Transcriber: Ellen Maloney Reviewer: Denise RQ
The story that I am going to tell you tonight begins in 2008.
It begins in London. It begins at Battersea Power Station.
Battersea Power Station was the central power station for London
from the 1930s to the 1980s.
I was standing there in 2008 with my friends,
taking photos of the building, we were fascinated by it.
If it is recognizable to you, you might have seen it
on the cover of Pink Floyd's "Animals" album.
It is an iconic building in London,
a building that many of you will recognize if you pass through the city.
The building has also been derelict for over 20 years.
We were fascinated by the building and its history,
but we were also frustrated
that we could not see what was inside the building.
We solved our curiosity in the obvious way;
we waited until two in the morning, we jumped over the fences,
we snuck past the security guards, and we had a look for ourselves.
What we found inside was incredible.
There were these breathtaking control rooms in a perfect state of preservation.
I was terrified by what we were doing,
but I also felt this incredible sense of wonder.
Running around, doing all of the things that you cannot do in a museum.
Turning all of the wheels, playing with the levers and dials.
It was fantastic.
What followed after Battersea Power Station
was five years of exploring abandoned places around the world,
places that are hidden, places that we are not allowed to access.
Places that, for all intents and purposes, are off the map.
As a geographer, I found this absolutely fascinating.
I was fascinated with the notion of space and place,
but I was also fascinated by how places become closed to access.
And how and why people reappropriate these places.
We snuck into abandoned hospitals, we wandered through sewer systems,
we saw the communication threads that connect us all,
we dangled our feet from skyscrapers,
and we ran metro tunnels, hiding from the drivers as they sped past.
Right now, a lot of you are thinking, "But Brad, are you not trespassing?"
The answer of course is, "Yes, absolutely."
We live in a world now, obsessed with health and safety.
We live in a world now, obsessed with security.
We live in a world where we are being boxed in
by signs, and security guards, and CCTV cameras.
In the name of "security",
we are being denied the ability to make decisions for ourselves.
In the name of "security", we are being denied our most basic freedom,
the freedom to explore the environment that we live in.
London, where I now live, has almost half a million CCTV cameras.
That is one camera for every six people in the city.
Most of these are privately operated.
More broadly in Europe,
private security guards now outnumber the police by 25%.
You will be interested to find out
that a 2007 Freedom of Information Act request did not show
that there was any sort of demonstrated link
between these higher security measures and safer cities,
but what geographers have found
is that where we find heavily surveilled spaces,
we do find lower rates of engagement with neighbors,
fewer public gatherings, and of course, less diversity.
You can understand why, of course.
When you see security structures like these,
you begin to think there is something nefarious going on.
You begin to suspect your neighbors.
Less obvious are heavily surveilled and controlled spaces like these.
This is the Mayor's Office in London.
All that land around the Mayor's Office,
what should be our most common sense public space,
is owned by a private company called "More London".
It feels like you can do what you want in this space.
But as soon as you step onto it,
"More London" begins filming all of your actions
and they have this advanced CCTV system where they click on your body
and the cameras track you as you move through the space.
If you were to undertake certain activities there:
filming, taking photos, congregating in groups of more than three,
picnicking, loitering, protesting, although none of these things are illegal,
"More London" has a right to ask you to leave their land.
If you do not, you can be charged with aggravated trespass.
What we are experiencing right now,
is a wholesale sell-off of our public space.
It is going into private hands.
Now "More London" claims to be
in a public-private partnership with the city.
However last year, without public consultation,
they sold their company to a Kuwaiti investment firm
for 1.6 billion pounds in one of the largest land deals in UK history.
It occurred to me, "What interest does a Kuwaiti investment firm have
in cultivating a sense of community here? A sense of place?"
The answer is, "Absolutely none". Because it does not feed the bottom line.
The walkways here are all patrolled by private security guards,
who are almost indistinguishable from police officers.
When this particular security guard heard the shutter-click of my camera,
he came over to tell me taking photographs of him was illegal.
I told him, "Well, no it is not, actually.
Also, I did not consent to be filmed on your land either."
He said, "You have no rights here; this is private space."
It turns out that if you want to control people's behavior,
the most effective way to do that
is to make them think that they are being watched all the time.
People will monitor their own behavior if they think they are being watched.
This has always been the dark secret of installing CCTV all over cities;
people will monitor their own behavior.
The cameras do not even need to work.
Place-hacking is the assertion of bodily freedom through trespass.
This is what we were doing over those five years.
Governments, corporations, and even our fellow citizens,
raise countless borders around us,
circumscribing our behavior in particular ways.
Rarely do we stop to think about whether those boundaries that are being raised
are ethical, justified or even legal.
By exploring this city and by trespassing across these boundaries,
we make those boundaries visible,
and we also give ourselves the opportunity to recreate the city in our image.
Very often, the only way to slip this net in contemporary cities, is just to do it.
Because very often, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.
This is my brother and I.
We are about 15 years old,
we have loaded up a bike with a cooler and flippers,
and we are off on some adventure.
I do not know where we are going.
But this is what we do when we are young.
This is how we make a sense of place, this is how we learn,
this is how we discover, this is what we do.
We explore the world.
As we get older, our behavior begins to change.
We begin to encounter barriers. We change the way we operate in the city.
We think of this as a beneficial process, right?
We are growing up, we are civilizing those childish instincts.
We are learning "civic duty".
What we are also doing is we are, in erecting these barriers
and training each other to stay within them,
we are killing off some forms of creativity.
We are creating a homogeneous culture.
Cities are meant to be places of diversity,
cities are meant to be places of encounter.
These cities that are being rolled out across the world are cities
where being together, lingering and exploring, is discouraged.
We should be asking ourselves what kind of people begin to form in these cities.
Social scientists have suggested that the frustration
that many people are feeling about having their behaviour regulated in this way
is leading to increasing outbursts of violence.
What I am going to argue here is that trespass can act
as a sort of pressure-release valve for people to feel, just for a moment,
like they are in control of their actions.
Like they are able to do what they like,
regardless of whether it is allowed or not.
Let me introduce you to a term. It is "usufruct".
It is an old term, it derives from Roman law.
It basically gives us the ability to use other people's property or land,
as long as that property is not damaged in any way.
In an age obsessed with private property this seems like kind of an absurd idea.
However, we understand this concept in terms of rural spaces, right?
If we see a hill, and it is on a farmer's field,
we might be willing to cross that farmer's land
to see the view from the top of the hill.
Prosecuting someone for climbing the hill seems like an absurd idea.
However, when I apply this concept to urban space,
suddenly we hit a mental block.
"That is someone else's building,
you cannot climb that building. You cannot see that view."
The ability to trespass on rural land was not a common-sense right.
Trespass, in England for instance, was illegal until 1664.
It was not until then that it was turned
from being a criminal offense into a civil offense.
However, many landowners still stopped people, walkers, and ramblers,
from crossing their land to get to places.
In 1933, the Ramblers Association rallied over 400 people for a mass trespass
over the Moorland Plateau called "Kinder Scout".
Lord Roy Hattersley describes this
as "The most successful direct action in British history."
It eventually led
to the [Countryside and Rights of Way Act] of 2000,
which gives us the ability to walk on, what is essentially mapped land.
Let us stop and think about this for a minute.
Private property laws favoring wealthy land owners were stopping people
from accessing certain spaces.
People thought this was undemocratic,
so they staged direct action to change those laws.
We now all benefit from those laws. We have a "right to roam".
If I move this structure to an urban environment and I ask you again,
if I want to climb someone else's building to take in the view,
to be alone in the city, to spend some time with my friends,
as long as nothing is damaged or altered, why is this not acceptable?
In fact, when we are talking about public infrastructure, like sewers,
we could argue that we have even more right to access these spaces
since they are built and maintained with taxpayer money.
It seems to me that sewers are the most commonsense public land.
I am sure that a lot of you are not interested in going into a sewer,
and that is fine,
but what I would ask of you is that you would consider the direct action
that urban explorers and place hackers are undertaking
as they access these secret and hidden spaces,
a form of direct action that is an acceptable and reasonable response
to the closing down of spaces in our cities.
Some of you are maybe thinking now, "I am kind of interested."
But you have got excuses, right?
"I do not have anyone to go with,"
"I don't know, maybe there is nothing in Vienna to find,"
"I don't really have the tools."
Just to shake things up a little bit, I left my hotel last night at midnight.
I went to the Wienfluss, and I wandered through.
I was about halfway through here,
and I was trying to get into the Third Man tour through a back door,
and I found another door, and I opened this door, and I crawled into it,
and I reached the sewer, and I crawled through a tunnel in the sewer,
and then I found this hatch.
I opened up this hatch and went down it, and I was inside the U-Bahn.
(Laughter)
I have only been here for 48 hours.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
I wish we could end on a good note here,
but I am going to give you a cautionary note as well.
Over the past five years, I have snuck into about 300 locations across the world.
Some of those locations I snuck into were abandoned metro stations in London,
very similar to what I did last night.
Totally benign, opened a hatch, crawled down, took a photo.
In 2012, I was flying back into London,
and my plane was stopped on the runway at Heathrow.
Police boarded the plane, and they arrested me.
While I was in custody, they took a battering ram to my front door,
and they confiscated all of my property.
They confiscated my phones, my cameras, my computers,
my hard drives, all of my research materials.
The police were frustrated with the fact that we were exposing these hidden spaces,
that we were sharing information about spaces that were not ours.
They eventually charged me, and 11 other people,
with conspiracy to commit criminal damage.
Which is a "thought crime".
There was no evidence of us actually doing anything criminal;
they have to charge us based on intent.
It seemed that just as in that private space outside the City Hall,
the frustration Transport for London was feeling was that they imagined
a potential future threat that they could not articulate.
They felt that somehow, our photos were going to manifest that future threat.
So by stopping us from taking photos, by physically taking them away from us,
and taking our camera gear, and dragging us through the court system,
they could stop that future threat from manifesting, potentially.
Then I started doing some research, and it turns out,
that if I go to the website of Transport for London,
the public-private partnership that owns the tube,
I can pay 600 pounds an hour to photograph that same disused station,
as long as I have got five million pounds in public liability insurance.
Which leads me to wonder, or conclude,
that perhaps photographing private space is fine,
as long as we are willing to pay for the privilege.
Or maybe we can conclude,
that people with money do not constitute an imagined future threat.
Maybe we can even conclude that national security has a price.
You are going to think I am totally paranoid at this point;
I am going to show you another document to prove that I am.
This document was put together
by the National Counterterrorism Center in the United States,
and it cites my website, and the websites of a couple of other urban explorers.
It suggests that we are aiding terrorists by taking photographs of hidden places.
I have to wonder if I had paid to take photographs of the same places,
would I still be aiding terrorists?
I soon realized that the problem was not necessarily with exploring these places,
or even with taking the photographs.
It was doing what I am doing right now,
sharing information, that they found threatening.
These corporations treated me, a photographer of hidden spaces,
in the same way they would treat a computer hacker.
They took my property, and they also took my passport.
They trapped me in the United Kingdom for two years, limiting my mobility
so that I could not get around to explore places.
This is a familiar story, right?
We know other hackers of virtual spaces, rather than hackers of physical spaces,
who have had their documents confiscated so that they cannot travel anymore.
In this light, I might perhaps suggest that it is no longer easier
to ask for forgiveness than permission anymore.
Perhaps both are equally difficult in today's city.
I think that information should be shared.
I think that transparency is important in a democracy.
I want to know what is being built in my city, by whom,
with what funds, and to what ends.
I think those are totally reasonable expectations,
as is the expectation that people are going to explore their environments,
whatever environments they happen to live in.
When we explore these spaces,
when we ignore those "No Trespassing" signs as I did last night,
we recreate space in our image, and we, in a sense, make the impossible possible.
You remember in 2008,
we were staring at these chimneys in Battersea Power Station,
and we were frustrated that we could not get closer to them.
After my arrest and after my passport had been confiscated,
and I was being dragged through the courts,
we went back last year, and we rigged up ropes on those chimneys,
and we climbed to the top, and I stood on the lip of the chimney.
It was absolutely incredible, looking out over London.
It occurred to me that there is some bravery in continuing to trespass,
regardless of what the consequences are,
because it forces open that discussion
about these boundaries that are being circumscribed around us,
and whether, indeed, those boundaries are ethical, justified, or even legal.
I am not going to ask you to become an urban explorer.
It is not something most people would want to do.
I would ask you to think about those boundaries
that are being drawn around your existence
and the way they are changing your behavior.
I would like to ask you to think about trespassing those boundaries
in whatever small ways you are willing to do,
and to think about whether those boundaries
are ethical, legal, or justified.
I would like you to think a little bit
about whether trespass might just be an essential component of democracy.
Thank you.
(Applause)