Wanderlust

Few places in the world are as enshrined in the pantheon of urban explorer mythology as the Carrières de Paris, often referred to more colloquially (though inaccurately) as the Paris Catacombs. Since 2008, we have spent dozens of hours underneath Paris, exploring the system and meeting those who map and build it. And despite that lively and active present day cataphile culture, it is clear from looking at the history of these spaces that we are all only a blip in the long history of subsurface Paris. Parisians are melded into the very fabric of the earth through these quarries.

Sightings

As early as the 13^th Century, open air quarries, and later mines, were sunk into the Left Bank of Paris to feed architectural projects on the Right Bank. Eventually, as the city became pressured for space, people began building over the Left Bank. A voidspace was created which, since the 13^th Century, has been continually lost and relocated, condemned and celebrated, backfilled and re-excavated. As Winch writes on his blog, exercising access to this voidspace is not a right or a privilege, it’s just something that can be done. And we do – again and again. These sunken tombs have a magnetic pull, despite, or maybe due to, the potential for visceral terror they harbour.

Taking the privilege

While in the quarries, we find ourselves in a negative space, a spatial gap that exists because earth matter has been excavated to build something else entirely. In architecture and urban planning this is sometimes referred to as space left over after planning or SLOAP.  Geographers and urban planners find that those modern negative spaces are used for various urban subversions, like skateboarding and street art, being largely ignored and disused space; but we rarely imagine SLOAP being as vast as the urban underground in Paris. As Marc Explo told me while we were wandering the 180 miles of subterranean galleries and chambers “if you want to know how big the quarries are, just look at all the buildings made of limestone in Paris. Then you understand the immensity of what we’re in.”

Expanse

In 1774, a hundred feet of the Rue d’Enfer collapsed, revealing the voidspace underneath. When King Louis XVI asked engineers to report on the implosion, he was told that much of Paris could collapse; it was built over fragile quarries that stretched for miles. This triggered an epic ongoing urban stabilisation project that spawned many of the shafts, rooms, mines and galleries that we now temporarily occupy. But the rich history of these spaces had just begun by this point. Into the 19th century, the caverns and tunnels were mined for building stone and by the end of that period, they would contain the skeletal remains of eleven million Parisians exhumed from graves where they impeded development – the quarries were transformed into a massive Necropolis.

This system have harboured criminals, French revolutionaries and Nazis, they have been used to grow mushrooms and store wine and, increasingly, give Parisians an unmonitored space to throw parties and get high in our age of the ever-present watchers. Today the tunnels are roamed by a different clandestine group, a loose and leaderless community whose members sometimes spend days and nights below the city. This is our urban playground, a timeless organic underworld of caves, water, bone and soil.

Their underworld

Our tombs

The contemporary relationship between explorers and the catas is thought to stretch back to 1793 when a Frenchman named Philibert Aspairt journeyed by candlelight into the abandoned quarry system to find a “lost” wine cellar. His body was found eleven years later and a monument erected to his memory, which still stands to this day. In Ninjaicious’ Infiltration Zine Issue 9, back in 1998, the urban explorer Murray Battle tells tales of multi-day sub-urban rambling, nipple-crunching tunnel crawls and and port sipping in La Plage. Not much has changed since then. As National Geographic wrote in their recent article, entering the quarries has been illegal since 1955, so cataphiles tend to be young people fleeing the surface world and its rules – freedom reigns underground, even anarchy. One of the cataphiles the authors run into down there is a guy called Yopi who says “many people come down here to party, some people to paint. Some people to destroy or to create or to explore. We do what we want here. We don’t have rules.” Our time in the catas costs us nothing but the battering on our bodies and psychological stability – an increasingly rare direct feed into the nervous system and hypothalamus – and contributes nothing to society except to add the the surreal project in whatever ways we desire. Money is of no use here, imagination is the currency.

Tarry

Of course, the phenomenological primacy of accessing the void cannot be ignored. After entering the Paris catacombs last year, on our Kinky Paris trip, our expectations of what to expect, think and feel began to melt with every sip of port, dripping off of us with the sweat and blood and caked quarry mud. It seemed all we could do was act, except in those moments when we were so shocked by some sight, smell or crushing feeling we were rendered temporarily inert. We would sometimes run into other sub-urban dwellers down there, cataphiles who spend the majority of their lives below the City of Light. We also encountered groups of people hunched over single file with bobbing headlights and plastic cups full of beer, and we would nod hello as we passed, acknowledging our shared experience in this space of unregulated sensory madness. It seemed to go on endlessly, and we achieved a state of supreme disillusionment or exceptional clarity (the meld). When we left and had to reconform to social expectations the come down hit hard.

Come down

Every time I am in the catas, I can’t help but think I am headed to the last party at Zion, just before the machines drill through to inevitably annihilate the remaining humans and their wonderful little dystopia. The catas feel like a post-capitalist future where everyone took the red pill and woke up. And yet, an 1877 engraving by Charles Barbant also relays this sense that we need not go to Herculaneum or Pompeii to find buried cities, for they occur beneath our own feet. Whether those spaces are a terror or a utopia, or indeed both simultaneously, perhaps can only be known subjectively to each distinct voidspace entrant. These experiences, like so many we seek as the intrepid explorers of this age, often verge on incommunicability (perhaps contributing to my reliance on multimedia in attempts to relay these stories – see below).

Subterranean utopia

So where do these thoughts fit into the hack? Well my friends, the quarries of Paris are perhaps the best Western example of a place where humanity has become intricately interwoven into the informal subterranean urban matrix. Paris culture would suffer a grave setback with loss of access to these spaces (not that such a thing could ever happen, they are far too vast). A co-addictive symbiotic relationship has been built over nine centuries where the populace continually hacked the closed system open again and again, leading to a consistent stratigraphic memorialisation of rediscovery and renewal that is now layered so thick with history and culture you can almost eat it (I tried). The catacombs are proof that just as virtual social systems can be maintained by the multitude, so can physical space. Enter the void.

Occupied

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Want to see more? Have a look at the video footage from my first trip to the Carrières de Paris:

Then read about it in my just-released article in ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies:

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Exhausted

At the end of 2009, I found myself in Sweden, reflecting on a year of impossible explorations, culminating in our massive 7-day urban camping adventure across 4 European countries and dozens of derelict spaces all the way to East Germany. I never would have guessed that at the end of 2010 I would find myself sitting in Las Vegas reflecting on a year even more incredible than the last.

The numbers are in. During 2010 we explored 110 locations in 9 countries, ranging from derelict industrial sites to impossible heights; from vital infrastructure to dead shopping malls. Over the course of the year, as part of my PhD research, I have taken 11,000 photographs (yes, you read that right), shot 20 hours of video footage, published 35,000 words about our adventures in academic publications (many still in press) and wrote over 40,000 words on this blog.

That all said, Place Hacking wouldn’t be anything without the places themselves, so without further ado, I present my top 20 explorations of 2010.

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#20 – The EDF Tunnels, Paris, France

While the tunnels themselves are not that remarkable, entering through a manhole in the streets of central Paris most certainly is. On this occasion, we opened the heavy cover with a carabiner and piece of rope. Once inside, we couldn’t close it and yelled at a passer-by to shove the lid shut while we ran off into the tunnel. It clearly made his night.

More interesting though are the ways in which, in Paris, subterranean spaces connect to each other. At times in the city of lights it seems you can move more freely below ground than above. We spent an entire night underground after entering these utility tunnels, connecting the catacombs, quarries and a massive abandoned electricity substation, ending up on a rooftop in some strange spatial twist that I will never understand.

#19 – The Paris Catacombs (Carrières de Paris)

While we are on the topic of subterranean Paris, we made a number of trips into the catacombs this year. In 2009 we were detained by French police in a riot van after popping out of a manhole cover at 3am, which was fun, but 2010 was the year that I got to know about 4km of the rooms and galleries by memory and can now successfully navigate a majority of the system with pretty high success using maps.

At some point during our Kinky Paris trip, the following things may or may not have happened:

1. We stayed underground for 3 days living only by artificial light.
2. I feel asleep in a pile of human bones.
3. Marc Explo convinced us all we were  ghosts haunting the place after a debate between him and Silent Motion while they propped me up like a corpse on the wall, drunk on port.
4. We went to two massive underground parties (one in the underground cinema built by La Mexicaine de la Perforation).
5. We sent people out of the exit first to get arrested so we could run away while they were getting cuffed. Marc Explo also may or may not have also left people for dead in there.

#18 – New Court, London, United Kingdom

We found New Court while we were looking for something else entirely. Waking in the City of London, we saw a giant hole in a brick wall at ground level. We went through it, while a drunk man in a suit pointed and yelled “hey!” while falling against a wall, and then found this crane. Seriously, it was one of the best spontaneous finds of all time and remains one of my favourite explorations. This photo, with Tower Bridge beaming behind me, later got me some love from Web Urbanist which really kicked off motivation to get more cool stuff done this year.

#17 – Métro workshop, Paris, France

This year has also been a great year for exploration of the Paris Métro system. When Marc Explo told me we were going to explore some Métro on my last trip there, this was not what I was expecting. We jumped off a train and then tiptoed quietly down the tunnel, trying not to rattle the tiles on the narrow walkway. When we turned the corner and I saw this parked-up train with the lights on, my heart almost stopped.

The workshop made all sorts of strange noises as we slid underneath the train and up onto the platform, tugging on the doors in a futile attempt to get in. I kept having the distinct feeling someone was in there with us. It didn’t help that it was in the middle of the day. Marc Explo is mental.

#16 – Arterial GLC Cable Tunnel, London, United Kingdom

2010 was also the year we largely moved into being primarily an infiltration crew and while we wiggled into no less than 6 distinct cable runs housing London’s infrastructural networks, this one in particular is a real gem. It runs under a primary party artery and listening to the people running wild in the streets through the manhole covers, high-heels clacking down the corridors and fights breaking out above us in front of clubs, one can’t help but laugh. My favourite sound though is cars rolling over the lids down the street above with that distinctive negative gradual thumping reverberation. The cable runs are exciting for about 10 minutes visually, but they are sonic wonders.

#15 – Urban Camping, Everywhere

Okay this one is a bit of a cop-out since it’s not a specific location but we spent almost an entire month of this year sleeping in weird, random and derelict places. While the most harrowing was an active crack den in Luxemburg which we barricaded with old furniture and barbed wire, this random hill at an Autobahn Rasthof in East Germany was the most comfortable urban camping spot we have ever found.

Not only that, the looks on tourist’s faces when we woke up and dragged our sleeping kit back to the car and drove off  to the next ruin was priceless. Pretty sure a little girl in a car seat cried when we came at her in the car park, “Gary” dragging a sadly deflated stolen air mattress connected to a pump we found in a derelict pool with eyes full of wild hangover.

#14 – The Nuclear Racetrack, Southeastern England, United Kingdom

There are plenty of things you could be doing on a weekend evening. One option would be sneaking around in a quarry until you find access to an abandoned nuclear bunker where you source electric go-karts with the keys still in them and drive them around at high speeds. Seriously. We spent 12 hours in this subterranean playground and were having a grand time until I put photos of it on the interwebs and got a lifetime ban from the largest urban exploration forum in the United Kingdom. C’est la vie.

#13 – Rubix, Brixton, London, United Kingdom

2010 was also the year we started seriously exploring London’s amazing sewer system built by the legendary Joseph Bazalgette, following many years of epic exploration by drainers like Otter and Jon Doe. While we enjoyed exploring the River Fleet, The Tyburn and The Westborne sewers, I was especially fond of the Rubix junction in Brixton, in London’s South West Storm Drain system, not in the least because it is walking distance from my flat in Clapham. There is something about walking around in your own sewer that’s very satisfying.

Silent Motion shot this great footage of our exploration there. My excitement in the video is… um… evident.

#12 – Battersea Power Station, Wandsworth, London, United Kingdom

While Battersea Power Station has been a site of serial trespass for years, this year’s epic 7-person infiltration in the middle of an event setup on bonfire night past hordes of workers deserves special recognition. Watching the Battersea Park fireworks display from one of the chimneys was incredibly surreal, especially when Silent Motion told me “close your eyes and you can feel the chimneys collapsing a little every time a burst explodes.”

By the way, whoever tried to sneak in after us and got chased out – that was hilarious to watch from the chimneys, thanks!

#11 – Vogelsang Soviet Military Base, Berlin, Germany

This year marked our second visit to Vogelsang after a 10% completion in 2009. This Soviet base was built outside of Berlin in complete secrecy from the local population and housed 15,000 Soviet troops at it’s height. Declassified documents released in the 1990s revealed that this base had nuclear missiles stored there in 1958 aimed at London, Paris, and Brussells. We obviously took nude photos on the launch pads.

When we showed up at the base this year, it felt like coming home as we set up camp in the main building after hours driving and walking down logging roads on the massive necessary trek to get to it. Strangely, upon arrival we almost immediately ran into a party of geocachers and had an awkward stand-off until we realized they were as nerdy as us.

Other than that unlikely encounter, we had the base to ourselves and used the opportunity to throw a fat 4-man party in the admin building with a raging bonfire and spent all night taking long exposure night shots, inspired by Troy Paiva’s book Night Vision, which we were reading during the drive.

#10 – NATO Headquarters Bunker, a Paris Suburb, France

Sometime in the spring, we rolled into a quiet village in this Paris suburb at 2am and killed the headlights while we looked for a place to park the car where it wouldn’t be noticed. It was quiet enough to hear the gravel crunch under our feet as we ran up to a blast door and slipped down a dusty ventilation shaft. Inside – a massive quarry system converted into a NATO headquarters bunker full of decommissioned military equipment brought in by strange enthusiasts. The only thing more fun than taking photographs in these rigs? Playing destruction derby in them. Just kidding. Sort of.

#9 – Palais de Justice, Brussels, Belgium

The Brussels Palais de Justice was the largest building in the world when it was finished in 1883 and opened by King Leopold II. It’s rumoured that it’s construction was such an undertaking that the architect, Joseph Poelaert, died from exhaustion. So when we heard it was covered in scaffolding, well, we knew we were going to climb it. 2/3 of the way up the scaff, Statler quit and by the time I pulled myself onto the dome, I thought I was going to die.

I was so shattered, I couldn’t even enjoy it; we just left a jar of Vegemite on top and climbed down. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t the best way to begin a 2-week roadtrip given that we were all wrecked by 6am on the second day but hey, for these views…

#8 – March Joint Air Reserve Base, Moreno Valley, California

I came back to California for a conference in March and I got a call from my brother Pip – “so you like exploring stuff these days huh? I’ve got something we can explore.” Turns out, Pip wasn’t joking. After sneaking onto March Air Force base in Moreno Valley, California, a broken window gave us access to a 7-story building full of disused medical equipment, then being utilized as an urban warfare training ground for soldiers going to Iraq and Afghanistan. Utterly terrifying and totally fun, I am proud that a building from my home town has made it onto the top ten. Hopefully since the economy has all but collapsed, we will see more of this sort of thing. Just kidding.

On the way out, the sheriff was waiting outside. We were apparently a little reckless with our headtorches. Just as he hit us with his cruiser spotlight, four of us hid behind the only four pillars in sight. When he drove off to the backside of the building, we ran like hell. Seeing Pip go head-first into the grass just before he dove through the window of my truck as I sped off was priceless. Big props to the military police for not gunning us down with their assault rifles.

#7 – Saint Sulpice, Paris, France

We have climbed so many churches and cathedrals this year that I think we can nominate cathedral climbing as a new Olympic sport. St-Sulpice was the gem of the year. Marc Explo distracted a security guard with inane questions just before we shimmied up the hoarding to the scaffolding. When we finally got to the top, the Eiffel Tower glowing in the distance, we found a group of 5 university students in really nice clothes having a picnic on the roof. Only in Paris.

Later, this crusty old hippie came up the scaffolding with his 6-year-old daughter and fired up a spliff as he introduced himself. Like I said, only in Paris.

#6 – The Sanitary(um) Hospital, London, United Kingdom

Hands down the most pristine derelict hospital I have ever been to. The hospital is also in the most unlikely location for a giant derelict building and it took Patch and Neb weeks of research and climbing around the place using benches and ropes to finally find an open window. Shouts to Patch for the dedicated research and legwork on this one – the payoff was grand!

#5 – Millennium Mills, East London, United Kingdom

I had been putting off Millennium Mills for years. I think a part of me wanted to save London’s last epic ruin for when I needed it most. When “Gary” called me and said “meet me on the Excel Centre bridge”, I knew the time had come. Mills exceeded all expectations, it’s clearly one of the most beautiful industrial ruins on planet earth today. As such, it’s been good to see a renewed interest from London explorers in the site lately. Might as well since the security guard is utterly useless!

Like all beautiful things, London authorities plan on fucking it up by turning it into a dreadful 5000-home development with an aquarium.

#4 – Croix Rouge Abandoned Métro Station, Paris, France

Croix rouge was as terrifying to get to as it is beautiful. Unbeknownst to me at the time I hit the shutter, this photographs would tour London as a 20×30″ print and end up on the brochure for the 2010 Royal Holloway, University of London Vertical Geographies Conference.

As usual, the best thing about Paris is when you crawl out of a metro tunnel onto a platform cackling, dressed in black and covered in tunnel dust and no one cares.

#3 – Lucky Charms, Stockwell, London

Otter, Yaz and I jumped into a sewer at Stockwell station and accidentally went upstream. I don’t know what we were doing but Yaz then says, “why don’t we just see what’s around the corner.” Ten minutes later, we were in one of the most beautiful drain junctions I have ever seen. Otter, in his style, spent 30 minutes setting up lights for this photo while Yaz and I danced in our waders to drum and bass.

I am incredibly humbled that Otter and Yaz invited me to name this drain. I christened thee “Lucky Charms”, the most wonderful drain we didn’t mean to find.

#2 – Pre-metro, Antwerp, Belgium

In the 1970s, Antwerp had a big plan to build 15 km of Metro tunnels with 22 stations. Then they remembered they were in Belgium and made sure not to complete it. Today, only 11 stations have been built and it’s never been used. But that is not the fun part.

The fun part is that the only way in to this beautiful beast of a system is via a 30 meter air vent with a straight drop. At the tail end of our road trip to Poland, we tied off the ropes and dropped into this gorgeous piece of almost-architecture while the rain pummelled us from up high.

Flipping the light switch at the bottom and watching the lights spark down 11 abandoned (under construction?) stations was one of the greatest things I have ever witnessed. Not being able to ascend out of the system due to exhaustion, torrential rain, and fear – even more awesome!

#1 – King’s Reach Tower, Southbank of the Thames, London

And finally, maybe surprisingly, at number one on my list this year is my new London favourite. The first time I stepped onto the roof of King’s Reach Tower, 111 metres over the Thames, I was floored by how spectacular the view was. It also has (had?) a working lift which seriously made this a night out that almost didn’t feel like exploring at all, just an evening with drinks and a beautiful view. When Otter released his Gigapixel panorama of London taken from here, I knew we had something incredible on our hands. It only got better when we threw an epic party on the 29th floor which brought explorers from 5 countries together for a fantastic gathering that ended in a drunken congratulatory speech from Siologen.

And so with that, I officially close the Place Hacking 2010 year of exploration. Hope to see you all out there next year!

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Thanks to Statler, “Gary”, Otter, Patch, Yaz, Neb, Claire-Elise, Gigi, LutEx, Hydra, Witek, Brickman, Cogito, Joel and Jesse Childers, Siologen, Snappel, User Scott, El Gringo, Pip and everyone else who I have been exploring with this year.

A special thanks to Winch for organizing all of our legendary ProHobo Road trips. I don’t know how you do it mate, but don’t stop. Marc Explo deserves the utmost respect for not only for his skills as an explorer but his in-action philosophising that always send me back to the drawing board. Silent Motion is the best place hacker the world has yet seen, you are an inspiration brother.

Further, I have had some great conversations and received encouragement on my PhD research from Dsankt, Urbanity, Simon Cornwell, Trevor Paglen, Adam Fish and the crew at Savage Minds, Alan Rapp, Julia Solis, Shane Perez and Steve Duncan. Cheers all. Thank you finally to Tim Cresswell for your unwavering support (and blind eye) during late night frantic calls and early morning coffee chugging sessions at the London Review Bookshop.

On a final note, 2011 already promises more than 2010 delivered so watch this space.

Oh, one more thing.

Explore Everything

Life is a pilgrimage. The wise man does not rest by the roadside inns. He marches direct to the illimitable domain of eternal bliss, his ultimate destination.
-Swami Sivananda

Ecstasy

Certain sites of urban exploration are to be tasted, others swallowed and some to be chewed and digested. I have had a love affair with Battersea Power Station, my Dark Princess, since arriving in London. The first time I rode past on the train and saw her crumbing dark brick and creamy smokestacks shining in the afternoon light, I began to feel a powerful desire to get closer. Slowly, over the course of 2 years, I have gone back to her over and over again, on foot, crawling through tunnels, by boat. I have visited her on lonely late nights of contemplation, seeking advice and solace, in the evenings, in the days, through changes of ownership and constantly changing security measures, running around the control rooms playing hide and seek and laying along the chimneys with friends in London’s early dawn light waiting for the ecstasy of her grandeur to eventually fade, which it never does. I feel that we have, over the years, developed a complicated and passionate relationship to the point that I defend her liminal status as being the best place for her to reside. I want her just as she is, now and forever.

No man's land

With intention

Last year, a plan was hatched to watch the city’s firework display from Battersea Park via the chimneys of my Dark Princess. Ironically, because of all of the traffic coming to Clapham Common where I live for the epic yearly display here, I couldn’t get there in time. I have regretted it ever since, determined to let nothing stop me this year from attending what has become a sacred urban explorer pilgrimage.

Security is part of the game. They know we are coming. They know we won’t give up spending this night with the Dark Princess. Last night, the place was swarming with workers and patrols, a large tent in the middle shooting blue lights onto the interior walls as we slipped up the scaffolding. The tremors of fear and roaming floodlights only added to the passion of the affair. In the end, 7 of us made it in even as others were caught in the yard below with screams and footchases we could hear while hanging from the steel girders.

And for our persistence, the Dark Princess rewarded us with the most spectacular beauty imaginable, aided in no small part the worker’s light show they unintentionally put on for us (thank you workers!).

Rekindled

The night

For 30 minutes, we sunk into the bliss of a successful pilgrimage, eyes closed with the sky flaring behind our eyelids, one terrible rumble after another awaking our primal imaginaries, drifting into the night. The evening turned into a fervour of laughter and play as we ran into the city to wreak more havoc in our intoxication of passion. I let the night go with a heavy heart.

In revelry

The whole universe will glow

–Hunter S. Thompson, Playboy Magazine, 1974, discussing drug use as edgework

Keep looking

Edgework was a term first used by gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to describe the necessity some people find in pushing boundaries to find fulfillment. The idea is to work as close to the “edge” as one can without getting cut (or at least not too deeply). For Thompson, this meant putting himself in perilous situations such as doing ethnographic research with the notorious Hell’s Angels Biker Gang, ingesting various intoxicants to the point of near overdose or taking drugs of unknown origin in unexpected combinations.

The term edgework was appropriated by the socialist Stephen Lyng as a blanket term for anyone who “actively seeks experiences that involve a high potential for personal injury or death.” In his 1996 article Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking (expanded in 2004 as an edited book), Lyng goes on to explain edgework as a negotiation between “life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, and sanity and insanity”.

Relatively conscious (photo by Otter, Yaz and Goblinmerchant)

It seems to me that most urban explorers not only feel the need to test those limits, but to push them. We find those opportunities in drain systems, where the obvious risk comes from flooding and drowning to abandoned buildings which have both short term (collapse) and long term (respiratory problems, cancer etc.) negative impacts on our bodies. Many urban explorers also frequent high places where falling is always a possibility. In these locations we are free to do our edgework, pushing these boundaries by hanging from cranes, balancing on edges of long drops, precariously tiptoeing over weak floors and scrambling under collapsing roofs.

Edging (image courtesy of nocturn.es)

In wider society, inevitably connected to the concept of “liability”, is the notion that these activities are trangressive. UrbEx, like street art, skateboarding and parkour, is a practice which reappropriates urban space for an unintended or unexpected use that may result in bodily harm and one of the common reactions to people choosing to take unnecessary risks is, of course, suspicion that these people are “out of place”. But as Christopher Stanley has written, “these subcultural events [could] assume the status of resistant practices not in terms of ideology but rather in terms of alternative narratives of dissensus representing possible moments of community.”

Sinking feeling

As Lyng rightly points out later in his article, “risk taking is necessary for the well-being of some people” as individuals work to “develop capacities for competent control over environmental objects” (see Klausner 1968) inspiring edgeworkers to sometimes speak of a feeling of “oneness” with the object or environment while undertaking these risks.

I know that the places where I feel most embedded in the “fabric” are places where I have taken risks. In those places, I have bonded not only with Lyng’s “object and environment” but also with my friends who shared in those risks.

Alternative cathedral use, Paris (image courtesy of Marc Explo)

The desires to explore for the sake of exploring, to take risks for the sake of the experience, with little thought to the “outcome”, is something that runs deep in us when we are children. Urban explorers are, in one sense, rediscovering and forging these feelings of unbridled play, of useless wandering, of trivial conversation and of spontaneous encounter, all of which lead to the creation of very thick bonds between fellow explorers who use play as a way “to de-emphasize the importance of work and consumption and their pervasive monetary components.”

These explorations bond people in an emotive embrace, tendrils of affect conjured by shared fear and excitement, experiences that have become increasingly hard to find in many modern city spaces which Guy Debord argues “eliminate geographical distance only to produce internal separation.”

Perched

Despite the ways edgework may be seen as trangressive, the empowering and inspiring process of undertaking edgework is exactly what is lacking from many people’s lives in global cities. Edgework may in this sense be seen  healing rather than severing, a hot blade that melts. Physical human connections through shared experiences of peaked emotions build stronger bonds of community, and I am proud to belong to this tribe of urban bodhisattvas.

Tribe

-Kahlil Gibran

We are not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesn’t hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect “behavioural disorders” at age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack.

- The Invisible Committee

Prison

Exploration is the only medication my body subscribes to. My trembling fingertips reach for the sewer keys on my way out the door and my bowels twist in satisfaction. This addiction began as research, then I went native, then I lost my way. My love for ruins, my love for old stuff, slipped quietly into the present without even a little wink to let me know what was happening. A life spent looking for material traces of the past morphed into a series of events connected only by my churning belly that vaguely resembles art or a job in construction.

Please don’t expect me to say I found my way again because I didn’t. I was at Tate Britain the other day listening to Joseph Heathcott talk about digging through a photo archive. He said that as he dug, he became more and more confused, buried in images that he didn’t know how to contextualize. When he reached the bottom of the box of images, all he could see was himself.

We explore not to find places but to find meaning. Place hacking is only partly about architecture, history, dereliction or photography. It is about reminding ourselves what in life is worth experiencing. Our explorations embody a consistency between action and thought where what we dream becomes real. The addiction that comes along with that is the point at which your synapses start firing in new directions, making connections you didn’t know existed or that you lost somewhere along the way. It’s the point at which you realize you never want to work again, the instant at which you understand you never want to own a home, the moment when the revelation occurs that the terrorist threat is as non-existent now as it was in 1972 and 1023 and that most of the world, despite what the media would have you believe, is full of love and attachment, not hate and fear.

Thinking of you

I have lost my way. I hardly know the (a?) government exists. I have forgotten about commitments. I have widened my focus to the point that I can barely see anything not in front of me and yet eschew almost nothing, an optic of total stimulation. I spend all day with my friends. I am in love with every moment. I know my neighbourhood, my city, inside out. I just described childhood.

We have built up a shell around ourselves to defend our bodies and minds from the barrage of victimisations they are subjected to. We are left staring stupidly at what it is we are being asked to do, wondering again and again “is this it?” Joshua Ferris, in his novel And Then We Came to the End sums it up in this tidy moment seen through the eyes of Carl, a copywriter for an ad agency: “Directly to his right, something curious was going on. Two men in tan uniforms were hosing down the alleyway – a small dead-end loading dock between our building and the one next to it. Carl watched them at their work. White water shot from their hoses. They moved the spray around the asphalt. The pressure looked mighty, for the men gripped their slender black guns, the kind seen at a manual car wash, with both hands. They lifted the guns up and sprayed the dumpster and the brick walls as well. They spot cleaned, they moved refuse around with the stream. For all inert purposes, they were cleaning an alleyway. An alleyway! Cleaning it! Carl was mesmerized….good god, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless?”

We have become desensitized to the everyday. We have become part of the spectacle, ignoring emotional engagement with the world because we are so alienated by it. We formulate emotional shells that lock out beauty as well as pain and stop us from taking action. We are left in a state of perpetual isolation, mouths open, ready to pour in pills to fix what we lost. We are left inert, flaccid, empty. As Raoul Vaneigem once said, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.” Raoul’s thesis is outlined succinctly in the following diagram.

I suggest a different sort of medication to cure that corpse-filled mouth. Explore everything, shatter the shell and live free.

Dreamers

get vertical

Playfully

Move beyond your conceptions of exploration. Explore your mind, explore the dance floor, explore your broken family that your are ignoring while you read this drivel. Move into abandoned buildings, take locks off of doors, turn CCTV camera so they only see each other, light off fireworks randomly. Scream at people in the streets, talk to strangers, photograph police. Stop paying the state until they give something back other than the promise of a good pension if you join the military and avoid dying through war X. Take what’s in front of you and pour your heart into it. And if you have to quit your job to make that happen, then go. But do it in style – run out screaming into the sky to invoke your freedom. Even better, abseil out of your window and rappel to freedom.

Play is power. Freedom is power.

We don't need 4th of July or 5th of November as an excuse to explode things in celebration (Marc Explo).

Our work ethic

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]]> http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/07/11/playing-with-power/feed/ 4 http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/04/02/summer-exhibition-during-the-london-festival-of-architecture/ http://www.placehacking.co.uk/2010/04/02/summer-exhibition-during-the-london-festival-of-architecture/#comments Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:32:39 +0000 Bradley L. Garrett http://bradleygarrett.com/?p=760 I am proud to announce that Oliver Dawkins of Urban Orienteer has invited me to contribute an exhibition to the Transparency and the City: Public Spaces or Forgotten Places? showing at the Alan Baxter gallery in Farringdon as part of their program of events for the London Festival of Architecture 2010.

Behind the scene

For the event, I have asked 7 explorers who have worked with me diligently on my PhD project to come along and show two pieces. Our exhibit, which we are calling Urban Exploration: Behind The Scene, will include work by myself, John Dodd, Laura Brown, Marc Explo, Alistair Sean William Costello, Chris Reinstadtler, Arron Fulker and Danny Pack.

Here is a blurb I wrote for the exhibit:

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

—   Lord Byron

By the light of the moon, Marc and Hydra walked through the common, stopping every once and a while to blow something up. It was a quiet wintry night, a night for explorations of the soul before landscape, a post-phenomenological spectacle of Autumn ritual thought adornment. And then, the unthinkable happened. One explosion, set off by the Marc in a hysterical frenzy over his departure from the land of the mystics, shook the ground with a terrible rumble.

The grass of the common began separating, the earth seizing and shaking like a new born baby addicted to crack; trees capsized into an emerging crevice that revealed a hidden underground storage facility, untouched for 42.75 years, filled with the records of the lost souls dragged down to Dante’s 7^th circle of hell.

An exposed vein

Something new

Records of the Lotus War

A decision was made to explore this emerging subterranean wonder. Hydra, designated lead explorer on this spontaneously scurrilous expedition, entered the metal-lined den with trepidation; there was evidence of habitation, or at least adaptive reuse. The mole people had been here, burrowing into the earth, connecting the tunnel with another inhabited by a perpetually sleeping dragon that shook the tunnel with his deep exhalations.

The mole people were encountered soon after, mining away at the sidewalls of the tunnel, inviting collapse, but also inquiry, undertaken carefully by Marc who spoke conversational Molish. LutEx, master and commander of the underground, resided there with his Queen it seemed. They join the expedition for the promise of chocolate éclairs. Earlier that night, he tells Marc later, he mined a Jewel, and Diamond from the depths. The Diamond, as she then became known, joined the expedition on the promise of existential freedom.

As they move through the tunnels, LutEx explains that there was indeed a sleeping Dragon at the end of the tunnel, and that the mole people has constructed a wall between them and the beast to keep it’s steaming slumbering sighs from singing their eyebrows. It turned out they were not trying to dig to the Dragon, but to avoid it while working their way through the 7^th circle. As Hydra commented on the quality of the construction, suddenly, running steps are heard.

Experiental barrier

The Goblinmerchant, vendor of the mystical, last seen at the Pyestock Stargate, emerges from the depths at breakneck speed, smashing through the wall in a brave but foolish attempt to challenge the Dragon. Little did he know, the Dragon had a guard. The Goblimerchant is caught in a time-space compression web, cast by a magical troll hidden in a subterranean enclave, forcing him back into the 7^th circle, restoring the barrier the mole people had constructed, a barrier, which, it seems, the Dragon allowed to exist.

For his transgressions, the group sees the Goblinmerchant subjected to endless torture, first by having his hair pulled from the follicles by a diabolical goblin-engineered torture machine, and then tied by his feet and hung from the roof of the bunker, on show until the end of time for other daring explorers, an example of the dangers of crossing the Great Dragon of Clapham.

Torture and Punish

Sisyphustic dilemma

With the expedition now complete, with lessons learned, The Diamond is indeed given her freedom, teleported back to the surface by a goblin transporter restored by the mole people to beam in food supplies and port.

Beamed

As for Hydra and Marc… Last was heard they had joined LutEx and his Queen in the underworld, digging into the 8^th circle of hell.

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I hope you enjoy it, please feel free to email me or comment on the blog with any comments, questions or hate letters.

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Heritage Infiltration: Quests to Find Myth, Mystery and Meaning through Urban Exploration

Bradley L. Garrett

Introduction to Topic
The term urban exploration conjures up a multifaceted set of interlaced images and ideas. I expect that each person reading this will have a slightly different idea of what exactly those words mean. Perhaps they even makes you cringe But for one group, individuals who call themselves urban explorers, UrbExers or simply UErs, the phrase is unabashedly precise. Urban exploration is an “interior tourism that allows the curious-minded to discover a world of behind-the-scenes sights” (Ninjalicious 2005).  In my own words, I might describe the urban exploration “scene” as a transnational enthusiasm focused on exploring and recording liminal zones and derelict places, rooted in an interest for the past and a passion for the photography of the forgotten.

I will spend the next three years getting to know urban explorers, embedding myself in their practice and hopefully becoming an UrbExer myself. Although I must admit that despite the seductiveness of my participant’s definition of their practice, I have misgivings about calling myself, or them, urban explorers. My reasons for this are rooted in the academic geographical imagination.

Firstly, what is “urban”? Can we still use the term when an exploration of built structures or human remnants takes place in a rural environment? Do we need to bound and separate the urban and the rural? Secondly, what narratives does the term “exploration” conjure up? We are all aware of the cultural baggage the terms carries: visions of colonial expeditions, invasions, subjugated populations, disease and occupation (Johnston 2000). It is language of conquest.

Because of these misgivings, I suggested a new term for what it is I have come to do every weekend. I began to call it heritage infiltration. It seemed to me that this term encapsulated the rogue adventure into humanity’s largely forgotten past that we were undertaking, while avoiding the negative associations I saw with the term urban exploration. When I suggested the new nomenclature to the urban explorers who I was working with, they hated it. In fact, they reprimanded me for suggesting that I knew better than them what it was they were doing. Consider it a lesson learned in doing ethnography: project participants are always the experts, and the researcher never has a right to make expert claims about the regulation, bounding or designation of identity markers.

In the end, I decided to use both terms (hence the title), one to describe my participant’s vision of what it is they do and one to describe my personal characterization of the experience.

Methods
So, the cat is out of the bag. I said I was doing ethnography, a term thrown around rather loosely in geography circles. Coming from anthropology, I realize the boldness of this claim. I know that building an ethnography is a deep process; maybe too deep for me to realize in three years. Ethnography, by a traditional definition, will include observation of people’s daily lives for an extended period of time (Hammersley and Atkinson 1995). Visual ethnographer Sarah Pink defines ethnography as “an approach to experiencing, interpreting and representing culture” (Pink 2007: 18). It is Pink’s definition, with the acknowledgment of personal experience in fieldwork that I find most appealing.

The experience of the researcher is often missing from ethnographic accounts, and I believe that the narration of my visceral, bodily experience as a heritage infiltrator is an important story to tell. I have realized early on that these explorations are about inscribing corporeal existence into place while absorbing enough memories, experiences, lead paint, asbestos and scars to take also the places with you.

Finding Hidden Community
It took me 8 months (beginning before I started the PhD!) to get an urban explorer to invite me on an explore here in London. The reason for this is that the urban exploration community is full of sneaks, shades, specters and rats. In fact, after offering my services as a “videographer” on an UrbEx forum board called 28 Days Later  shortly after arriving in London, I was accused of being a federal agent infiltrating the network to collect evidence for prosecution. The realization of the difficulty of gaining access to project participants has led me to use a variation of snowball sampling or respondent-driven sampling (Salganik and Heckathorn 2004). Basically, by meeting one person and building trust, I can ask them to introduce me to someone else. Using the mythological law of 7 degrees of separation, this should lead me to everyone eventually (though maybe not within 3 years)! The technique has worked well so far; after my first explore on Jan 15th 2009, the two Kent explorers I went out with called friends in London to give me the “green light”, leading to the 16 person (and ever-growing) research group I now have! This process was greatly assisted by virtual social networking sites such as facebook and internet forum boards.

Virtual Networks ←→ Physical Encounter
Online networks are quickly becoming very important for cultural research. In my case, I have chosen a community who has had their own web-based networks long before facebook, myspace or even friendster. A quick search of “Urban Exploration UK” in google brings up dozens of sites, all associated with different cliques, some quite hostile to each other. On the forums, identities are fiercely guarded. The reason for this is that law enforcement and private security firms patrol the web spaces looking for information about member identities and access points into sites. As a result, the biggest “noob” (newcomer) offences in the forums include:

1.    Not blurring out faces in a pictoral forum posting
2.    Using someone’s real name
3.    Revealing how you gained access to a site (especially when this leads to the access point then being sealed!)

Aliases and costumes have become increasingly important in recent years, I am told, with the proliferation of CCTV and the general air of suspicion regarding urban explorer’s motives, to the point that even on an explore, people will not reveal their real names. Interestingly, off of the forum boards, I have built a group of friends on facebook who, of course, have revealed to me their real names. All of our profiles are set to only be viewable by “friends”, and we frequently post pictures of explores with our faces shown, with the assumption that these posts are “internal”. In some cases, explorers will ask me not to “tag” them to keep visibility to a minimum.

As you may have guessed, being an urban explorer, at least a part of this community, requires some degree of technical prowess, a fair dose of paranoia and, I might add, a nice still camera and some skill with it if you want to build recognition on forum boards. I knew at the beginning of this project that I did not have the technical skills with a still camera to gain access to this group. I did however have videographic experience, which prompted me to begin using video to build my ethnographic stories. Ironically, I have found that video does some really fantastic things in the field and my role as a videographer is seen as anomalous but increasingly desired as I produce youtube videos that can be embedded into forum postings, one of my gifts that I give back to participants.

From Virtual Geographies to Visual Geographies
Again, claiming to be making an ethnographic film is a bold claim, but as Sarah Pink points out, “a video is ‘ethnographic’ when its viewer(s) judge that it represents information of ethnographic interest” (Pink 2007: 79). Ethnographic interviews are perhaps the most useful area for video collection and production. The reason for this is that video allows project participants to speak for themselves. Photographs, as Hastrup (1992: 10) argues, are a thin description, capturing form but not meaning. Hastrup goes on to argue that in order for the photograph to become a piece of ethnographic thick description, it must be contextualized by text, an argument also made recently by Gillian Rose (2001). Video, on the other hand, is capable of capturing experience (both yours and your participants), and does so in a way that I believe is respectful and accurate in terms of ethnographic storytelling. I hope to use both “in the field” interviews and more focused formal interviews once a sufficient level of trust has been built to request these.

By the end of my research, I expect to not only have written a thesis, but to have also produced a feature length ethnographic film, a film that my participants have expressed much more interest in than the written component.

Some Parameters
In an effort to increase participant control over the project, my parameters have been defined largely by my research groups. Basically, to be part of this project participants are expected to:

1.    Define themselves as an urban explorer and consider urban exploration an important part of their life.
2.    Actively post on an online community of like-minded individuals or at least have an avatar on the forums.
3.    Following this, participants must subscribe to the urban explorer community code of ethics.
4.    Agree to be filmed, and agree to have me use that film for my research (on whatever terms they choose i.e. face-blurring, anonymity, audio-only etc.).
5.    Agree to having their alias used to describe their practice in the film and in any writing.

Finally, in terms of location, I am following participant leads, where they take me is where I study. At the present time, it looks as if this study may involve 5 countries and dozens (if not hundreds) of locations.

Other Aspects of the Study
There are a wide range of themes connected to the topic of urban exploration that I have not touched on here including, but not limited to, ghosts and hauntings, gender roles, urban adventure (extreme sports in derelict places), policing and authority resistance, childhood play, homelessness and squatting, emotional adventure, adrenaline addiction, political and cultural nostalgia, localized mapping, dystopian fantasy, alternative archaeologies, building hacking and heritage hijacking. All of this can and should be unpacked through experience and interviews.

Why is This Worth Researching?
Urban exploration is an international movement, a shared global culture that defies language barriers, national borders, and conceptions of private ownership over space. It is a form of activism, an art, a hobby, a sport, an addiction and, to many, a way of life. Urban exploration is a way to resist the smooth spaces of the city and to seize heritage in a very personal way.

I believe that there are also deep roots in urban exploration, roots that tendril into themes about life in the city, desires for emotional freedom, the need for unmediated expression, associations with childhood memory and historic materiality, and desires for physical human connection and bonds through shared experiences of peaked emotions (Cahill and McGaugh 1998). These are issues explored by phenomenology, psychogeography, ontology and cognitive archaeology. I believe that tracing the roots of urban exploration will reveal a philosophical rabbit hole that does not end at the smooth pavement of everyday life.

It is also a topic which has been little discussed. In the course of my first few months of research, I have found two films on the topic (Faninatto 2005; Gilbert 2007), a few television shows (Duncan 2004; Wildman 2007; Zuiker, et al. 2006), a handful of popular books (Deyo and Leibowitz 2003; Ninjalicious 2005; Talling 2008; Toth 1993; Vanderbilt 2002), a single academic text (Edensor 2005), two M.A. dissertations (Lipman 2004; McRae 2008), a few journal articles (Genosko 2009; Pinder 2005) and a very large stack of zines (locally printed fanzines). Actually, the most coverage I have seen of urban exploration is in popular magazines and newspapers, where the press is almost assuredly negative. Obviously, this ever-growing and increasingly popular pastime is ripe for infiltration.

References
Cahill, L. and J. McGaugh
1998    Mechanisms of Emotional Arousal and Lasting Declarative Memory Trends Neurosci 21 (7):1-6.

Deyo, L. B. and D. Leibowitz
2003    Invisible Frontier : Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York. 1st ed. Three Rivers Press, New York.

Duncan, S.
2004    Urban Explorers. Hoggard Productions, United States of America.

Edensor, T.
2005    Industrial Ruins : Spaces, Aesthetics, and Materiality. Berg Publishers, Oxford, U.K.

Faninatto, R.
2005    Echoes of Forgotten Places. Scribble Media.

Genosko, G.
2009    Illness as Metonym: Writing Urban Exploration in Infiltration. Space and Culture 12(1):63-75.

Gilbert, M.
2007    Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness. Channel Z Films, United States of America.

Hammersley, M. and P. Atkinson
1995    Ethnography: Principles and Practice. 2nd ed. Routledge, London.

Hastrup, K.
1992    Anthropological Visions: Some Notes on Visual and Textual Authority. In Film as Ethnography, edited by P. I. Crawford and D. Turton. Manchester University Press in association with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, Manchester.

Johnston, R. J.
2000    The Dictionary of Human Geography. 4th ed. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK

Lipman, C.
2004    Tresspassing in the Ruins: Urban Exploration at the CRX, Royal Holloway, University of London.

McRae, J. D.
2008    Play City Life: Henri Lefebvre, Urban Exploration and Re-Imagined Possibilities for Urban Life M.A., Queen’s University.

Ninjalicious
2005    Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. Infilpress, Canada.

Pinder, D.
2005    Arts of Urban Exploration. Cultural Geographies 12(4):383-411.

Pink, S.
2007    Doing Visual Ethnography : Images, Media and Representation in Research. Manchester University Press in association with the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, New York.

Rose, G.
2001    Visual Methodologies : An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. Sage, Thousand Oaks, California.

Salganik, M. J. and D. D. Heckathorn
2004    Sampling and Estimation in Hidden Populations Using Respondant-Driven Sampling  Sociological Methodology 34:1-48.

Talling, P.
2008    Derelict London. Random House Books, London.

Toth, J.
1993    The Mole People : Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City. Chicago Review Press, Chicago, Ill.

Vanderbilt, T.
2002    Survival City : Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America. 1st ed. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, N.Y.

Wildman, D.
2007    Cities of the Underworld. The History Channel, United States of America.

Zuiker, A. E., C. Mendelsohn and A. Donahue
2006    Free Fall (Season 4, Episode 20). In CSI: Miami. CBS Paramount Television, United States of America.[

[vimeo vimeo.com/4665841]

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