Urban Adventures and Autopsies - Experience and Exploration in Recent Ruins

Sammanfattning

This ethnographic study takes a phenomenological approach to examining the experiences of urban explorers in Sweden. Data collection took place in Skåne and Stockholm between October 2025 and February 2026, using the qualitative methods of semistructured interviews and participant observation. Urban exploration encompasses a wide range of practices; this thesis centers around its core aspect of visiting abandoned places. The hobby’s practitioners, called urban explorers, are a loosely connected group of diverse individuals, typically organized through online spaces around a common interest for places, photography, and abandonment. This study attempts to productively engage with the concept of experience by examining the social, historical, and material processes that inform the reflective and pre-reflective experiences of urban explorers. It finds that urban exploration affords experiences that are emotional, evocative, transformative, and unique to everyday Swedish life. These experiences are constituted by environments that have distinctive qualities in terms of materiality, affordances, aesthetics, temporality, legality, and sociality, in interaction with the evolving movements, perception, physicality, feelings, and presuppositions of urban explorers.