Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies by Alastair Bonnett Read Free Book Online

featuring situationists and Magical Marxists. For me it was only when people like my nephew started going out and laying claim to hidden parts of the city that I began to understand that open-air haphazard ramblings can seem very tame when compared to more purposeful adventures: geographical missions targeted and designed to gain access to forbidden and unseen spaces in and under the workaday world.
    Today this kind of urban exploration isn’t, for the most part, done for the sake of art or politics but for the love of discovery. The web is filled with message boards for modern urban exploration, where you can find reports from groups in dozens of cities. New legends are being established by thousands of metropolitan Columbuses. Some of the best-known play spots are the catacombs and quarries of underground Paris, the dead subway stops of London, and the abandoned factories and embassies of New York and Berlin, but the nomadic spirit of urban explorers keeps finding new possibilities and taking ever bolder risks to journey into the map’s blank spaces. The burgeoning nature of this scene is reflected in the fact that it has begun to suffer from internal splits and territorial disputes. At least some of the discoverers of the hidden city like to think that they have sole rights to their finds or, at least, that access must be restricted to an elite clan of fellow travelers.
    This story is about the secret world under Minneapolis–St. Paul, which has been labeled the Labyrinth by urban adventurers. The excitement of exploring the multifarious tunnels and cave systems that make up the Labyrinth was captured by the Action Squad, a band of Twin Cities explorers who specialize in subterranean voyages. After trying plenty of manholes, they found the entrance to the rumored system, a portal that eventually revealed to them seven interconnecting tunnel routes and myriad man-made caves and underground chambers of demolished buildings. Like any other group of pioneers, the Action Squad relished the idea that they were the first to find this lost world, noting on their website the “almost perfect absence of graffiti, explained by the lack of access points achievable by anyone but truly dedicated explorers.”
    The Labyrinth is hard work, but it offers that mixture of adrenaline rush and breakthrough that makes the effort addictive. “We’ve spent hours digging tunnels through solid sandstone using butter knives and other primitive tools to bypass barriers that stood in the way of our exploration,” recalls a team member on the Action Squad homepage. “We’ve exclaimed dozens of variations on the theme of ‘holy fucking shit!’ as we found still more amazing places to explore after thinking we’d already seen it all. God, we
love
that place.”
    The dedication of the Action Squad and the quality of their finds have drawn other adventurers to the Labyrinth. In an example of urban exploration tourism and homage, a Calgary-based explorer called K.A.O.S. visited the Twin Cities in 2007. “I had to do the Labyrinth. I knew the stories too well,” K.A.O.S. writes on a Canadian urban exploration website, adding, “To me it was like stepping into the original UE mythos.” After taking a guided tour through some of the Labyrinth’s highlights, the natural caves and under-river passages, K.A.O.S. is left with reverence for the “people who did this for the first time, not knowing whether these tunnels led anywhere, facing the possibility of getting stuck or causing a cave in. That’s gotta take balls.”
    Many of the once hidden places discovered in the first wave of urban exploration have become well known among the cognoscenti, and knowledge about where and how to progress through them grows increasingly commonplace. The shift from an activity shared by a hardy few to a leisure pursuit enjoyed by thousands is a cause of regret among those who want to keep places like the Labyrinth pristine. Another of the early voyagers into