Urban Exploration: a Subculture at a Glance by Veronica Davidov

As subcultures go, “urban exploration” or “urbexing” is a very materially embedded one, where community formation happens around specific physical locations, even though as a global phenomenon, it is almost entirely facilitated by the internet … What all of these subgroups share is a value system concerned with locations and material remnants that, in the mainstream capitalist value system are nothing more than negative spaces around the trajectory of economic and industrial progress … The common denominator in all “hot spots” of urban exploration is a period of economic decay in the general vicinity … At the core of the subculture lies a special relationship that participants experience with physical spaces and the material infrastructure left behind by the waxes and wanes of a capitalist industrialized economy. Inherently, they create a system of value around objects that have been excised out of the economy of value. The value is attached to precisely the same factors that devalue these spaces in the mainstream economy: extravagance to the point of inefficiency, loss of use-value, severe decay. For people living in economically depressed areas, this provides an alternative relationship with their physical surroundings, when those surroundings provide something other than a narrative of economic decline. > More

See also: The Urban Exploration Resource and Infiltration: The Zine About Going Places You’re Not Supposed To Go

- Anne