The Dictionary of Human Geography

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partnerships. Jessop (1998) adds a definition of

entrepreneurialism focused on innovation:

urban entrepreneurs devise new ways of doing

urbangovernancein order to be as competitive

as possible. em

Suggested reading

Hall and Hubbard (1998).

urban explorationInvolving journeys thro-

ughcitiesas a means of discovery and the

construction of geographical knowledge, the

term is often associated with the activities

of nineteenth-century social explorers and

reformers, who ventured into urban spaces in

the ‘heart of empire’ to report on their condi-

tions and bring them to wider public attention.

As with cultures and practices ofexploration

more generally, such explorations have been

subjected to considerable critical attention,

which has focused on the colonialdiscourses

and unequal power relations that framed

them, the encounters they involved, and the

ways in which their accounts were not simply

neutral but had material effects – for example,

scripting urban areas as ‘dark’, ‘undiscovered’

and populated by a ‘race apart’ (Driver, 2001a,

ch. 8: cf.colonialism;imperialism). The

term has been appropriated for other ends,

however. Among those seeking to turn around

the colonialist language of exploration has

been the radical geographer Bill Bunge,

through his urban ‘expeditions’ in the late

1960s and early 1970s as part of the Society

for Human Exploration. Based in Detroit and

later Toronto, these aimed to be contributive

rather than exploitative, democratic rather

than elitist, as they worked with disenfran-

chised residents ofinner cities,planningwith

them rather thanforthem (see Merrifield, 1995;

see alsoradical geography).

More recently, the term ‘urban exploration’

has been taken up widely by individuals

and groups interested in investigating areas of

cities that are ‘secret’, overlooked, forgotten or

obscure. Such practices are also sometimes

named ‘infiltration’ and typically focus on

places off limits to the public, including aban-

doned buildings, ruined constructions, transit

and utility tunnels, storm drains, rooftops or

secure sites (Ninjalicious, 2005). Often involv-

ing photographic documentation, and imbued

with a sense of play and curiosity, their profile

and popularity has expanded rapidly through

media attention and proliferatinginternet

sites. Modes of urban exploration have also

been important in recentarts, cultural and

writing practice through projects that seek

to engage with city spaces and their potential-

ities beyond galleries and other formal arts

institutions (Pinder, 2005b). Some of these

are indebted to the earlier politicized spatial

practices of thesituationistsas well as to

longer visionary and literary traditions of

urban wandering as they intervene in how

spaces are imagined, represented and lived.

(See alsopsychogeography.) dp

Suggested reading

Driver (2001a, ch. 8); Pinder (2005b).

urban fringe Those areas around urban

cores that are functionally or morphologically

linked (but not necessarily contiguous) to the

urbanregionand have an emerging (sub)

urban settlement structure. They tend no

longer to be dependent on agriculture alone

and do not simply take overflow from urban

industrial, transportation or commercial activ-

ities in the core. The term is a statistical cat-

egory. Statistics Canada, for example, defines

the urban fringe as including ‘all small urban

areas (with less than 10,000 population)’

within census metropolitan areas that are ‘not

contiguous to the urban core’ (http://geodepot.

statcan.ca/Diss/Reference/Tutorial/UF_tut2_e.

cfm).

In the 1980s and 1990s the urban fringe was

the focus of much attention, as traditional

urban cores lost significance to industrial and

commercial competitors insuburbsand net-

worked small towns close tometropolitan

areas. Terms such as ‘exopolis’ (Soja, 1992),

‘Zwischenstadt’ (Sieverts, 2003) or ‘edge city’

(Garreau, 1991) signalled the growing signifi-

cance of emerging denser nodes in the urban

fringe. rk

urban geography The geographical study

of urban spaces and urban ways of being.

It was thechicago schoolof sociology, and

not geographers, who initiated the study of

urban space (Fyfe and Kenny, 2005). Early

urban geography was characterized by histor-

ical studies that saw physicalmorphologyto

be a determinant of urban development, or

regional studies that looked at the different

relations between towns. By way of contrast,

Chicago sociologists studiedhuman ecology,

gathering data through social surveys andpar-

ticipant observation, and producing rich

urbanethnographies. It was not until the

mid-1950s that geographers, drawing heavily

on sociology andneo-classical economics,

and on thelocational theoriesof geograph-

ers Chauncey Harris and Edward Ullman,

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_U Final Proof page 784 31.3.2009 9:34pm

URBAN EXPLORATION