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One for uair01 and anyone else interested in 'The Strange World of Urban Exploration.'
More at link.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/20/urban-exploration-robert-macfarlane-bradley-garrett
The strange world of urban exploration
Urban explorers scale skyscrapers, jump fences, lift manhole covers – and break the law. Robert Macfarlane joins fearless urbexer Bradley Garrett on a night-time jaunt, and discovers the thrills of this illicit and dangerous pastime
The Guardian, Robert Macfarlane. 20 September 2013
Urban exploration: a guide for the uninitiated. Urban exploration, urbex or UE is recreational trespass in the built environment. Among the requirements for participation are claustrophilia, lack of vertigo, a taste for decay, a fascination with infrastructure, a readiness to jump fences and lift manhole covers, and a familiarity with the laws of access in whatever jurisdiction you're undertaking your explorations. Archive and web skills are useful too, for acquiring the schematics and blueprints that will inspire and orient you. Among the sites in your sights are disused factories and hospitals, former military installations, bunkers, bridges and storm-drain networks. You should be content on the counterweight of a crane 400 feet above the street, or skanking along a sewer 10 yards under the asphalt.
The cultural origins of urbex would include, to my mind, Tarkovsky's Stalker, the fiction of JG Ballard, old-school mountaineering and caving, blasts of steampunk (there is a love of girders, rivets and brickwork), console culture (Bioshock), apocalypse dreams (from Planet of the Apes to The Road), the Mission Impossible films and (inevitably) Guy Debord and his situationist dérive – the randomly motivated walk designed to disrupt habitual movement through the cityscape. It's quite some gumbo. If urban explorers didn't exist, China Miéville would have had to invent them.
The scene has its subscenes. Just as certain climbers prefer granite to gritstone, and certain cavers prefer wet systems to dry ones, the explorers have their specialisms: the bunkerologists, the asylum seekers, the skywalkers, the builderers, the track-runners, the drainers. Most people start out in ruins, though: these tend to be the easiest sites to access, and the aesthetic payoffs – the pathos of abandonment, the material residue of inscrutable histories – are rapid. Ruinistas dig "derp" (UE slang for "derelict and ruined places"). Detroit was the world mecca for derp, until it became a city-sized version of Don DeLillo's "most photographed barn in America", and it was impossible to see it except through a haze of ruin-porn imagery: HDR stills of dusty ballrooms and atria, with artfully scattered detritus (detroitus) in the foreground.
Along from the ruinistas come the adventurers, who are mostly out for the kicks. Photography is important to the adventurers too, they specialise in the "hero shot": the lone explorer seen from behind on the rim of a building or bridge, or heavily backlit (partly to preserve anonymity) and framed in a storm-drain or archway. Such images unmistakably have their origin in Caspar David Friedrich's icon of Romanticism, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818): the dark frock-coated traveller atop his peak, with the mists of unknowing spread out beneath him. Every modern-day mountain summit shot owes a debt to Friedrich's painting, and UE has absorbed and adapted the same image.
Then there are the self-styled "guerilla preservationists", deep into heritage theory, and genuinely committed to creating a coherent photographic and textual record of buildings that would otherwise crumble unnoticed until a developer arrived to raze all trace of them. Their archives are carefully curated on websites, their identities disguised with pseudonyms and firebreaks.
Up at the avant-garde of urbex are the infiltrators, the "real" explorers, who tend to be more stimulated by systems and networks than by single sites, and who cherish the challenge involved in accessing super-secure locations. Like climbers, infiltrators experience what Al Alvarez called, in his classic essay on climbing, "feeding the rat". The rat lives inside you, and itfeeds on fear. The more you feed the rat, the larger it grows, the greater its appetite – and therefore the more fear you must experience in order to sate it. Infiltrators run tracks in the brief gaps between trains, they take dinghies down storm-drains, they lift-surf, and occasionally they die – in ways that may strike you either as noble, or as liable for a Darwin Award, depending on your attitude to urbex.
The culture of urbex is mostly but not overwhelmingly male. Its politics are hard to simplify: libertarian in the main, fringed here and there with a Fight-Clubby anarchism, and in certain people aimed at resisting the rise of surveillance and the privatisation of urban space. Like all subcultures, it thrives on acronyms and slang. Security guards are "seccas". "The Fresh" is sewage. Manhole covers are "lids", and you "pop" them. Sleeping overnight in a site is "going pro-hobo". Certain terms have been imported from urban design: "Sloap" is Space Left Over After Planning. "Toads" are Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned or Derelict Spaces.
Urban exploration is international, with groups around the world, but it is too various in its motives and methods to constitute anything like a community. A code of honour is broadly adhered to: no criminal damage, no sueing anyone if anything bad happens to you. In the white sandstone under Minneapolis, digging teams work in shifts to open routes into sealed caves. In Toronto an explorer has bolted a pitch and abseiled into the vast tailrace pipe under the Niagara Falls. This year, Russian explorers are on fire, taking the practice to places – Dubai, Hong Kong – it's never been before.
Urbex is not for everyone. Let me put that differently: urbex is hardly for anyone. Participation is high in profile but small in number (perhaps 20,000 globally), and the thrills are niche. Not for urbexers the sturm und drang of mountains or the arid elegance of desert exploration. Their epiphanies are mucky, their metaphysics mephitic. The short-term risks are grim: drowning in sewage, falling from girders, gralloched by razor-wire, skewered on scaffolding. Longer-term dangers include respiratory problems from exposure to dusts and gases. I know, I know: why would you? Who would? It is a hugely strange scene, and – occasional claustrophiliac with an intermittent taste for decay that I am – I find myself rather gripped by it.
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