“Urbex and Urban Space”: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Urbex – from urban exploration – is a leisure activity that involves scouting abandoned and/or neglected infrastructure with the aim of touring and sometimes photographing it. Alongside its expansion since 2005, this practice has garnered increasing interest from the academic community thanks to the democratisation of digital photography and social media. My purpose here is to provide a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature on this practice over the past fifteen years, since, to my knowledge, such a study has yet to be conducted or published. I will perform a scoping review and a bibliometric analysis of the fifty-one papers I sourced that deal with “urbex and urban space”. An examination of the formal and fundamental frameworks provided by academic studies, together with an analysis of what these papers bring to this subject, will provide new avenues for research. These avenues are both methodological – inviting researchers to make use of specific tools and turn their attention to specific spaces and groups of people – and theoretical, with an emphasis on multidisciplinary studies and a rethinking of theoretical prisms. Finally, I would like to underscore the importance of urbex for academic study as a means of better understanding cities, urban spaces, and urban societies.