engleski

Urban Exploration Climbing and Spatialised Power Relations in the City

In the face of the growing regulation, surveillance and privatisation of public space in cities, urban exploration has been hailed by several authors as a creative and subversive practice, which engages with publicly inaccessible spaces, thereby creating experiences of the city that have not been designed for consumption. In this work I will attempt to contribute to this strand of thought by focusing particularly on the urban exploration practice of infiltrating and climbing tall structures and viewing the city from above. The work is partially based on interviews with an explorer and the central visual element is a photo-essay which follows in parallel the explorer getting on top of an apartment building and a group of friends going to a luxury bar above the Hilton Hotel. Elevated positions and the view from above are both symbolically and literally linked to power and high social status. The idea of exclusivity which is often associated with high positions is generally based on the financial capacity for consumption and it has the effect of reinforcing the opposition between high and low, privileged and ordinary. As opposed to this, explorers transcend this opposition. They reach high points as positions of power in their practice, but they do so without recourse to consumption and the use of money, relying only on their own skill and daring. They also occupy positions of power only temporarily, since the process of repeatedly ascending also necessarily requires a descent. It also entails the continued creation of new views of the city, challenging the idea of a normative relation toward city space.

urban exploration; urban space; power; climbing; view from above; anthropology

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