What I Am Reading: "A Burglar's Guide to the City" by Geoff Manaugh
Though it never uses the term, this is one of the few books I'd consider to be urban exploration texts; and is the first one I've read in a few years. The author, Geoff Manaugh, writes BLDGBLOG (which looks very good), and has written an excellent work on how burglary is inherently entwined with architecture.
Using all of the academic architectural jargon that I love, Manaugh discusses and provides numerous examples of how burglars see urban space differently than it's normal users do. They do not move through space in the prescribed manner, but instead adapt it to their purposes by traveling through air ducts, tunneling, breaking through walls, and other such methods. Sometimes this outside-the-box thinking backfires, as burglars get themselves caught by passing up on an easy or obvious route. The embodiment of the burglary-architecture relationship is George Leonidas Leslie, revisited several times in the book, a gilded age architect turned meticulous bank robber.
Burglary is an inherently spatial crime, with a considerable legal tradition dedicated to defining what structures can be burglarized (Manaugh cites an essay from the '50s by Minturn T. Wright III criticizing this proliferation of eligible structures). Manaugh looks at the relation between crime and the built environment on the level of individual buildings and on the level of the city as a whole. The arrangement of a city determines the nature of crime in the city to some extent, as well as the forms that policing takes. There is a big difference between the flat, suburban LA with it's LAPD helicopter patrols and the dense warren of London covered by Orwellian security cameras. This geographic destiny persists even down to the level of basic geology, as different natural features make tunneling feasible for an ambitious burglar.
On the level of individual buildings, burglars can become proficient in their own form of architectural analysis. An inspection of the layout of fire escapes can show where the largest (and thus richest, and thus most lucrative) apartments are, and interior layouts can be inferred given sufficient knowledge of the municipal fire code. (Here Manaugh notes the book Local Code by Michael Sorkin, creating a fictional city by depicting only it's tortured codes and regulations). A building's service corridors and other spaces make up a kind of "internal hinterland" that an intruder can make use of.
Other than the city and the building, Manaugh covers some of the tools of the burglar, with an interesting adventure into locksport, or recreational lockpicking. This includes discussion of The Open Organization of Lockpickers and of Schuyler Towne, both of which I might look into further (especially since Towne published a zine). Despite this enthusiasm for mechanical security and the puzzle-like defeat of same, most burglars don't pick a lock to enter a building. To chase that, Manaugh dives also into the world of "breaching," which seems like a very tacticool interest for security experts and "security experts" who are interested in taking down doors via rams, hydraulic spreaders, explosives (including "burn bars"), torches, saws, modified airbags, and so on. Finally, in the arms race to counter these methods, high-tech panic rooms are covered.
Beyond the physical tools of burglary, the book looks at the social tools, including knowledge of a building's internal routines. This applies not only to banks, but also to places like chain restaurants, which were the target of a burglar called "the Roofman," who knew exactly when to come in through the roof and hold up the teenagers working the McDonald's graveyard shift. On the opposite side of the divide, police activity in housing projects can rely on the uniformity of floorplans to aid their work.
On the academic side of social interactions with architecture, Manaugh brings in some avant guard architectural theory from Bernard Tschumi, who made elaborate diagrams that mapped out, in a manner colloquially compared to football plays, the ways people interact with the built environment. This interacted with crime in his book The Manhattan Transcripts, depicting the architectural aspect of murder in Central Park. Similarly, he covers artist Janice Kernel, who exhibited detailed plans for a robbery and getaway from a real bank, and other works, such as those depicting how to successfully navigate an old Victorian or other house without being seen.
Many buildings of course use architecture defensively or for social control, and advanced burglars must counteract the planning and surveillance built in to targets like casinos. They also can extend counteraction of architectural control back out to the city at large for their getaway. Pioneering bank robber Herman Lamm would meticulously plan and rehearse robberies, running on a strict timetable for the heist and the getaway, with multiple contingency routes planned. After his career came to a violent end, his surviving gang members taught John Dillinger the same military-style approach (Lamm had served as a Prussian officer). Nowadays, the getaway must employ much more sophisticated methods (such as hacking-based traffic control seen in some heist films), and must contend with the centralized social engineering of the "smart city" that the police can deploy in their favor.
Despite the sophistication and theorizing that can come into play, Manaugh ends by saying that burglary is mostly an unglamorous crime, and that burglars are more likely to be unsophisticated brutes than they are to be romantic counter-architects, subverting the built environment. Burglars play both roles in human culture, as a source of fear and of awe. We all view buildings as puzzles to some extent, and seek to unlock their secrets.
As I said, this book isn't explicitly about urban exploration; but despite using neither term, it is clearly an investigation of "place hacking," an alternative term used to denote gaining entry to spaces. Ninjalicious might have used the term "live-site" urban exploration, seeking to enter not abandoned buildings, but areas "on the grid" and in use.
I think that this book is a useful connector between UE texts and other investigations and deconstructions of the built environment, such as the repeatedly-cited City of Quartz by Mike Davis. It also gets a lot of material from books I wouldn't have looked to on my own, such as police and burglar memoirs. I might say repeatedly that I like academic works on history and politics, but I am definitely comfortable dabbling in this pop-architecture, especially in this countercultural and anarchic form. I theorize that I like urban exploration because it is the application of an aesthetic and subculture that I enjoy, punk/hacker counterculture, to a topic that (unlike music or computers) I am actually interested in: buildings (especially old ones) and the built environment. I've already read them, so I don't intend to do a blog post on them individually, but anyone interested or with no idea what I am referencing can check out Access All Areas by Ninjalicious or Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City by Bradley Garrett; or my column on Spark and Fizz. In fact, this book inspired me to finally check out the one remaining popular UE text I haven't picked up yet, so look for that in the coming months.