Place hacking, ethnography and urban exploration

Dr Bradley L. Garrett has been working for several years on the politics of public space. After a brief career as an archaeologist working for the United States Bureau of Land Management, he moved to London, England in 2008 to undertake a multi-year ethnography with urban explorers interested in forgotten and off-limits places in cities.

His first research project, published as Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City (Verso Books), was an account of urban trespass into ruins, tunnels and skyscrapers in eight different countries. He has also published extensive photodocumentation work such as Subterranean London: Cracking the Capital (Prestel Publishing), a photographic dissection of what lies underneath the streets of London, layer by layer. A final book in this urban exploration triptych, London Rising: Illicit Photos from the City’s Heights (2016, Prestel Publishing), documents the social, infrastructural and corporate verticalities of the city.

project publications

(2016) London Rising.

(2014) Subterranean London.

(2013) Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City.

Researchers

Bradley L. Garrett