Urban Exploration Research Articles

The value of heritage: urban exploration and the historic environment

This article presents the author’s research that investigates the intersection between the motivations and interests of the urban exploration community and formal heritage significance, as more commonly prescribed by heritage professionals. The article considers how non-mainstream experiences can challenge accepted definitions of heritage, particularly those related to understanding, valuing and engagement; with important implications for audience engagement and diversification.

Trespass into the Liminal

This article outlines narratives of trespass. It analyses relations between the personal and the social in abandoned urban physical surroundings. Grounded in our own duo-auto-ethnographic encounters with off-limit places, the research examines the classic notion of liminality through a set of prisms that are less than orthodox. It does so by stressing the formative and transformative possibilities of those threshold spaces that often get bypassed, surpassed or trespassed. Through a series of vignettes describing moments of urban exploration in different parts of Estonia, our implicit aim is to unsettle such conceptual categories as risk and adventure, material decay and transgression. Explicitly, we argue for revisiting storytelling tropes such as the flâneur or the stalker, freeing them up from their respective leisure and pastime associations.

Picturing urban subterranea: Embodied aesthetics of London’s sewers

As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London’s sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London’s sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London’s main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes body-space interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality.

Modeling travel decisions: Urban exploration, cultural immersion, or both?

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the characteristics of the choice between cities and culture (or aspects of both) in selecting certain travel destinations. The data consist of 28,700 individuals in 32 European countries. Bivariate probit model estimates show that those with moderately and skilled occupations, students, pensioners, women, people living in cities and regions with a high gross domestic product per capita have a higher joint probability of undertaking city and cultural trips. Furthermore, there are large differences in decisions to take a combined city and cultural trip across the countries of residence surveyed, with small western European countries exhibiting the highest probability.

Archiving an urban exploration – MR NICE GUY, cooking oil drums, sterile blister packs and uncanny bikinis

This article reflects on a performative workshop that was conducted by the artist collective, zURBS. The workshop sent the participants into the city to look for objects and material traces of social practices in order to explore questions relating to the legibility of the urban environment. Harriet observes the workshop from a participant’s perspective, whereas Cecilie discusses it as a facilitator of the workshop.

Urban Exploration: From Subterranea to Spectacle

Recreational trespass or ‘urban exploration’ (UE) is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings, construction sites and infrastructure systems. Over the past two decades, a global subculture has coalesced around this activity. More recently, however, the practice has begun to transform along divergent lines. The aims of the present article are three-fold: first, to bring UE and its emergent variants to the attention of a criminological audience; second, to interrogate increasingly spectacular visual representations of UE and attendant processes of commodification; and third, to introduce the rhizome as a way of thinking about urban social formations, their development and appropriation.

Heritage views through urban exploration: the case of ‘Abandoned Berlin’

This article frames the practice of urban exploration and its interest towards abandoned places from a heritage perspective. It is argued that most urban explorers prioritise the excitement of trespassing and the creation of their own narratives over the historic importance of the sites they explore. These ‘performative’ explorers avoid deliberate attention that may lead to vandalism or touristification – an alternative way of ‘preserving by not preserving’ that celebrates decay and assumes the sites’ progressive loss. To achieve this, they prefer not to disclose exact locations, creating a divergence towards a minority of practitioners who prefer to collect data on history and current state of conservation to make it public. Attention is paid to these ‘communicative’ explorers, whose documentation renders abandoned places visible, opening further debates about a more inclusive preservation and memorialisation. By distinguishing both heritage views, the objective of this article is to contribute to the enlargement of Heritage Studies by incorporating urban exploration as a space for reflection between loss and bottom-up preservation and interpretation.

A Politics of the Urban Ordinary: The Material Ad Hoc-ness of Shops in London

This visual essay offers an urban photographic exploration of the politics of the urban ordinary in and around commonplace shops. It draws from a visual ethnography of corner shops and kiosks in Bloomsbury, Central London—places that are not developed through the holistic design narratives familiar to most urban retail, but ones that emerge through everyday material and practice. The images, field notes, and quotes presented here are part of a larger doctoral research project that used in-shop ethnography to explore how the shops’ practices of curation and lively materials intersect with forces of the city. These forces are numerous, but might include the dynamism of urban matter, the currents of neighborhood change, the fluid manifestations of the urban brand, and the translocalism of the shopkeepers and precarity of their lives. The project came to see these forces not merely as external pressures, but intrinsically wrapped up in the material ad hoc-ness of the shops and their ways of quietly getting by. This photo essay touches on these threads through the collection and curation of fragments; not unlike the unruly aesthetics of these shops, this piece uses an ad hoc montage to tell some of their stories. The juxtapositions of image and text represent an experiment in visual storytelling and acknowledgment that the shops—and their politics—are difficult and multiple.

Appropriating the Past: Urban Exploration and Loft Living in Deindustrialized Detroit

Appropriating the Past: Urban Exploration and Loft Living in Deindustrialized Detroit

Among the Disposable: Jack London in the East End of London

This article analyzes Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903) as an ethical and socio-political critique. I make the case that London’s writing is concerned not only with poverty, the urban poor, and the wasting forces of modernity (emblematized in the megalopolis, London), but also with the ideological dimensions of representation and narration. In the book, London assumes the familiar persona of an urban explorer (made popular and adopted by a variety of Victorian journalists and writers) and then systematically defamiliarizes the persona as a role that is played rather than as a subjective actuality. The result is a (meta)discursive and self-relfexive writing style that explores and problematizes the relational dynamics and representations of self and other, subject and object of discourse within and beyond the slums of late-Victorian London.

Intersections of creative praxis and urban exploration

Since the 1960s, walking artists have documented the multifarious relationship between humans and their built environments. By turning walking into art, key figures such as Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Marina Abramović, and Hamish Fulton paved the way for future practitioners, such as Janet Cardiff, Tim Brennan, Tim Knowles, and Rachel Clewlow, among others, who continue to use walking as an opportunity creatively to investigate notions of place, identity, time, consciousness, and heritage. Whether walking fosters new artistic inquiry or remains its product, what a vast majority of walking artists have in common is that they pursue a form of praxis on the surfaces of their habitats. This practice-led research project contributes to creative walking praxis by pursuing notions of cultural identity through an engagement with sub-suburban infrastructure. By developing sound-based, visual, and textual interactions with subterranean space – specifically stormwater drains – this project seeks to investigate alternative ontologies of everyday life.

I Remember it Well: Epiphanies, Nostalgia, and Urban Exploration As Mediators of Tourist Memory

This article takes the author's own nostalgic feelings for a now defunct theme park and translates these into an analysis of other people's tourism-related nostalgic experiences. In doing so, the article furthers discussion around nostalgia and memory within tourism and approaches new ground in the use of images, online forums, and urban exploration as mediators of individual and shared nostalgias. It has also been argued that while nostalgia is a key motivational factor in tourist decision making, it has not been fully explored. Furthermore, this article uniquely focuses on younger people where previous research has considered older age groups. As a consequence, the semiautoethnographic discussion, supported with quantitative and phenomenological content analysis of online forums, explores the creation of tourist epiphanies and identifies key themes around family, repeat visitation, and the preplanned creation of new nostalgias within hyperreal environments.

English

Travelling to cities has long traditions, but in recent years tourists more frequently decide to visit places which are not typical tourist attractions. One of the new, alternative methods of spending free time in cities is urban exploration. It is a kind of quasi-tourism consisting in rediscovering forgotten and abandoned places. In the countries of Central and Eastern Europe which were the part of the former Eastern Bloc, this phenomenon can be observed particularly in post-communist cities and districts, such as NowaHuta in Krakow, Poland. The aim of the article was to identify places visited by urban explorers in NowaHuta and to indicate the main problems of managing city tourism in the context of this type of adventure travel development. Urban exploration is considered controversial but is constantly gaining more and more popularity. The main tourism products are not the specific monuments and museums but emotions and experiences of tourists. This requires proper management of tourism according to the rules of sustainable development and the concept of experience economy. The explorers in NowaHuta act on the edge of law, which causes their activity to be seen in a negative way. In the wider perspective, however, they contribute to reviving the local activity for protecting, restoring and rendering the buildings of the communist heritage available. Key words: Urban exploration, communist heritage, tourism management, city tourism, experience economy, Krakow, NowaHuta.

Painting the Town Blue and Green: Curating Street Art through Urban Mobile Gaming

Painting the Town Blue and Green: Curating Street Art through Urban Mobile Gaming

User-generated videos of urban exploration and the production of affective space

Abstract This article posits that user-generated videos have the potential to modulate affective maps of, or the aggregation of our intensive dispositions towards, urban areas. It argues that bodily topologies, which reside in our neurological substrates, are the primary source of our cognitive understandings of space and that user-generated videos have the capacity to affect these maps through their circulation of multisensory rhetorics. Taken together, these videos’ tendency to obscure their images’ photo-realistic qualities and to provide visual and sonic sensations disrupt the potential for identification and encourage haptic modes of viewing that work primarily at the level of the virtual. As a case study, this article engages videos produced by self-styled urban explorers that provide tours of abandoned buildings in Detroit, Michigan. These videos, it argues, work through lighting, unsteady cameras, sound, image durations, and movement through space, to imbue the buildings with kinetic energies that may modulate audiences’ dispositions towards the Motor City.

Content-Aware Point of Interest Recommendation on Location-Based Social Networks

The rapid urban expansion has greatly extended the physical boundary of users' living area and developed a large number of POIs (points of interest). POI recommendation is a task that facilitates users' urban exploration and helps them filter uninteresting POIs for decision making. While existing work of POI recommendation on location-based social networks (LBSNs) discovers the spatial, temporal, and social patterns of user check-in behavior, the use of content information has not been systematically studied. The various types of content information available on LBSNs could be related to different aspects of a user's check-in action, providing a unique opportunity for POI recommendation. In this work, we study the content information on LBSNs w.r.t. POI properties, user interests, and sentiment indications. We model the three types of information under a unified POI recommendation framework with the consideration of their relationship to check-in actions. The experimental results exhibit the significance of content information in explaining user behavior, and demonstrate its power to improve POI recommendation performance on LBSNs.

Urban Decay Photography and Film

Detroit’s perceived social and industrial degeneration has been matched by an unfortunate aesthetic appreciation for the image of urban ruination. Detroit, and other cities experiencing economic disinvestment, have become the inanimate models for a documentary and artistic mode of photography that fetishizes scenes of urban decline and abandonment. Such cities and urban spaces have become real-life stand-ins for the apocalyptic imagination already nurtured in broader arts and media. The fascination with the ruins of contemporary culture and the proliferation of what is sometimes referred to as “ruin porn” photography, point toward Susan Sontag’s cautious warning about the photographer’s complicity in retaining the photographed object’s state of being. Drawing on Sontag’s suspicions of photography, I offer a critique of the function and meaning of ruin photography. I draw on both Sontag’s and Roland Barthes’s cautions about the interpretive function of the photograph in terms of the act of photographing the object as well as the meaning that the photograph proposes. Using this framework, I consider the recent conceptualizations of ruin, particularly the industrial ruin, as ambivalent and multifaceted. I question whether this multidimensionality is evident in the ruin photography of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and others, the urban exploration photography of Detroiturbex, and the documentary film Deptropia. I suggest that the photographer’s fascination with places of ruin carries out the double act of fixing such places firmly in a particular melancholic moment and equally fixes any potential meaning potentially represented in such imagery.

Urban soil exploration through multi-receiver electromagnetic induction and stepped-frequency ground penetrating radar.

In environmental assessments, the characterization of urban soils relies heavily on invasive investigation, which is often insufficient to capture their full spatial heterogeneity. Non-invasive geophysical techniques enable rapid collection of high-resolution data and provide a cost-effective alternative to investigate soil in a spatially comprehensive way. This paper presents the results of combining multi-receiver electromagnetic induction and stepped-frequency ground penetrating radar to characterize a former garage site contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons. The sensor combination showed the ability to identify and accurately locate building remains and a high-density soil layer, thus demonstrating the high potential to investigate anthropogenic disturbances of physical nature. In addition, a correspondence was found between an area of lower electrical conductivity and elevated concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons, suggesting the potential to detect specific chemical disturbances. We conclude that the sensor combination provides valuable information for preliminary assessment of urban soils.

Ntopia: A Google Street View of Psychogeography in Space-Times of Cybergeography

This paper translocates situationist concepts of psychogeography and derive into digital “neogeography,” recounting insights occasioned by three digital psychogeographical experiments: an urban walk using the smartphone application Derive: Urban Exploration App, a “hyperlink” walk, and a walk through Google Street View using Derive. As psychogeographical dreams of “endless drifting” have been simulatedby digital media, those media now occasion a reassessment of psychogeographical assumptions about map and territory. Just as Guy Debord and the situationists radicalized concepts of space and place by questioning the division between art and life, so now must cyberpscyhogeographers question the division between physical meatspaces and virtual cyberspaces. Digital media reveal the arbitrariness of urban “physicality” as a mode of data representation, as augmented?reality smart?phone GPS maps merge map and territory, gesturing toward an “n?topia” of instantly mapped desires: a teleportativedatabase logic of “cyberurbanization” simultaneously undoing, unifying, and manifolding conceptions of space and place.

The Future of Ruins: The Baroque Melancholy of Hashima

Here, we present an iteration of our theoretical/creative writing project Hashima, begun in 2012. The paper is a collaboration and draws on the different discourses, practices and sensibilities of a performance theorist, a geographer, and a visual artist. For us, Hashima, located off the coast of Nagasaki, Japan, and a former site of forced labor and intensive offshore coal-mining, is a provocation for experimentation. Hashima, exploited and abject, has offered itself, unsurprisingly, to the fetishistic gaze of artists, photographers urban explorers, and ruin enthusiasts. The logic here is to control representation, and to determine and fix the meaning of the island as always in reference to something else and elsewhere. Paradoxically, there is no sense of temporality or transformation in these representations of ruins; time has been stopped in an image. By contrast, we want to draw out the allegorical value of Hashima not as a site of loss, but as a baroque, blasted landscape of monstrous becomings that resists, and forefronts, this tendency to collapse history into nature. In the following, we introduce the island before turning to an exegesis of Walter Benjamin's writing on German baroque tragedy in order to demonstrate how representation itself becomes tainted through a material encounter with the baroque's two primary topoi, the ruin and the labyrinth. To do this, we finish with a creative narrative and two images illustrating our methodology.