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

this system, university geologist Greg Brick, noted in his local handbook
Subterranean Twin Cities
how, from a few “committed souls,” the scene had boomed: “The result was predictable: the subterranean venues, hitherto silent and inviolate, were overrun.” Brick has attacked Internet-savvy “point-and-click kids” for despoiling the cities’ hidden kingdoms and, in a move that provoked outrage within the Twin Cities underground community, placed a lock on the entrance to one prime site, the Heinrich Brewery Caves.
    “I thought that was kind of—pardon my French—but kind of a dick move,” complains Action Squad member Jeremy Krans. “It’s not his place. None of us go locking things up trying to keep other people out.” Krans was talking in 2013 to a reporter from a Twin Cities newspaper that headlined the article “Cave Wars.” The story had added bite because the Action Squad claims Brick plagiarized their missions for
Subterranean Twin Cities
. Brick denies this, and a bitter legal dispute has resulted, which has opened unexpected challenges for this formerly carefree community of trespassers. It seems that once their activities become widely known they change in character. Following the routes and finding the places of others, even if those routes and places are illegal and dangerous, may still be an act of adventure, but it is less clear whether it’s an act of exploration.
    Such thorny issues are likely to become more visible as urban exploration grows. Yet too much emphasis on originality and being the first misses the point for most of its participants, which is about the thrill of discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary city. Bradley Garrett, a geography lecturer at the University of Oxford, who has brought the topic to the pages of geography’s scholarly journals, explains that the core values of urban exploration derive from “desires for emotional freedom, the need for unmediated expression,” and “associations with childhood play.” In 2012 Garrett put his words into practice by climbing up the outside of the Shard, a new London skyscraper, a month before it was finished.
    Another explanation comes from Brandon Schmittling, the founder of Survive DC, a kind of citywide game of adult tag based in Washington. “I think people like to believe there’s more out there that hasn’t been seen,” he told
Newsweek
, adding that urban exploration challenges people “to shed their fears about the city.”
    What is also striking about the urban explorers is their affection for the previously unloved places they discover. They often picture themselves as ragged desperadoes, but their relationship to their sites is actually one of care. They research and document the places they discover with an attention to detail and an offhand but deeply felt respect. Not so much punk Columbuses, perhaps, as urban Alexander von Humboldts, they collect and collate fragments of information in order to create a sense of possibility and celebrate the fact that the mundane world contains within it, or under it, far more pathways and far more fun than we previously thought.

Zheleznogorsk
    56° 15′ 00″ N, 93° 32′ 00″ E
     
    In April 2010 two white-coated scientists laid flowers on top of the control rods of a nuclear reactor in Zheleznogorsk, a town founded in 1950 for the sole purpose of making nuclear weapons. For forty-seven years the reactor had been producing weapons-grade plutonium in a city that officially did not exist and was closed to the outside world. The ceremony on the reactor marked the end of an era, and it might have looked like the end of Zheleznogorsk itself, for its ninety thousand residents were nearly all in some way dependent on this one site.
    Zheleznogorsk is a grid city of wide boulevards, a place of calm solemnity and perseverance. It was once a secret city. It did not appear on Soviet maps and is still missing from many. For most of its existence it didn’t even have its