Suchergebnisse

"What does it feel like to find the city's edges, to explore its hidden tunnels and scale its skyscrapers? In Explore Everything, Bradley L Garrett tells the story of his adventures with the London Consolidation Crew, an infamous urban exploration collective, as they cross boundaries, uncover ruins and experience the city in new ways that shatter conventions of everyday life. In a series of narratives, including stories of how the LCC found the lost underground stations of London, discovered abandoned bunkers and ruins in Eastern Europe and scaled the tallest buildings in London, Paris, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit and Las Vegas, Garrett explores the various motivations for illicit trespass and what it might mean. The book is a passionate manifesto for rights to the city as well as new ways of belonging in and understanding the metropolis"--

As cities around the world are tunnelled and hollowed to new depths, geographers are giving increasing attention to infrastructure in the context of verticality, often framed through urban planning or geopolitics. This paper responds to calls from geography and the wider geohumanities for ethnographic and aesthetic consideration of vertical infrastructures by reflecting on London's sewer system as a site of embodied engagement and creative imagination. Once venerated by the press and public as engineering, medical and aesthetic triumphs, London's sewers are thought to have morphed into sites of ubiquitous obscurity. This paper counters this understanding by considering bodies, technologies and activities through time that have shaped imaginations of London's main drainage, including the work of contemporary urban explorers. I argue that although the current aestheticization of infrastructural spaces in London is connected to particular technologies, politics and geographical concerns of the present, it also echoes body-space interventions and affects across a 150-year span. This aesthetic legacy is a crucial pillar in our understandings of urban verticality.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long overlooked – the bunker. This body of work draws on a variety of theoretical influences and explores multiple historical contexts, yet most remains wedded to the late Paul Virilio's influential 1970s study of the Nazi Atlantic Wall. Enlightening as his 'Bunker Archeology' is, Virilio's theorization has constrained contemporary debates around the function, materiality and temporality of the bunker. Here, we seek to counter this set of limitations in three ways. First, we contest the idea of the bunker as a simple space of human protection and argue for a more expansive conceptualization that is attentive to the bunker as a site of extermination. Second, we challenge the assumed concrete materiality of the bunker and suggest an expanded typology, utilizing a range of materials and milieux. Finally, we take to task readings of the bunker as an obsolete relic by highlighting the continued construction, re-appropriation and reimagination of this architectural form.

Domestic violence is often referred to in development circles as the most pervasive, yet least recognised, human rights abuse in the world. Based on four participatory video (PV) workshops in Cambodia, the paper analyses spontaneous and orchestrated forms of storytelling on this normatively "private" issue. Bringing into conversation emerging geographical scholarship on storytelling with more established PV literature, it provides an exploration of the feminist politics that arise when participants' narratives belie established academic knowledge on the causes of, and solutions to, domestic violence. In tandem with questioning whose narrative authority "counts", the paper works to problematise commonly held assumptions about the efficacy of PV to overcome hegemonic norms and discourses