Select Page

Urban Exploration

Graffit on a train track against the Oklahoma skyline

Looking north on a train track just parallel to Shields Boulevard in Oklahoma City. (9/2011)

The blogger Tamaranorbust is a writer and academic who writes about things like Urban Exploration (urbex). She’s poured herself into this post, Generation X Goes Back to the Future: Urban Exploration. I love a writer who pushes your fingers to the dictionary or drives you to cross reference! She’s conducted an interview with an urban explorer from England, and this post is so worth the read. The pictures are stunning. If you are interested at all in the urban landscape, urban decay and urban revitalization, you’ll want to check this out.

Here is an excerpt:

Some Urban Explorers are interested primarily in the aesthetics of abandoned places, others show civic devotion to their own municipalities. Still, their work provides a key to new sensibilities. They reject the ‘throwaway’ mentality of rampant urbanization. They are witnesses of recent urban developments that are undocumented in the archives – and largely unexamined by the universities. Of course, urban decay is a trend that, for the most part, civil and institutional authorities are not keen to share. Urbex covers the ‘secret history’ of our cities over the past few decades and show the end results of recent municipal policy-making. The decline of old institutions, schools, railways, barracks, asylums and many other public buildings and structures is a trend that few people grasp as a general phenomenon. Yet Urbex is a growing pastime in many developed countries precisely because that decline is a general problem. 

***

Are you an urban explorer? Do you know any? What urban structures do you wish you could explore? One of my favorite Oklahoma websites is Abandoned Oklahoma, which regularly features many abandoned urban structures.

Gen X Blog Jennifer Chronicles

Thank you for subscribing. Posts are delivered ONCE A WEEK on Sundays at 6 p.m. You can unsubscribe anytime with one click. Also, we will not share your email address with anyone.

2 Comments

  1. Sarah

    Hi my name is Sarah, I’m an “explorer” from Philadelphia. I run my own urban exploring website http://www.photadyta.com. I really enjoy the excerpt you posted – it’s not often someone describes urban exploring with such insight.

  2. Yogi♪♪♪

    I have to say that the post you linked to is outstanding, well written and great pictures.

    I’m fascinated with abandoned buildings especially commercial and industrial. In the few I have actually been in (legitimately!! most of the time) I am fascinated by how much was left behind. Desks not cleaned out, file cabinets with files still in them, etc.

    In my geocaching hobby, while looking for places to hide caches, I have found lots and lots of abandoned buildings in the squalor zone that sounds the core of downtown Tulsa.

Pin It on Pinterest