Ah, but you speak more of the death of interesting abandonments, which is inevitable if the planet continues on its present course. Some of you Chicagoans seem to notice only abandonments, when there are so many other opportunities there. An Alaskan had to come to town before I saw any pages on classic hotel snooping or city wandering.

There has been no slowing of construction of tunnels or large buildings. The "tallest building in the world" is a title no building can hold for more than a decade, it's just that we whitebread Americans can't read the web pages of the local explorers. Ambitious tunneling projects like the Chunnel and the Big Dig will become more common as long as we have a car society and the aformentioned spatial discontinuity between the consumers and the manufacturers.

My college built another quarter mile of steam tunnel over last summer, and it's certainly not the only campus that will expand. As we move to the service and knowledge-oriented society that you talk about, institutions of higher learning will continue to enlarge. Some day it may not be unfashionable to be a "career student"; I expect a wholly new high tech school to exist befor I die, like Caltech or MIT, and you can be sure they'll have tunnels.

I see a bright future for live infiltration, as new uses are created for the decaying hulks, uses that don't quite fit and leave interesting nooks and crannies and other captivating inneficiencies.

Drains are obviously never going to stop being built. They're more efficient now that 50 years ago, so they're a minimum size. But city sprawl will continue makng permeable land nonpermeable, and burying creeks and rivers.

You can always hope for a new great mistake like Chernobyl. It quickly made an entire town abandoned. People will continue to be more and more willing to take big risks while exploring as the rest of their lives are sanitized for their protection.

I don't think you are right, D-funked. I think UE is different from other subcultures as other cultures consists mostly of people who act on other people and immediately know what they're doing is called (though they might not know what they're doing). In Urban Exploring on the contrary, a lot of people explored long before they ever heard of the term "Urban Exploring".

They were individualists, and still are, though they seek contact with each other over the net and sometimes even during exploration, but I think this cooperation has more to do with practical reasons and safety, and with finally meeting people with the same eye and mindset, than with wanting to explore together.

It is and will stay an individualistic movement, therefore each real explorer will allways continue exploring. If there are no more abandond factories or asylums left, he will explore drains. If these become grated, he will explore active buildings. If these become too secure, they will explore the streets. If that becomes impossible, (and I think, keeping Landmark 6 as an incident, that this will be long) then we do have a problem.

Tijmen

P.S. For more information on how to explore streets, I refer to Petr Kazil.

P.P.S. Linked to in my log about UE reasons

I don't think he's saying UE is going to be extinct 15 years from now. I think he's talking long term, like 150 years. But I still don't agree with him. By then, the information economy will finally be stablized, and a nanoeconomy will either be well established, or just coming around. The information age will eventually peak when we finally sort everything out. Then will come an age of using that information to develop cures to the world's problems (nanomachines).

A conventional powerline loses an insanely huge percentage of what it transfers. But a powerline made out of Carbon nanotubes strung together will hold pretty much all of what is transfered through it. Once human civilization masters nano technology, so many problems will be solved. Energy, computers, disease, cancer, transportation. The possibilities are endless. This new age will increase the art of society. The only way to revive a city is to bring the people with money back into the city (I took a whole class on this, so please don't argue with me :p ), and the only way to bring people with money back into urban areas is to make the areas look nice. Plant trees, block of streets and turn them into areas were people can walk around and shop. Turn ugly cracked pavement into brick. For a city to become alive again, it has to spend money on looking nice. The stablization of the suburban-information age will hopefully bring the ages of using Willow as an energy source, and reviving of the cities. A major trend in the past years has been to make buildings beautiful. It is true, if trends continue, we will not see many abandoned buildings, and yes, security everywhere has increased tenfold. But with new amazing buildings, it's going to be a blast exploring them, and the areas underneath them.

UE won't die, it will just have to evolve.

Have you read about "gray goo"?