Abstract
Recreational trespass or ‘urban exploration’ is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings, high-rise construction sites and infrastructure systems. Over the past two decades a global subculture has coalesced around this activity. More recently, however, the practice has begun to transform along divergent lines. As numerous corporations have sought to cash in on what they see as the latest edgy urban branding opportunity in an attempt to market their products to young urban consumers, new and increasingly image-centric, spectacular and conformative variants of the practice have emerged. Based on ongoing (auto)ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with urban explorers, this chapter considers how processes of commodification and corporate sponsorship, in conjunction with the emergence of new social media platforms, have drastically altered both the firsthand experience of the practice and the dynamic of the subculture more generally. The chapter suggests that urban exploration has been thoroughly assimilated into a dominant neoliberal culture of spectacular consumption, exhibiting the kinds of individualistic, competitive and risk-taking behaviours valued within the current social conjuncture, and asks: to what extent, if any, can urban explorers recuperate the practice’s transgressive potential? It is my hope that the potential of urban exploration, and of other similar practices that engage with urban spaces in novel and informal ways, as genuinely prosocial forms of leisure can be realised. However, we must first recognise and understand the myriad harms associated with commodified leisure more broadly.
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Notes
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The term raises issues about the (staged) production and (‘masturbatory’?) consumption of such images, as well as their deferral of deeply political questions such as how and why such ruins came to be in the first place, in a manner similar to how consumers of pornography ‘do not generally concern themselves with questions of its production’ (Mott and Roberts 2014: 231). Importantly, this argument may be extended to other forms of urban exploration. The images and narratives of those who infiltrate construction sites, demolition sites and infrastructure are often equally uncritical of the economic and political forces at play behind the production of such spaces, such as gentrification, speculative real estate development and what Graham and Marvin (2001) term ‘splintering urbanism’.
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The criminogenic implications at the subjective level of consumerism’s cultivation of insatiable forms of desire (and their logical concomitant: a constant sense of unfulfillment, dissatisfaction and disillusionment) hardly need spelling out (see Hayward and Kindynis 2013). The perpetual failure to fulfil (essentially unattainable) consumption-oriented expressive aspirations can, in many instances, precipitate a constellation of negative emotional states—frustration, resentment, insecurity, humiliation, dread and anxiety—that can, under the right circumstances, manifest itself in crimes of passion, retaliation and illicit acquisition (ibid.: 124).
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This term is used disparagingly amongst those explorers who prefer to keep a low profile. The implication is that those who ‘dangle’ from easy to access structures such as construction cranes do so to compensate for their lack of skill and inability to research and ‘crack’ (access) more exclusive locations that prove interesting in and of themselves.
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Kindynis, T. (2019). Urban Exploration as Deviant Leisure. In: Raymen, T., Smith, O. (eds) Deviant Leisure. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17736-2_17
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