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'No Trespassing'

To urban explorers (like Ninjalicious or me), that's an invitation – to find beauty.

Lisa Hale 5 Oct 2005TheTyee.ca

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The sun is rising as I haul myself over an eight-foot chain link fence topped with rusty strands of barbed wire. My adrenaline surges as I look over my shoulder then drop into the shadows on the other side. One more brush with barbed wire and I'll reach my target: an abandoned industrial facility in the heart of a gentrifying Vancouver neighbourhood. The site is no longer in use, but is actively patrolled by security guards. Their job is to stop me from entering the site, but they can only do that if they notice me.

My plan? Nothing more nefarious than having a look around, taking some pictures of decaying machinery and slipping out unnoticed. I'll take nothing but a few pre-dawn photographs, and will leave nothing but footprints in the dust of the buildings. If I do it right, no one will ever know I was here.

What I'm doing is called urban exploration. If you've heard of it, chances are it's because of Jeff Chapman. In 1996, Chapman, writing under the name Ninjalicious, started a Toronto-based zine called Infiltration, devoted to accounts of exploring the underside of the city and its infrastructure. Explorers are people who make a hobby of finding ways to see secret and off-limits aspects of the city, and Ninjalicious's work documented much of the exploration of this underground world. And now there are many others like Dark Passage, Abandoned Places, the Wraiths and Vancouver Urban Exploration Group.

To urban explorers like Ninjalicious (and now me) "no trespassing" signs serve as an invitation to investigate the drains, abandoned buildings, steam tunnels and other facets of the city most people never glimpse. We operate under the belief that trespass, while technically illegal, is not immoral. We don't vandalize or take objects from sites, and most of us follow a strong ethical code that mirrors the Sierra Club's: "take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints".

Nimble adventure

A tireless promoter of the idea of "going places you're not supposed to go", Ninjalicious has become one of the world's best known urban explorers in the years following the launch of his self-published magazine. To the great shock of the exploration community that has come to know his work so well, Ninjalicious passed away in August at the age of 31 after a long, quiet struggle with liver disease.

Ninjalicious's writings have had a profound effect on how we, explorers and non-explorers alike, see the urban environment. His zine served as a window into a subculture, exposing many for the first time to the idea of exploring beyond the boundaries of the everyday. His work is notable, not only for the fact that it brought positive attention to the world of the urban explorer, but because it stretched the possibilities of what a city could be.

To Ninjalicious, the urban environment was a playground filled with potential discoveries. Challenging the notion that most of the city is off-limits to the average citizen, he turned an appreciative eye and a strong sense of curiosity to exploring and documenting the forgotten faces of the city.

Cars not people

Most North American cities are not user-friendly places, as they tend to be built for efficiency and automobile-use. Public space seems to be an afterthought, and most of us are too busy to notice how little of the city is for the use of its citizens. The daily grind of work and consumption dulls our perception, making it is easy to slip into an unchallenging and routine urban existence. Because of our familiarity with the urban environment, most of us don't even see its unique elements anymore. The city exists as a mere backdrop for our daily activities, forming an undifferentiated landscape that rarely catches the notice of our conscious minds.

It is precisely this blasé existence that Ninjalicious's type of urban exploration agitates against.

Exploration starts with the act of tuning in and paying attention to the forgotten, decaying and unseen spaces that make up our cities. Ninjalicious's writings attempt to motivate us to become more than just passive drones in the urban landscape. His approach was to empower his readers to become active explorers.

'Free entertainment'

In an essay, No Disclaimer, Ninjalicious urged readers to explore rather than rely on prepackaged experiences. His message was that in a city filled with nooks and crannies to investigate, free entertainment is all around us. The city is more than just a place where people work and consume, it's a space for imagination, creativity and curiosity. He wrote that "we can't help but want to see the world around us; we're designed to explore and to play, and these instincts haven't disappeared just because most of us now live in large cities where parking lots have replaced common areas, malls have replaced city squares and the only public spaces that remain are a few grudgingly conceded parkettes".

Urban explorers reject the notion that the city and its infrastructure are off-limits to the average citizen. Exploration is not expressly political, as Ninjalicious states in "No Disclaimer," but most of us believe that "cities should be for citizens". We refuse to accept the artificial boundaries set out by no trespassing signs, shut doors and fences (with the exception of private homes - we aren't in the business of break and enter).

However, "urban explorers aren't generally fighters. We don't seek to smash the state, just to ignore its advice on a subject it doesn't really know much about. When we see a sign that says "Danger: Do Not Enter", we understand that this is simply a shorthand way of saying "Leaving Protected Zone: Demonstrate Personal Accountability Beyond This Point"."

Most people may not enjoy the prospect of tangling with barbed wire or evading security guards for the sake of exploring a decaying abandoned building. But Ninjalicious' ideas are also for the armchair explorers. His work has encouraged me to do more than just take up space in the urban environment, and to go beyond the officially sanctioned routine of daily life. To see the forgotten and ignored aspects of the urban environment, and to pay attention to the everyday beauty of the cities we live in.

Lisa Hale is a Vancouver based writer and urban explorer, currently writing an MA thesis on exploration.  [Tyee]

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