Abstract
Urbex – from urban exploration – is a leisure activity that involves scouting abandoned and/or neglected infrastructure with the aim of touring and sometimes photographing it. Alongside its expansion since 2005, this practice has garnered increasing interest from the academic community thanks to the democratisation of digital photography and social media. My purpose here is to provide a comprehensive overview of the scientific literature on this practice over the past fifteen years, since, to my knowledge, such a study has yet to be conducted or published. I will perform a scoping review and a bibliometric analysis of the fifty-one papers I sourced that deal with “urbex and urban space”. An examination of the formal and fundamental frameworks provided by academic studies, together with an analysis of what these papers bring to this subject, will provide new avenues for research. These avenues are both methodological – inviting researchers to make use of specific tools and turn their attention to specific spaces and groups of people – and theoretical, with an emphasis on multidisciplinary studies and a rethinking of theoretical prisms. Finally, I would like to underscore the importance of urbex for academic study as a means of better understanding cities, urban spaces, and urban societies.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The fifty-one papers of the scoping review are listed in the thesis this paper is taken from (Lesné, 2021, p. 480).
References
Agier, M. (2019). La sagesse de l’ethnologue (2nd ed.). Presses Universitaires de France.
Andrieu, B., & Chavaroche, L. (2017). La cosmose urbaine: Le rooftoping, une géotopie des espaces corporels. In C. Gibout (Ed), Activités sportives, récréatives et ludiques & développement des territoires (pp. 297–312). Edilivre.
Arboleda, P. (2014). Heritage Claim through Urban Exploration: The case of “Abandoned Berlin”. MA thesis, Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany.
Arksey, H., & O’Malley, L. (2005). Scoping studies: towards a methodological framework. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 8(1), 19–32.
Augustin, J. P. (1997). Les territoires émergents du sport. Quaderni, 34(1), 129–140.
Badger, D., Nursten, J., Williams, P., & Woodward, M. (2000). Should all literature reviews be systematic? Evaluation & Research in Education, 14(3–4), 220–230.
Baudelaire, C. (1863, 26 & 29 November & 3 December). Le Peintre de la vie moderne. Le Figaro..
Bennett, L. (2010). Bunkerology – a case study in the meanings, motives and methods of urban exploration. MA thesis, Sheffield Hallam University, UK.
Blackshaw, T. (2018). The two rival concepts of devotional leisure: Towards an understanding of twenty-first century human creativity and the possibility of freedom. International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure, 1(1), 75–97.
Bonnett, A. (1989). Situationism, geography, and poststructuralism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 7, 131–146.
Daskalaki, M., & Mould, O. (2013). Beyond urban subcultures: Urban subversions as rhizomic social formations. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(1), 1–18.
De Certeau, M. (1980). L’invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire. Gallimard.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-Œdipe. Édition de Minuit.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux. Édition de Minuit.
DeSilvey, C. (2006). Observed Decay: Telling Stories with Mutable Things. Journal of Material Culture, 11, 318–338.
Deyo, L. B., & Leibowitz, D. (2003). Invisible Frontier: Exploring the Tunnels, Ruins, and Rooftops of Hidden New York. Three Rivers Press.
Dumazedier, J. (1962). Vers une civilisation du loisir ? Seuil.
Edensor, T. (2005). Industrial ruins: spaces, aesthetics, and materiality. Berg Publishers.
Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir. Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (1984). Des espaces autres (conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales, 14 mars 1967). Architecture Mouvement Continuité, 5, 46–49.
Fraser, E. (2012). Urban exploration as adventure tourism: Journeying beyond the everyday. In H. Andrews, & L. Roberts (Eds.), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience, and Spaces In-between (pp. 136–151). Routledge.
Gal, N. (2015). Sauvage de nos vi(ll)es, une quête de la nature dans les interstices urbains.Téoros, 34, 1–2. http://journals.openedition.org/teoros/2745. Accessed 1 June 2022
Gibout, C., & Mauny, C. (2009). La question locale comme nouvelle frontière socio-spatiale. SociologieS. https://doi.org/10.4000/sociologies.2763. Accessed 1 June 2022
Graham, S. (2000). Underground. In N. Thrift, & S. Pile (Eds.), City A-Z (pp. 271–272). Routledge.
High, S., & Lewis, D. W. (2007). Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization. Cornell University Press.
Kindynis, T. (2016). Graffiti writing, shoplifting and recreational trespass in London: A rhizomatic ethnography. PhD thesis, University of Greenwich, UK.
Kindynis, T. (2019). Urban exploration as deviant leisure. In T. Raymen, & O. Smith (Eds.), Deviant Leisure (pp. 379–401). Palgrave McMillan.
Le Gallou, A. (2018). Espaces marginaux et fronts pionniers du tourisme urbain: approcher les ruines urbaines au prisme de la notion d’(extra)ordinaire. Bulletin de l’association de géographes français, 95(4), 595–612.
Le Gallou, A. (2021). De l’exploration urbaine au tourisme de ruines: imaginaires, pratiques et valorisations touristiques des espaces urbains abandonnés à Berlin et Détroit. PhD thesis, Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, France.
Lebreton, F. (2009). « Faire lieu » à travers l’urbain: socio-anthropologie des pratiques ludo-sportives et auto-organisées de la ville. PhD thesis, Université européenne de Bretagne, France.
Lebreton, F., & Gibout, C. (2017). Les nouveaux usages ludiques du patrimoine militaire: Opportunités pour le développement récréatif des territoires? Riséo, 2017(1), 53–75.
Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Anthropos.
Lefebvre, H. (1974). La production de l’espace. Anthropos.
Lesné, R. (2021). La ville récréative. Ce que la récréativité fait à l’urbanité: réflexion à partir des pratiques du parkour et de l’urbex. PhD thesis, Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale, France.
Lyng, S. (1990). Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking. American Journal of Sociology, 95, 851–886.
Munn, Z., Peters, M. D. J., Stern, C., Tufanaru, C., McArthur, A., & Aromataris, E. (2018). Systematic review or scoping review? Guidance for authors when choosing between a systematic or scoping review approach. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 18(143), https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-018-0611-x
Nakonecznyj, T. (2019). Reimagining urbanism and heritage through urban exploration. In M. Joannette, & J. Mace (Eds.), Les communautés patrimoniales (pp. 189–214). Presses de l’Université du Québec.
Nieszczerzewska, M. (2018). Urban Exploration as an “Interior Tourism”. In S. Owsianowska, & M. Banaszkiewicz (Eds.), Anthropology of Tourism in Central and Eastern Europe: Bridging Worlds (pp. 255–270). Lexington Books.
Ninjalicious (2005). Access All Areas: A User’s Guide to the Art of Urban Exploration. Infilpress.
Pahlevan-Sharif, S., Murab, P., & Wijesinghec, S. N. R. (2019). A systematic review of systematic reviews in tourism. Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management, 39, 158–165.
Pinder, D. (2005). Arts of urban exploration. Cultural Geographies, 12, 383–411.
Robinson, P. (2015). Conceptualizing urban exploration as beyond tourism and as anti-tourism. Advances in Hospitality and Tourism Research, 3(2), 141–164.
Roult, R., Machemehl, C., & Gaudette, M. (2018). 40 ans de la revue Loisir et Société: revue systématique des articles publiés sur le sport et la ville. Loisir et Société, 41(1), 27–45.
Roult, R., White, B., Adjizian, J. M., Morel-Michaud, L., & Auger, D. (2019). Loisir et intégration des immigrants: revue systématique des écrits sur le domaine et analyses autour des paradigmes de multiculturalisme et d’interculturalisme dans le contexte canadien. Loisir et Société, 49(2), 279–302.
Urry, J. (1990). The Tourist Gaze. Sage.
Virilio, P. (1975). Bunker archéologie. Centre Georges Pompidou.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Christophe Gibout and Florian Lebreton for their supervision during the thesis, which allowed the present study to be carried out, as well as the TVES laboratory for taking care of the translation.
Funding
The author has declared to have received the following financial support for this article’s research, writing, and publication: This work was supported by the Université du Littoral Côte d’Opale.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Lesné, R. “Urbex and Urban Space”: A Systematic Literature Review and Bibliometric Analysis. Int J Sociol Leis 5, 425–443 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-022-00120-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41978-022-00120-y