Explore Everything: Place-hacking the City

Abstract

In an urbanized world, issues of globalization, privatization, migration, diversity, and multiculturalism are evolving. With growing class and cultural conflict between global forces of capital and local forces of community, public places embody political and social differences expressed through individual and collective actions (Harvey, 2012). In this post-modern urban context, there are critical questions of authenticity, control, security, and sense of place pertaining to engineered public policies and utopian public spaces imposed on city life. These questions of complex power arrangement underline Henri Lefebvre's (1996, p. 158) assertion of the public realm as ‘right to the city’. In response to Lefebvre's call for action in places, Bradley L. Garrett writes in Explore Everything: Place-hacking the city, that ‘urban exploration’ ‘emerges in the midst of a cluster of growing urban interventions developed to (re)seize agency where freedoms appear to be constantly eroding, circumscribed and surveilled, often enough in the guise of protecting our freedoms' (pp. 174–175).