed the fragmentation of the shared infrastructures of living especially the post-1981 fiscal crisis spurred by federal housing austerity that set the conditions for the escalation of social and political tensions in the 1980s, forming part of the terrain for the city’s deadly assault on MOVE. Before reconstructing the political ecology of fire in 1980s Philadelphia, Roane first considers Black writers’ responses to the destruction of MOVE. These artists contextualized the PPD’s attempts to annihilate MOVE within the wider social and political terrain of the city and nation that made the bombing of a row house and the fiery destruction of an entire community conceivable and justifiable. This sets the coordinates for my engagement with the scorched archive of extant municipal records related to house fires in the year before the attempts to destroy MOVE as well as newspapers that document significant losses of life in the deindustrializing city. Beyond simply measuring death, Roane analyzes the peculiar kind of work internal-facing city documents did in the reconfiguration of the state and in relation to its legitimation within majoritarian community formations and local alternative community formations, performed in naturalizing and challenging the political ecology of deadly fires through the recursive emphasis on individual culpability as well as the rejection of this paradigm.  The records of Detective White Papers in the Philadelphia City Archives, in particular illustrate the ways that insinuations and tropes of irresponsibility related to smoking and “playing with matches” and even arson helped to hide the collective vulnerability of Black communities to infrastructural disintegration in the era around the attempted destruction of MOVE.