I will be at the Canterbury School of Architecture tomorrow speaking on Explore Everything: Place Hacking the City. Opening drink will be at 5.30pm and the lecture at Lecture 6pm in the Architecture Building Foyer Space at UCA Canterbury.
It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us—the cities we live in—that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge; to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis?
Bradley Garrett advocates the reclamation of the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity.
Bradley Garrett is a writer, photographer, and researcher at Oxford University with an interest in uncovering hidden places. For the past four years, he has lived as an urban explorer, photographing off-limits urban places and recording his escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. His research is a manifesto that combines philosophy, politics and adventure and investigates our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.
