Beyond thrill-seeking, it seems clear that urban explorers believe that by recording their observations in words and images, they are preserving history. This education or historical justification for their activities also serves to distance them from everyday trespassers. “Forgotten and abandoned corners of the world’s cities suddenly are rediscovered,” noted the editors of Jinx, who then drew a troubling historical analogy to describe the difference between a trespasser and an explorer: With Infiltration magazine, then, the urban explorer truly parted company with the mundane trespasser. Ninjalicious became an explorer when he faithfully published his observations and enriched posterity by them. The trespasser, by contrast, always consigned his story to silence; he, like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe. The ‘base Indian’ as a trespasser on his own land is an analogy that reeks of class and racial bias. In the context of deindustrialization, one might expect that many of the ‘mundane' trespassers were local youths – the sons and daughters of many of the same men and women who once worked in the abandoned mills and factories. The urban explorers, by contrast, were more likely to come from successful white-collar families living in the suburbs, or in other towns or cities altogether. None of the urban explorer narratives that I read – and I have read hundreds – provided any indication that the storyteller had ever been in a working mill or factory. More to the point, perhaps, there was no indication that their parents had, either.
Steven High, “’Take Only Pictures and Leave Only Footprints’: Urban Exploration and the Aesthetics of Deindustrialization,” in Steven High and David W. Lewis, Corporate Wasteland: The Landscape and Memory of Deindustrialization (Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 50–1.
