Explore Everything: place-hacking the city

Currently reading Explore Everything : place-hacking the city, by Bradley Garrett, a book on urban exploration, documentation of ruins and experiences of place. Well worth investigating!  It also has numerous footnotes and references that point to other interesting and relevant texts and resources, for example his own blog and the Talk Urbex forum. The blogs and forums contain quite a lot of the usual bragging, flaming and other forms of online squabbling, but in amongst the ranting there are some interesting references.

"It is both a celebration and a protest. It is a melding, a fusing of the individual and the city, of what is allowed and what is possible, of memory and place."

"Thus it can be seen how the many possible histories of a place are constructed through experience, memory, forgetting, political agendas, spontaneous encounters and myth-making processes. When we allow a place to teach us about itself, when we give it agency, we begin to build rich tapestries that enticingly near-range images of the past"

"As we anticipate their transience, ruins, like dreams, pull us both toward our innermost yearnings and towards a life beyond the constraints of the material world. In that tension we find a darker component of an imagined ruined future, a Ballardian formulation of urban apocalypse where the remains of our everyday existence become the archeology of the future."

"It is in these moments….. that we might make the decision to leave our mark, to take more than photographs, to inscribe a place with our own feelings and memories."