A huddle of young men, packs loaded with equipment, and the schematics of the London metro system—its sewer tunnels, utility tunnels, underground mail rail system, and abandoned WWII bunkers—committed mostly to memory, dive into the door of an airshaft, abseil thirty meters into the darkness, and then squeeze through the blades of an extractor fan and, finally, slip through a blast door. They aren’t utility workers, secret agents, terrorists, or actors in an espionage thriller. They are Urban Explorers, or place-hackers, bent on testing themselves by testing the limits of the city (or vice-versa)—London, in this case—as well as “undermining the notion that local borders, CCTV systems, walls, fences and guards could stop [them] from playing as [they] wish.” If playing is all they are doing, it is a complicated and dangerous game. Later, the crew would infiltrate a similar bunker to “play bunker Frisbee,” put back a few beers, and listen to drum-and-bass music. Why not go to a park or an apartment? The answer, in part, is that the wall, the lock, the No Trespassing sign and the Danger sign are part of the draw; plus: “as we know from Berlin, the Mexico/US border and the Israel/West Bank barrier, walls are powerful political statements—as is breaching them.”
Bradley Garrett’s Explore Everything is a detailed, self-critical, scientific and sometimes high-flying adventure story/treatise on the art of urban exploration. Garrett, originally from Los Angeles and currently an Oxford Professor in the School of Geography and the Environment, spent two years doing immersion ethnographic research on urban explorers for a PhD dissertation at Royal Holloway University of London. In Explore Everything, Garrett not only pens an apology on the art of urban exploration, but also takes readers through a thrilling series of Goonies-like adventure stories, in which the young professor and a team from the London Consolidation Crew (LCC) skirt security cameras, military patrols, police and laypeople alike as they break into abandoned insane asylums, spiderman crawl across iconographic bridges, plunge into deep bunkers or balance on the beams of skyscrapers, with plenty of bloggable photos to prove it the next morning. Urban explorers, not settling for the controlled form of the city, pre-packaged forms of entertainment, or closed doors that open only for the wealthy, look to find and forge new meaning out of what it means to live in a modern metropolis, besides just getting their kicks.
To say that more of us than ever before are living in cities is to underplay the similar-sounding, but much more profound fact that, as of a few years ago, and for the first time in history, more of us are living in cities than are not living in cities. According to the United Nation’s World Urbanization Prospects, in 2015 nearly 54% of the world’s population will be urban. By 2050 that number will shoot to over 67%. If you’re not astounded right now, reread the last two sentences. Humans are adapting, socially, emotionally, even physically, to more and more crowded, vertical, horizontal, frenzied, polluted and strictly controlled environments made up of asphalt, steel, and, ever more of our fellow featherless bipeds, as Plato called us. While we try to keep some order to the madness, and as governments and corporations try to cover our basic need for security, whether real or imagined, some urbanites are pushing back, by force or by choice, on what they see as Orwellian over-securitization and the undemocratic (or draconian) control of space. A sect of those saying no to the urban securitization complex are place-hackers, those looking to cut through the skin of our cities by exploring and adventuring and even living in the liminal spaces of construction and destruction, the off-limit environments that are either derelict or reserved exclusively for the elite.
Urban Exploration, or UE, or Urbex, is the newly branded historical art of trespassing, or “poking holes in the urban security fabric, leveling and democratizing place wherever it is closed off.” Think boxcar children meets ruin porn: a social-media-age Frankenstein of the Situationist philosophers (those who critiqued neo-liberal politics and helped spark the revolutions of 1968), Wiki-Leaks, parkour, and Fight Club. Although they often claim to be apolitical, place-hackers’ ultimate goal, according to Garrett, is to “find deeper meaning in the spaces we pass through everyday.”
In a time of mass migrations throughout the world, record number of detentions and deportations in the US, and a pervasive and sometimes oppressive “security-entertainment complex” these ninja-like urban explorers are breaking down the over-securitized and exclusionary walls of our modern cities. One of Garrett’s credo-sounding statements: “Wherever doors are closed, we will find a way through. Wherever history is buried, we will uncover it. Wherever architecture is exclusionary, we will liberate it.” He is simultaneously describing human nature and lamenting the fact that the modern city impinges on it. In an interview, Garrett addresses the potential for place-hackers to move into a more overtly political role: they have “mental databases of hundreds of location around cities (derelict buildings, construction sites, tunnel networks) that often have electricity and heating. It would be great to use that knowledge to help get people off the streets and into space not being used for other purposes.”
But harnessing that knowledge and skill might be an exercise in herding cats. Garrett quotes one unnamed and dazed-sounding place-hacker who refers to his forays as “more real than real life.” Another, addicted to all the “unbridled play,” “just fucking gave up on a normal life and became nocturnal.” Urbex espouses both a flippant, fuck-it all, attitude toward society at large—dropping into manholes and “buildering” (rock-climbing the exterior of buildings) for the fun of it—even as it has the potential to lead the way for new and more open relationships between city and citizen.
The combination of spiking conurbanization and deindustrialization that is explosively changing many cities around the world is hitting Los Angeles hard, and would seem to make Garrett’s hometown prime real estate for urban exploration. Place-hackers, however, have hardly delved into the Southland. “The failed parts of [Los Angeles]” Garrett says, “are rarely vertical, or worth much exploring, and enticingly derelict buildings like Linda Vista hospital… always get turned into film sets.”
In some ways, however, the streets of Los Angeles are already infiltrated. There are more than fifty thousand homeless people in LA County, and more than 1 in 10 persons are undocumented. Historian Mike Davis, in his groundbreaking work, City of Quartz, hails the city he calls “Fortress L.A.” as a place where “the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into a proliferation of new repressions in space and movement.” With the “architectural policing of social boundaries” such as bum-proof benches or randomly firing sprinklers to keep homeless populations from making comfortable use of public space, Davis describes LA as having shown that “today’s pharaonic scales of residential and commercial security supplant residual hopes for urban reform and social integration.” So while L.A. seems overripe for place-hacking, for “poking holes in the urban security fabric,” it is also perhaps more tightly controlled than any other city in the world, and the vast communities of homeless and undocumented live on a different edge than that on which place-hackers are playing and sharpening their skills. “In Los Angeles,” Davis writes, “once-upon-a-time a demi-paradise of free beaches, luxurious parks, and ‘cruising strips’, genuinely democratic space is all but extinct.”
Despite virtual transparency projects like Control Panel L.A., and events like Hack for L.A., the spring of new urban parks, especially in downtown LA, seem designed specifically to drive out the poor and homeless, as well as maintain spatial security. Restrooms in Pershing Square, a popular park for the homeless, are now only available to those with a paid parking ticket. In fact, parking prices ($8 dollars an hour) are even more prominently displayed than the historic name, and the citadel-like walls of the park, which block both views and pedestrian flow, seem like the top ring of a parking structure rather than any sort of public space. As one LA Times article reports, even the grass in Pershing Square is “off-limits to protect the sound system,” and in many of the other new downtown parks there are outright bans on shopping carts and bum-proof benches across the board. The new downtown statutes seem to be efforts at “widespread intimidation of the poor and homeless,” effectively ejecting them out of the urban space. With continued deportation raids (though there is some hope with the recently passed California TRUST Act) and the quick arrest of protestors, Los Angeles is pitted against the very people who make it what it is.
“At the heart of this search for exceptional places,” Garrett describes, “is a call for urban-dwellers to become actors rather than spectators, to effect change rather than simply witnessing it.” One of the critiques against place-hacking is that it is mostly middle-class white men, those who don’t face fear of deportation (though Garrett himself mostly adventured out of his home country, and did at one point have his passport confiscated by British authorities) or discriminatory assumptions of wrongdoing. In fact, a number of times, Garrett and his crew escaped the police with merely a warning. Probably non-white place-hackers would not have gotten off so easily. Though some of the dangers of place-hacking are inevitable (free-climbing construction cranes, outrunning guard dogs), many explorers still “insist on their right to… put their bodies in harm’s way.” So while worldwide billions of people in our cities are disgracefully thrust into the shadows (the undocumented, the poor, and the homeless), others jump into the shadows, or even the sewers, with glee. Hopefully, though, as Garrett writes, “by infiltrating the… urban body… and jittering its internal organs, undertaking pointless subversive play in the veins and arteries of the city, we create alternative pathways, little fragments of possibility.” Perhaps it’s hard to correlate these moments of “pointless subversive play” with the concrete creation of “alternative pathways” for the disenfranchised living in our midst. And admittedly, Garrett makes this critique himself, stating that “if urban exploration is ever to have the capacity to be more than art for art’s sake, it must move from an internal dialogue to engage with other artists, hackers, explorers and political activists.”
David Harvey, in suggesting that the next major societal change will necessarily come from urban uprising, poses a question at the beginning of his recent book Rebel Cities: “The freedom to make and remake ourselves and our cities is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights. How best then to exercise that right?” One answer to that question might involve dressing up as a construction worker, conspicuously laying orange cones out in the middle of the street, and then diving through an open manhole. The direct effect of such action is surely slight, but its symbolism may hold important weight: another hairline crack in the façade.
As Garrett shows in Explore Everything, there is a lurking political nature deep in the art of Urbex. Perhaps those politics would be better wielded by a collective reimagining of our city-spaces, rather than a by a single hero-type figure or exclusive (shudder at the word) Special Ops-like group. That collective, in one of its most recent iterations—the Occupy movement—rallied for the rights of the 99% and more democratic access to both space and capital. But that mass mobilization lags in the slough of crackdowns, a shifting base of support, and unclear messaging. Cue the young lady, a devious smile on her face, dangling from the skyscraper’s scaffolding.
Whether racing to the moon, the poles, the heart of the jungle or the bottom of the sea, our explorers should come away with more than just uploadable photos to post the next morning. Let’s hope that we can harness the fortitude, creativity and joy of these men and women explorers to find some greater social benefit for the rest of us, those who probably won’t ever swing like a monkey from the scaffolding. Here is an open invitation for urban explorers, the Tenzing Norgays and Edmund Hilarys of the 21st century, to come and explore the ever-undiscovered urban frontier of, to name just one lost city, Los Angeles.
