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Urban Exploration: From Subterranea to Spectacle

British Journal of Criminology

Published online on

Abstract

Recreational trespass or ‘urban exploration’ (UE) is the practice of researching, gaining access to and documenting forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, including abandoned buildings, 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. The aims of the present article are three-fold: first, to bring UE and its emergent variants to the attention of a criminological audience; second, to interrogate increasingly spectacular visual representations of UE and attendant processes of commodification; and third, to introduce the rhizome as a way of thinking about urban social formations, their development and appropriation.