Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration
Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration
Urban exploration is a practice of researching, rediscovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments without permission to do so. Drawing from four years of ethnographic research with a group of urban explorers in the United Kingdom who undertook increasingly brazen forays into off-limits architecture, this paper argues that while urban exploration can be connected to earlier forms of critical spatial engagement, the movement also speaks to the current political moment in unique ways. Urban explorers are one of many groups reacting to increased surveillance and control over urban space, playfully probing boundaries and weaknesses in urban security in a search for bizarre, beautiful and unregulated areas where they can build personal relationships to places. The results of this research both complement and complicate recent work within geography around issues of surveillance, subversion, urban community building and critical engagement with cities.
urban exploration, infrastructure, infiltration, recreational trespass, place hacking, ethnography
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Garrett, Bradley
e51aa011-881c-4284-8889-124b1b52efc7
January 2014
Garrett, Bradley
e51aa011-881c-4284-8889-124b1b52efc7
Garrett, Bradley
(2014)
Undertaking recreational trespass: urban exploration and infiltration.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39 (1), .
(doi:10.1111/tran.12001).
Abstract
Urban exploration is a practice of researching, rediscovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned, derelict and infrastructural areas within built environments without permission to do so. Drawing from four years of ethnographic research with a group of urban explorers in the United Kingdom who undertook increasingly brazen forays into off-limits architecture, this paper argues that while urban exploration can be connected to earlier forms of critical spatial engagement, the movement also speaks to the current political moment in unique ways. Urban explorers are one of many groups reacting to increased surveillance and control over urban space, playfully probing boundaries and weaknesses in urban security in a search for bizarre, beautiful and unregulated areas where they can build personal relationships to places. The results of this research both complement and complicate recent work within geography around issues of surveillance, subversion, urban community building and critical engagement with cities.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 26 July 2013
Published date: January 2014
Keywords:
urban exploration, infrastructure, infiltration, recreational trespass, place hacking, ethnography
Organisations:
Geography & Environment
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 368947
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/368947
ISSN: 0020-2754
PURE UUID: da795cbd-1e30-4568-a31e-1f5aae3fd2b7
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Date deposited: 15 Sep 2014 10:18
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 17:56
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Author:
Bradley Garrett
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