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Bradley L. Garrett

Place Hacking: Tales of Urban Exploration

Web: www.placehacking.co.uk
Email: b.garrett@rhul.ac.uk 
Supervisor: Professor Tim Cresswell
Advisor: Professor Phil Crang 

Education:
M.A. Maritime Archaeology (James Cook University 2006)
B.S. Anthropology (University of California Riverside, 2003)
B.A. History (University of California Riverside, 2003)

Funding: 
Reid PhD Studentship (2008-2011)

Urban exploration is a practice sometimes referred to as recreational trespassing, an urban subversion which involves researching, discovering and physically exploring temporary, obsolete, abandoned and derelict areas within built environments such as derelict buildings, mines, subway tunnels, underground facilities, atomic bunkers, sewers, drains, cranes and catacombs, among other places. These activities might be labelled as creeping, crawling, building hacking, reality hacking, infiltration, UrbEx, UE, urban spelunking, urban caving or draining. I like to call it place hacking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Urban exploration is a growing movement operating on an international scale, a reaction to increased surveillance and control over a populace increasingly anxious and frustrated with restrictions being placed on basic spatial freedoms. The movement seeks to reassert these freedoms through an embodied exploration of places that hacks into physical sites much in the same way a computer expert can hack into a closed virtual system, opening opportunities for play, community building and place-making through risk-taking “edgework”. As part of my PhD research, I have conducted a visual ethnography of urban exploration communities in and around London, a project which now has over 50 participants and has spans over 200 locations in 7 countries.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Recent publications

2011 (submitted) Undertaking recreational trespass: an ethnography of urban exploration for Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

2011 (submitted) Jute: excavating material and symbolic surfaces with Brian Rosa and Jonathan Prior, Liminalities, the Journal of Performance Studies. 

2011 (submitted) London’s Olympic waterscape with Michael Anton, Terri Moreau, Amy Cutler, Ellie Miles and Allison Hess, International Journal of Heritage Studies (special issue). 

2011 (submitted) Women, film and the hidden histories of mountaineering: the life of Eileen Healey with Katherine Brickell for Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

2011 (revised and resubmitted) Urban subversions: conceptualising alternative urban pastimes in the modern world city(special issue) with Oli Mould for City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action.

2011 (in press) – Cracking the Paris carrières: corporal terror and illicit encounter under the City of Light for ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.

2011 (in press) – Assaying history: creating temporal junctions through urban exploration for Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

2011 – The Tree by Torgny Lindgren, translated from the Swedish with Erika Sigvardsdotter, Asymptote Journal, April 2011 issue

2011 – Ruins of Modernity book review, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(2): 378-380. 

2011 – American Visual Culture book review, Cultural Geographies Volume 18(1): 137-139.

2011 – Videographic geographies: using digital video for geography research, Progress in Human Geography available via Online First.

2010  – Urban explorers: quests for myth, mystery and meaning, Geography Compass, Vol. 4, Number 6 pp. 1448–1461 (paper and video article).

2009 – Are we there yet? The Golden Age of American family vacations book review, The Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change Vol. 7, Issue 3.

2009 – Drowned memories: the submerged places of the Winnemem Wintu, Archaeologies, the Journal of the World Archaeology Congress, Volume 5, No. 3.

2008 – Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality book review, Environmental Planning D: Society and Space, Volume 26, Issue 4 pp. 758-760.

2006 – Digging it up Down Under: Doing Archaeology in Australia (Sec 3.2, pp. 68-69) edited by Claire Smith and Heather Burke. Springer / Plenum, New York.

2006 – The World War II Cultural Landscape of Townsville, Queensland: Management, Interpretation and Research Opportunities with Erika Stein, Nicolas Bigourdan and William Jeffery, Australasian Institute for Maritime Archaeology Bulletin Vol. 30 pp 76-84.

2006 – Shared Landscapes: Archaeologies of Attachment and the Pastoral Industry in New South Wales, book review, Historical Archaeology Vol. 40 (4) pp. 149-150.

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A full CV can be downloaded from http://www.placehacking.co.uk/resume