2 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 3

Into the Meld

Interview with
Bradley Garrett
4 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02
‘Place-hacking’ as a form of urban
exploration has burst onto the scene with
publications, documentaries, and a long-
running court case. But getting to know the
detail of what urban explorers do, how they
feel, and what their philosophies are remains
a challenge. With a special interest in the
interactions between fleshy human feeling
and mutable, powerful technologies, Politics
of Place approached Bradley L. Garrett
for an interview. Dr. Garrett is the author
of the much talked-about book Explore
Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso,
2013). Following research at Royal Holloway
and Oxford, he has been appointed as
lecturer in the School of Geography and
the Environment at the University of
Southampton.
PoP: Could you tell us how you first became
interested in urban exploration, and how
you found entering the UE community?
BG: I was raised just outside of Los Angeles,
on the edge of the Mojave Desert, and I used
to drive into the desert looking for old mines
and structures, camping in them for days at
a time. I was naturally drawn to archaeology
when I began studies and spent many years
travelling the world doing both terrestrial
and underwater archaeology, digging, diving
and mapping. When I moved to London
and found there was a whole community
of people exploring urban environments in
similar ways, I had to get involved. Urban
exploration has always been, for me, a
kind of adrenaline-fuelled archaeology, a
way of getting close to history, or indeed
infrastructure or construction, without
guides or interpretation. So my fascination
came from those intersecting interests in
history and the politics of place, especially in
finding hidden and secret places in the world.
That being said, this is, for obvious reasons,
a very difficult group to do ethnographic
work with. Urban explorers are notoriously
suspicious of outsiders – though once
you get in it’s an unbelievably welcoming
community. It took me about eight months
to really to build up enough trust that people
were willing to invite me out on weekend
expeditions and then on longer road trips.
If you think about how anthropologists
undertake fieldwork though, often it takes
years to begin to assimilate enough get
glimpses of the culture under study from the
inside, so I didn’t find this to be a prohibitive
process in any way.
PoP: Your book Explore Everything:
Place Hacking the City is full of stories
of infiltrating ruins, scaling building
developments, abseiling into tunnels, and
so on, that would terrify many people.
In your paper Undertaking recreational
trespass: urban exploration and infiltration
you briefly mention the ‘tendrils of affect
conjured by shared fear and excitement’
(p.9) amongst urban explorers. Could you
tell us more about the role fear plays for you
and those you have explored with?
BG: There is certainly a very particular kind
of bonding that takes place when you are
exploring with people. This is something that
has been well-documented in war, where
people come together, often people who might
not have met under any other circumstances,
and experience (or create) highly pressurized,
adrenaline-fuelled moments that, unlike
many representations of the events, are
often almost completely chaotic. Very often
having these experiences together builds life-
long bonds as you are forced to intellectually
contend with something that is, by definition,
almost incomprehensible, so the collective
imagination gets activated in interesting ways.
Richard Sennett famously argued that the
modern city (the late capitalist city or neo-
liberal city) is constructed to, in many ways,
contain our experiences and pacify our
bodies. He argued that spaces are built to
circumscribe discovery, creating limitations
about what can be experienced and, even
more nefarious, what can be imagined.
The modern security apparatus, in effect,
Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 5
eliminates fear in the city by creating legal
constraints and cultural taboos around
access to certain types of information and,
importantly, this applies to physical space
as much as virtual systems, though the
latter tends to dominate our conversations
and concerns these days, understandably.
Most people accept urban surveillance as
positive, assuming it makes them safer
– and it does in some ways. However,
when the city becomes more secure
and controlled, when ranges of fear are
eliminated, a fundamental way people
bond also becomes lost, replaced by states
of internal chaos like drunkenness which
temporarily satisfy our inherent desires to
deal with complicated situations. So urban
explorers reintroduce fear into the equation,
in a way that is, for the most part, playful.
Here, the philosophy of Henri Lefebvre,
and more importantly, Guy Debord and
the Situationist International, is key to
understanding how explorers reintroduce
play as a coping mechanism for dealing with
a society that encourages spectatorship over
participation. But through that playfulness,
explorers are making room for fear and chaos
that I argue are existentially fundamental
to human happiness, contradictory as that
might seem.
6 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02
I might also mention that a lot of what
is pinpointed as something necessary to
avoid stems from fear of the biological (in
a Foucauldian sense) because we all carry
with us this modernist sensibility that our
bodies should be closed off from the world.
So one of the things people always bring up,
when I show them a picture of us wandering
around in a sewer or derelict building for
instance, is their concern about the fragility
and porousness of our bodies, how we are
making ourselves unnecessarily vulnerable,
that this is ‘foolish’ and that our lack of fear
points to a fundamental dysfunction in
our rejection of social taboo. While this is
probably true to a degree, there is also much
benefit in making ourselves vulnerable that
should not be overlooked.
PoP: Some of your work makes use of
field notes, and they often appear to have
been scribed at times of imminent action
or danger. How did you find fitting the
physical process of ethnography in amongst
the fraught and swift movement of urban
exploration?
BG: It was honestly very difficult. The
problem with any recording technology,
whether we’re talking about writing, taking
photos or making audio recordings, is that
it changes the nature of the event and that,
as researchers, we can’t anticipate how
Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 7
that might unfold. This is why Margaret
Mead made attempts at creating ‘objective’
ethnographic films, setting up cameras and
then leaving them to record on their own,
like a weird precursor to CCTV. That was
such a naïve notion, that the machine,
somehow lacking consciousness, would
therefore not influence human behavior,
as if the camera didn’t have a gaze. So the
balance here, methodologically, is in being
present, acknowledging the way everyone’s
behavior is affected by the pen, the camera,
the Dictaphone, and indeed our very bodies,
and then deploying those tools in the right
place and right time, respectfully. Often
this involves a bit of social engineering, like
making a joke about how you’d better ‘write
that great quote down in the toilet’ during
a conversation and sneaking away. People
think you were joking but you actually did
just that. Doing good ethnographic work is
always about playing a double game and
being adept at code switching. The danger
is in straddling lines of dishonesty, and that
is where, again, we have got to be really
critical in our engagements. That’s why good
ethnographic work is so exhausting; you are
always crosschecking your positionality.
In terms of those more dangerous moments
in my own research, walking in sewers,
running live train lines, abseiling down
8 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02
ventilation shafts and evading security,
ethnographic observation gets deprioritised
when things get raw. However, at times you
can get around this by keeping an audio
recorder going in your pocket, for instance.
Sometimes this happens accidentally – I’ve
got this video footage from Poland when
we’re running from a security guard and I’ve
forgotten to turn the camera off. Watching
that nauseating footage later was really
useful when I was writing up and trying
to relay the moment of euphoric panic in
the text.
PoP: Indeed, the camera seems to hold an
interesting place in your work; acting as
both an emblematic tool of surveillance
and prohibition (CCTV), and as a tool with
which to catalogue and communicate
exploration. Is this representative of a wider
ambivalence around technology for urban
explorers?
BG: That’s a good point! I’m glad you get
that the camera isn’t just a recordation tool
for explorers. As Harriet Hawkins and I
wrote in Antipode recently, the imagery
urban explorers produce encourages
us to think about relationships in the
assemblage of body, camera and place.
The distribution of imagery, and further,
the ways in which people consume, share
and rework that imagery when it goes to
work in the world, add a multiplicity of
unpredictable meanings and force to the
images that confounds the expectations
and anticipation of the photographer (we
might consider Jacques Rancière’s work on
the emancipated spectator).
The thing about CCTV technology, then,
that is a key difference, is in the voyeuristic
control over the consumption of the
imagery. We can of course imagine a bleary-
eyed security guard sitting in a cold hut,
eyes darting between screens, who might
be our spectator. But what urban explorers
prove again and again is that most of those
recordings often actually have no human
audience - they are visual archives to be
delved only if ‘needed’. So classically, as
Foucault might argue, the point of the
CCTV camera is not to record images,
it’s to condition our bodies by making
us think we are being watched, that an
audience exists. The technology, in both
cases, conditions the body in different ways
and that is the assemblage between body,
camera and place – an assemblage that’s
being reworked constantly as technology,
and our perceptions of technology, morph.
PoP: Talking of technology, you have
argued that the period 2000-2005 was
a key moment in the development of
organized urban exploration. Do you see
the concurrent spread of internet access
and portable digital photo and video
technology as a necessary condition for
this development?
BG: I’m sure urban exploration has existed
as long as the notion of private property
– there will always have been somebody
sneaking into off-limits spaces throughout
history. What the Internet facilitated was
the connection of individuals for whom this
was a primary interest, which inevitably
led to the creation of the development
of an urban exploration community (I
use that term loosely). It also led, as the
anthropologist Marc Augé wrote in Non-
Places, to the inevitable co-option and
fragmentation of any coherent sense of
monolithic motivation to the practice.
You are right to point out that this is
not simply a matter of scaling up and
connecting, it’s also a matter of circulation.
A photo taken and shared has far more
impact than a photo taken and hoarded.
The Internet allows for, and encourages,
that sharing of experiences in a way that,
in one sense, simply satiates narcissism
but in another sense allows us to relay a
politics of potentiality which, I argue, has
democratic and emancipatory potential. So
the record of the exploration, be it in the
form of a photo, a video or a forum report,
Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 9
allows us to inhabit those spaces virtually
and then, hopefully, to incite others (and
ourselves) to go back into the world to
continue the journey of discovery. There’s
a hint of a politically conservative arms
race here, a notion that every experience
must be ‘trumped’ by another, that has led
to some recent forms of urban exploration
that seem to be devoid of critical thrust –
they’re simply about shocking the viewer,
entertaining rather than inviting. A recent
Channel 4 documentary called Don’t Look
Down comes to mind here.
However, I’d like to be more optimistic
about this. I think what’s happening is that
the nature of technology is changing so fast
(during my PhD, the body-mounted POV
camera was brand new technology) that
experimentation is running rampant. So
there’s an incredible sense of reaching, trying
and, dare I say it, hacking, involved with
the deployment of these new technologies
in ways that might actually shock the
people developing them. Essentially, in
this formulation, we co-opt the capitalist
forces working on these projects and recruit
them to our cause, which in turn spurs on
their investment in the development of
more technology, most of which no one can
anticipate the use of. And that’s the point,
in the context of the Situationist project,
10 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 11
12 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02
not to condemn the spoils of capitalism
and the relentless accumulation of stuff
like camera technologies, but to meld those
technologies into our desires, to entangle
the spectacle by its own means.
PoP: You describe exploring the
technological underbelly of the city:
sewers, communication networks, and
underground transport. These are parts of
the city that are invisible, though essential,
to most people. Could you tell us more about
how it felt to be in the flow, or at least in the
pipes, of networks which we usually only
experience as end-users?
BG: Absolutely. Standing in the flow of
underground rivers, the imagination
inexorably stretches to distant bubbling
sources and conjures up an imagination of
the water’s journey. By the time it gushes past
our feet, wedding fishing waders to skin, it’s
a murky grey mess of floating turds, tampons
and toilet paper, sometimes accumulating
into little islands just solid enough to traverse
(with trepidation). In that darkness, the visual
often gives to the aural. Beyond the ceaseless
stridency of rushing waters and car tyres
popping manholes out of the tarmac, you
can sometimes hear car horns and screams in
the city above, another indication of porous
boundaries. I guess in a Burkian sense, it all
gets pretty sublime.
In my book, I describe what I call ‘the
meld’. It’s a classic non-representational
formulation where the urban explorer, after
sustained and intimate association with
the hidden features of the city, and with
an understanding of the history of those
connections, attempts to lace associations
between places, connect whole networks
and actually reconfigure conceptions
of connections – so buildings become
networks. But the understanding doesn’t
start or end there, those attempts are often
frustrated by the immediacy of the felt
moment. It’s felt, most importantly I think,
in the body, before it is apprehended in
a way that makes much sense rationally.
Those encounters then seep into our
awareness and colour the way we see spaces
that are constructed, as Sennett argued, to
present us with pre-packaged qualities that
pre-empt our inherent desires to discover
by offering us simulacra of discovery. I don’t
want to create a problematic binary here,
but I do want to argue that not all spaces
are created equal!
This stuff isn’t new – John Hollingshead, a
writer commissioned by Charles Dickens,
traversed London’s sewer system in 1861
and ventured into a drain under a house he
once owned in London’s West End, where
he wrote that he felt as if the power had
been granted to him to open a trap-door
in his own chest, to look upon the long-
hidden machinery of his up-to-this-point
mysterious body. Obviously Hollingshead
was going through something similar here,
where he can feel the existential panic
bleed through as he embraces the failure
to clearly articulate his experience, when
the boundaries between his body and the
city suddenly dissolve and he’s left staring
at a piece of brick that he’s sure is sweating,
in a tunnel that appears to be breathing,
watching the contents of bowels, maybe
partially his, flow over his feet.
You could argue that explorers are just
adding to the distracting simulacra because
they use these technologies and produce
representations. You could argue that about
Hollingshead’s journey too, since Dickens
commissioned him to go and he was writing
for a journal. However, I think that as
explorers reveal urban cracks and gaps
through the representations they produce,
they also open those fissures out through
persistent exploration, creating imagery
that does more than simply document, it
creates blocks of sensations, new creative
imaginary space opened through the
(continued) collective force of the images,
connecting dusty archives to stinky street
gratings. That’s the meld, the political
Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 13
entanglement of the whole assemblage.
PoP: In Explore Everything: Place Hacking
the City you see urban exploration 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’ (p.8). Is this idea exclusive
to urban explorers, or would you advocate
a more widespread change toward how
we occupy and engage with urban spaces?
BG: Urban exploration is, of course, a
temporary occupation and many people
level criticism at explorers for that. A few
friends who are squatters, for instance,
have told me that explorers are missing an
opportunity to effect real social change by
opening spaces for others. The spaces urban
explorers do open, as well as the spaces
they occupy, are largely an imaginative
space and I don’t accept that this has no
social value or that physical occupation
of space is inherently more political then
virtual or imaginative occupation of space.
In making transparent the world around
us that has been closed to access, and in
making clear that those spaces can be
accessed if the desire is strong enough, we
create a politics of possibility that does in
fact resonate quite strongly in an age where
we are told security is rapidly reaching a
14 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02
point of complete ascendance, where our
every movement will be traced by facial
recognition and motion tracking software .
What urban exploration does in
disseminating these stories and imageries
is to help us perceive worlds other than the
ones presented to us. As David Harvey has
noted, the freedom to make and remake
our cities and ourselves is one of the most
precious and neglected of our human rights,
and I don’t think I’m overstating the case
when I say that it’s vital to the maintenance
of what few rights to place we have left to
continually make transparent and subvert
the boundaries that are constantly being
circumscribed around our bodies and
imaginations. I think technology can help
us in that and we shouldn’t be so quick
to dismiss technologies as being anti-
intellectual or somehow prohibitive to
critical deployment – everything can be
hacked.
PoP: Finally, what are the latest directions
in urban exploration, and what can we look
forward to seeing from you in the future?
BG: Urban exploration is at an interesting
point right now. There is a sort of new branch
reaching out that is a meld between parkour
(free running) and urban exploration. These
people seem to be less interested in the
Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 15
spaces themselves and more interested in
exhibiting athleticism at the risk of death by
hanging from construction cranes hundreds
of meters high, standing on top of teetering
masts and jumping big gaps. There’s also
an escalation in ‘ruin porn’ photography
taking place now, where photographers are
sneaking elaborate costumes and models
into derelict building for ‘illicit’ photo shoots.
I’m sure researchers will be doing work on
these emerging aspects of the practice in
the next few years.
As far as my research, my first book, Explore
Everything: Place-Hacking the City has
done well and was recently translated into
Japanese! I also worked with my project
participants to release a collaborative
photobook called Subterranean London:
Cracking the Capital that visually dissects
underground London layer by layer. It was
published by Prestel (Random House) and it
contains 120 gorgeous photos, some writing
from me and others, a forward by Will Self
and drawings by Stephen Walter.
That book actually sold out in four months
and is now going to paperback in the
Autumn. There still seems to be a lot of
interest in urban exploration! The release
of Subterranean London also coincided
with a celebration of our court victory.
Some readers may have heard that eleven
16 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 Politics of Place • Technology • Issue 02 17

of my project participants and myself

were charged with ‘conspiracy to commit
criminal damage’ in 2012, which carries
with it a 10-year jail maximum sentence.
We worked very hard to get everyone out
of the dock and the charges were dropped
against seven explorers late April 2014. I was
given a ‘conditional discharge’ by the judge
in early May 2014. My life as a nocturnal
trespasser is likely over in the UK since the
‘conditional’ in the ‘conditional discharge’
means that if I am charged with anything
in the next three years, I can be brought up
on those conspiracy charges again. I’m not
overly perturbed about the inability to do
urban exploration here since that project
is complete. However, the broader result of
that ruling is that I’ve also been barred, in
no uncertain terms, from doing research on
any social practice that may cross legal lines
for the next few years. That is, I would argue,
an unfortunate byproduct of an already
disconcerting attempt to stifle reasonable
academic research that was undertaken
to public benefit. However, the world is a
big place and I’ve got plenty of ideas for
new research projects, along with a new
permanent lecturer position at the University
of Southampton – I’m just going to use this
time to realign my interests a bit.