Urban Exploration

Urban Exploration
–     Drains
–     Abandoned buildings
–     Unusual places in urban areas
–     Try to find unseen areas or forbidden/hidden territory

The situationists
-       Research, art
-       Magazine- transgressions
-       Linked psychogeography with UE
-       Situationists were revolutionary geographers created psychogeography

“Proletarian revolution is this critique of human geography through which individuals and communities could create places and events commensurate with the appropriation no longer just of their work, but of their entire history.
The ever-changing playing field of this new world and the freely chosen variations in the rules of the game will regenerate a diversity of local scenes that are independent without being insular. And this diversity will revive the possibility of authentic journeys — journeys within an authentic life that is itself understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself. “
Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1968

Urban explorers video: Quest for myth, mystery and meaning:

• The want and desire to experience places in an anti authoritarian way - against prevailing authority.
• Desire to explore derelict spaces and the fascination with landscape 
• Discovering a sense of place in a placeless world and the feelings of heightened intensity when you do
• finding and exploring the gaps and cracks in urban space where everything is spectacularised
• 'community' feeling in a time where its not uncommon to not know your neighbours
• exploring the vertical dimention of a city through geographical imagination
• a huge view and scale. larger picture of a whole ruin but then can focus on the tiniest texture or room.
• its abotu rediscovering childhood or experiencing exploration that never had chance to. children are fairly 'caged' now and being watched continually unlike the past and you can get out of 'cage' by exploring private spaces. 
• quest for historic authenticity an small forgotten histories of towns and cities.
• Places continually mutate thus somewhere can appear so different a few months later. 
• we are limited by urban spaces and have a subconcious longing

This article assesses aspects of the troubled and disputed practice of the dérive some half a century after its Lettriste inception. Rather than seeking to draw a ‘virtuous’ layer from the multiplicity of practices presently grouped around the category of ‘derive’, the article identifies generative properties in their contradictions and variegated connections. Particular attention is given to the spatial question, to the politics of the everyday and ‘anywhere’, to the limitations of aesthetic and occult psychogeographies — suggesting their dispersed and hybrid redeployment — and to the dérive as a socialized rather than individual practice. The article addresses the relationship of the dérive to relational aesthetic practices as a means to renew a connection with a critique of the spectacle, with the distributive trajectories of labour and capital, and with the creation of ‘situations’ in a society that has, for some time, accommodated them.

Phil Smith

"The surrealits enjoyed randomly wandering the streets and markets of Paris as a way of opening themselves up to unpredicatble emotions and events."

Alistair Bonnett 1992 

This paper addresses ways in which artists and cultural practitioners have recently been using forms of urban exploration as a means of engaging with, and intervening in, cities. It takes its cues from recent events on the streets of New York that involved exploring urban spaces through artistic practices. Walks, games, investigations and mappings are discussed as manifestations of a form of ‘psychogeography’, and are set in the context of recent increasing international interest in practices associated with this term, following its earlier use by the situationists. The paper argues that experimental modes of exploration can play a vital role in the development of critical approaches to the cultural geographies of cities. In particular, discussion centres on the political significance of these spatial practices, drawing out what they have to say about two interconnected themes: ‘rights to the city’ and ‘writing the city’. Through addressing recent cases of psychogeographical experimentation in terms of these themes, the paper raises broad questions about artistic practices and urban exploration to introduce this theme issue on ‘Arts of urban exploration’ and to lead into the specific discussions in the papers that follow.
David Pinder