The Spreadable City : Urban Exploration and Connective Media

• More than any other space, cities are shaped by a plethora of competing interests andinterventions of various groups. What should a city look like? Who should have accessto particular urban places? Such questions raise continuous public debates. Since themid-1990s urban exploration has emerged as an alternative form of organized actionthat actively problematizes spatial power and control in contemporary cities. Urbanexplorers try to find, access, explore and document places that are abandoned, secretand/or located on the fringes of the city. Their practices can be seen as place-politicalin a dual sense; partly because they challenge existing regulations and norms, partlybecause they engage in the circulation of alternative images of the city. Urban explorersthus intervene in the production of space on representational as well as materiallevels. However, as the current paper shows, urban exploration is not a homogenouscommunity. Rather, it is made up by a relatively diverse set of approaches, not leastwhen it comes to attitudes towards various connective media. While certain groupssee themselves as urban entrepreneurs, ultimately as brands, and promote their urbanimageries according to the logics of spreadability, others operate in greater secrecy andtry to maintain the exclusivity and authenticity of their experiences. It is thus possibleto conceive of urban exploration as a cultural sub-field where different ethical andcultural attitudes compete, not just in terms of what urban exploration should be, butalso in relation to the symbolic construction of cities in times of extended mediatizationand commercialization. The paper begins with a preliminary assessment of thisfield, based on 12 interviews and go-alongs among urban explorers in Sweden andDenmark, which then leads to an analysis of how the appropriation of connectivemedia becomes part of the politics of urban space

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

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