EXPLORE EVERYTHING
PLACE – HACKING THE CITY
Don’t miss this basic book about urban exploration by Bradley L. Garrett. This book is now available published this month, October 2013. Learn about urban exploration and place hacking, read the first hand experiences by one of the most skilled urban explorers in the world.
Bradley L. Garrett is a writer, photographer, and researcher at the University of Oxford with an interest in uncovering hidden places in soil, seas, cities and space. From 2005-2008 he travelled the world as an archaeologist. For the past four years, he has lived as an urban explorer, photographing off-limits urban places.
He is currently developing a new project that will use smartphone and tablet technology to reveal buried urban history.
Breathtaking and brilliantly illustrated—reclaiming the city with extreme urban explorations!!!
Disclaimer? There is none, do as you wish. Climb bridges, run the subways, play in sewage, go in drains.
Dsankt, one of the world’s best-known explorers
[widgetkit id=12124]
On the occasion of the publication of the new book by British Urban Explorer Bradly Garrett, we offer a little sneak peek into the book, EXPLORE EVERYTHING: PLACE-HACKING THE CITY, explaining what it is about.
some excerpts:
So what exactly is urban exploration? In his 2005 book Access All Areas, an explorer who wrote under the nom de plume Ninjalicious described urban exploration […] as ‘an interior tourism that allows the curious-minded to discover a world of behind-the-scenes sights. Troy Paiva more recently wrote that urban exploration was about the discovery and investigation of ‘TOADS’ – temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces. More specifically, urban explorers trespass into derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals, abandoned military installations, sewer and storm drain networks, transportation and utility systems, shuttered businesses, foreclosed estates, mines, construction sites, cranes, bridges and bunkers, among other places – simply for the joy of doing so.
For the last four years I have been an ethnographer – literally, from the Greek, a ‘culture-writer’ – working from within the global urban exploration community. Rather than writing about events from an outside perspective, as a journalist might, I have embedded myself in the community to see how the people within it work and play, the rules they give themselves and the stories they tell. Within the community I discovered a call to adventure and a desire for personal freedom that I had never experienced elsewhere.
Urban explorers, much like computer hackers in virtual space, exploit fractures in the architecture of the city. Their goal is to find deeper meaning in the spaces we pass through every day. Our ‘place hacks’ have taken us to cities all over the world, from London to Paris to Berlin and across the Atlantic to Minneapolis, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, encountering different communities of practice as well as the different security measures implemented in various places. […]
This book tells two stories. The first is my personal involvement in more than three hundred trespass events in eight countries with over one hundred explorers, primarily undertaken with an urban exploration collective once referred to as […] the London Consolidation Crew. […] The LCC, as a result, became one of the most revered and reviled urban exploration collectives in the world in the eyes of the public, other explorers and the authorities. The story of what it took to get there, and, to a degree, my complicity in those exploits as a member of the crew, make up one strand of this book.
The second strand is a discussion of why people become urban explorers in the first place, and what this might mean in the contemporary city – built around my concept of ‘place hacking’. […] I see it as being about taking back rights to the city from which we have been wrongfully restricted through subversions that erode security and threaten clean narratives about what one can and can’t do.
If you are interested in what the book has to offer, go to VersoBooks.com and purchase it online or participate into Explore Everything Twitter Photo Contest!!
Reviews
-
“A no-nonsense, high-adrenaline, fast-twitch report that requires us to think about the city in new ways. This is a provocative challenge to received dogma. An inspiration to get out there, to go over the fence. To see with our own eyes.” – Iain Sinclair, author of London Orbital
-
“A unique and electrifying travelogue … Garrett and his fellow travelers are as fit, agile and fearless as ninja.” – Booklist, Starred Review
-
“Urban exploration is… a way of renegotiating reality, transforming the moment, turning the city into a video game. Except that, in this game, you only have one life.” – Evening Standard
-
“For Garrett, physical exploration is merely the outward manifestation of a deeper philosophical inquiry. The theoretical DNA of much of his work traces back to the concept of “psychogeography.”” – GQ
-
“Great and topical” – Bookseller
Upcoming Events
October 23, 2013, Komedia – London
Explore Everything: A talk with short films by Bradley L. Garrett