Luke Bennett

Bunkerology—A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Urban Exploration

This paper reviews existing academic interpretations of ‘urban exploration’ and argues that focus to date on identifying and celebrating the transgressive and/or emancipatory dimension of this practice has failed to account for the taxonomic and survey-related orientation evident in the authors study of accounts of exploration of Cold War bunkers posted on urban exploration Internet forums. The authors study suggests that the survey and veneration of place evident in these accounts may be a more significant motivation for urban exploration as practised than psychogeographical revere and/or transgressive incursion into space and place.

The Bunker: Metaphor, materiality and management

The image of the ‘bunker’ has a deep resonance in contemporary organisational discourse. This paper seeks to explore the link between this metaphor and the materiality of the bunker as a physical site of organisation. The twentieth‐century origins of the bunker lie within the rise of aerial bombardment. The bunker, as a structure, is a triumph of function over form, yet it somehow also resonates at a symbolic level – either by invocation of the abject circumstances of Hitler’s final days in his Berlin bunker or in the celluloid imaginings of the nuclear command bunker during the Cold War. In each case the materiality, the ‘concrete’ essence, of the bunker weaves in and out of its symbolic existence. This paper also considers the fate of these bunkers and what their ruins leave for us as traces of the essentialist organisational life lived in extremis by those who dwelt within them.

TREES And PUBLIC LIABILITY - WHO REALLY dECIdES WHAT IS REASOnABLY SAFE?

Abstract This article has its origins in investigations that the author has been undertaking into the effects of public safety and liability perception in the built and natural environment (e.g. BENNETT and CROWE, 2008; BENNETT, 2009 and BENNETT and GIBBESON, 2010). In these previous studies the author and colleagues have examined the impact of public safety and liability concerns upon memorial management in cemeteries, access to the countryside and to the training of built environment professionals. In these studies the aim has been to explore how the liability perceptions of owners and managers of such places is formed, and specifically whether public safety and liability perceptions have a tendency to cluster around certain patterns and conventions within particular ‘interpretive communities’ (FISH, 1980). Underlying these studies is a hypothesis that lay communities are at least as important as lawyers and courts in setting what the law regarding liability for site safety actually is in practice. In this paper the aim is to directly engage with an interpretive community that is engaged in a phase of public safety and liability anxiety, in this case current debate about the merits (or otherwise) of setting explicit standards for the safety inspection of trees.

Thinking like a brick : posthumanism and building materials

Posthumanism exhorts us to pay more attention to nonhuman things, but can we actually engage any more ‘deeply’ with non-sentient objects, and in a way that detaches our investigations from human concerns and positionality?

Who goes there? Accounting for gender in the urge to explore abandoned military bunkers

This article enquires into the motivations of ‘bunkerologists’ – a term coined for analytic convenience by the author to describe those who research, explore and survey twentieth century military bunkers as a hobby. Specifically, it considers the gendered dimension of this predominantly male pastime. In doing so, the article examines the role of a range of cultural influences, including signification of militarism, inter-generational initiation and remembrance around themes of defence and labour, human-technology relations, conquest, and hermitic escapism. These factors all appear to have roles to play in disposing individuals towards participation in this practice. The analysis finds the source of many of these influences within a particular mode of English male socialisation, and masculinities related to it, prevalent in the late twentieth century. The analysis presented is also grounded in an auto-ethnographic exploration of the biographical roots of the authors own choice of this research topic and the effect of the research upon him and his family. Whilst the subject matter of the study may be regarded as somewhat arcane, the analysis of the role of socialisation within routes to participation in this predominantly masculine pastime may help to illuminate the motivational frameworks of other rarely studied, and seemingly introverted, ‘male’ hobbies such as train spotting, stamp collecting and sport fishing (angling).

Concrete multivalence – practising representation in bunkerology

In this paper I investigate the various ways in which once secret and ‘unknowable’ military bunkers have over the last fifty years become increasingly accessible to perception and representation in print and other ‘off-line’ media. I focus upon the role played in this rediscovery by accounts produced and circulated by various types of bunker-hunting enthusiasts, who are defined collectively in the paper as ‘bunkerologists’. The paper also shows that bunkers are not, as some theorists such as Beck have recently suggested, beyond description and incapable of cultural assimilation. For whilst the military bunker is a powerful totem of postmodern ambiguity for some, bunkerologists have developed relatively stable modes of representation through which these abandoned concrete structures can come to be cherished, discussed, and ‘known’. Through analysis of bunkerological texts, and the practices by which they are generated, I examine how bunker huntings dominant discursive formations—ie, the political, the taxonomic, the nostalgic, and the experiential—frame the ways in which accounts of bunkers and bunker hunting are presented by bunkerologists themselves, and show how representation is performed by them. Whilst accepting the importance and value of nonrepresentational theory and its challenge to the dominance of the discourse-fixated analysis characteristic of the ‘linguistic turn’, I argue for an active acknowledgment of the role of representational practices within studies investigating performative engagements with place.

Perceptions of occupiers' liability risk by estate managers: A case study of memorial safety in English cemeteries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a socio‐legal case study, examining how the legal notion of “reasonable safety” provision has come to be constructed by municipal cemetery managers in relation to gravestones and other memorial structures over the last decade in England.Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes a social constructionist approach to the subject of the case study. It is based upon a literature review of relevant law, policy and guidance, and on the results of qualitative face‐to‐face, semi‐structured interviews with a small sample of English municipal cemetery managers.Findings – The issue of memorial safety illustrates the tensions that can arise between safety and conflicting priorities, in this case sensitivity to the bereaved. The paper shows that the simple promulgation of guidance will not automatically lead to it being accepted by all as “good practice”. The interviews show how organisations and individual managers have sought to make sense of, and render workable,...

Making common ground with strangers at Furnace Park

Abstract In this article, we seek to widen the debate about the sites and processes of encounter with strangers by examining the ways in which ‘strangeness’ necessarily fades within the familiarisation processes at play in any sustained and situated place-making. Our analysis draws upon our experiences of encountering strangers – and of our familiarisation with them – in the initial, year-long, site acquisition and preparation phase of a project to create Furnace Park, an experimental urban space in a run-down backwater of central Sheffield. We show the tensions between a project commitment to the formation of a loose, open place and the pressures (which arose from our encounters with the urban development system) to render both the project and the site certain, bounded and less-than-strange. Furthermore, at Furnace Park the site itself presented to us as a non-human stranger, which we were urged to render familiar but which kept eluding that capture. We therefore show how the geographies of strange encounters could productively be widened to embrace both recent scholarship on the material-affective strangeness of ground itself, and a greater attentiveness to the familiarisation effects born of the intersection of diverse communities of practices within place-making projects.