Urban exploration is only bourgeois when it has a name

Image: Hugh Spicer

I’m reading Bradley L. Garrett’s excellent book Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City. In it, Garrett says that urban exploration is mostly a middle-class pursuit, since its practitioners need the time and resources to do it. He’s right as far as that goes, but what the bourgeois experiences as a hobby is an experience that arises naturally for others. When an activity has to be named, it means that the people naming it experience it as something “other.”...