Urban explorers live and spelunk by their own code of conduct.
By Liz Clayton, originally printed in Spacing Magazine
Photo by Michael Cook
From the tight embrace of a city’s storm pipes to the freedom-filled vistas of an illicit rooftop perch, urban explorers move beyond the blind motions of the usual urban travels into a world of adventure and civic understanding impossible to recreate. Whether plumbed from manholes or skimmed off skylines, whether forged out of an abandoned factory or culled from the back corridors of our institutions, getting to know these silent spaces ignored by so many can confer upon the explorer-citizen a sense of rich connection with the city as a cohesive, evolving organism of its own unique identity.
Urban Exploration is the practice of examining and enjoying a city in ways that necessarily and repeatedly call into question the meaning of rules. At the hobby’s heart lies the idea that looking around (and above, and below) the everyday elements of our cities can enrich an understanding of our urban spaces and the histories that have built them, and through touring the buildings, tunnels, alleyways, rooftops, transit routes, harbourfronts, and abandoned factories that make up our cities, the explorer sees not the segregated land of infrastructure but a city as a psychogeographical whole. The only caveat to this wonderful practice is that most cities are set up – either from fear of litigation, by perceived terrorism threat, or out of plain ol’ stick-in-the-muddishness – to discourage it.
As examples of self-governing societies go, urban explorers and their ethical code is a great one. Within the context of broken “civil” rules – such as disobeying boundaries between, say, public property and railway property, or between a public corridor in a building and a private mechanical room – lies another landscape of ethical, social, and logical rules that the majority of explorers adhere to. Most of these rules might well be known under the simpler umbrella of common sense. Don’t violate others’ privacy (e.g., avoid exploring obvious dwelling-places), don’t endanger yourself or others, and don’t do anything to harm the area you are exploring. The Sierra Club came pretty close with “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints,” but most explorers like to skip the footprints part, too.
But isn’t it unethical to break rules that others have made about their own property, just because the explorer thinks their own personal set of rules is good enough for them? Maybe, maybe not. The late Ninjalicious (who was this author’s too-brief partner in exploration as well as life), addressed this in an article on the canonical urban exploration website infiltration.org. “While it’s true that some aspects of the hobby happen to be illegal,” he wrote, “it’s important not to confuse the words ‘illegal’ and ‘immoral.’ Laws against trespassing are like laws against being out after curfew: people get into trouble not for actually doing anything harmful, but simply because the powers that be are worried that they might.”
Indeed, it’s this litigation-minded, culture-of-fear mentality that raises so many of today’s children to be vacant consumers, rather than active participants in the enjoyment and evolution of their urban spaces. The often arbitrarily drawn line between protecting people from what could go wrong and the calculated, conscientious risks of appreciating the world around them is very often worth crossing. And furthermore, isn’t it beneficial to societies to encourage freer thinking, openness to new ideas, and the ability to judge personal risk and risk to others in an intelligent way? Urban explorers do just that on a daily basis, and in doing so create vivid histories and photographs that share their experiences and benefit us all.
Of course, it’s easy to sound all civicly superior from a written podium, and not so easy when you’re face to face with a beautiful relic in an abandoned building that would look great in your living room. And of course – of course! – there is dissent within the exploration community as to where these personalized ethics lines are drawn. Is it more unethical to pick a lock than to walk through a loose plywood board-up? And, even among a community so inherently opensource, there can be a tendency to be possessive about one’s conquests, keeping information about access points or locations close to the vest. Despite the overall success of the hobby’s self-regulation, it only takes one person who disregards the unwritten dictums of exploration to cause a razor-wire fence to go up around a decaying factory, or to burn down an abandoned restaurant boat on the side of the QEW.
Ultimately, explorers are more nerdy than nefarious. It takes a certain level of arcane interest to pore over maps of disused transit routes, research abandoned breweries, and visit and revisit buildings in hope of finding a stubbornly recalcitrant door one day magically unlocked. As such, the smart-thinking, city-loving individuals who make the commitment to enjoying their urban spaces from top to bottom ought to be applauded rather than reprimanded, encouraged rather than smacked back by bylaw and rent-a-cop. We explorers don’t refrain from touring through private homes because it’s illegal, we refrain because it’s wrong. Similarly, we don’t turn away from a “do not enter” sign in an abandoned office corridor that protects us from no one but ourselves. Personal accountability and self-governance are traits that create thoughtful populi who are able to improve the city around them. By all means: explore, think first, and make your own rules.
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Liz Clayton is a former Toronto resident who now lives in New York City and occasionally posts dispatches for Spacing.