As one of the younger people on this forum and someone who has only been doing urban exploration for a couple years, I'm constantly thinking about whether UE will be possible when I'm older. Oldheads, please correct me if I'm wrong but the UER seems way past it's prime and new security measures and increases in urbanization seem to be exponentially decreasing the popularity of exploring. As someone who lives in a major city it seems almost impossible to find non-active sites to explore without traveling tens of kilometers away and all the active sites are getting impossibly hard to infiltrate. Is it time to pack my bags and move to Europe or am I just making it seem worse than it is.

edit: I should've definetly stuck to the original title of "where is the future of UE headed" but hey extra engagement I guess

Posted by llux As one of the younger people on this forum and someone who has only been doing urban exploration for a couple years, I'm constantly thinking about whether UE will be possible when I'm older. Oldheads, please correct me if I'm wrong but the UER seems way past it's prime and new security measures and increases in urbanization seem to be exponentially decreasing the popularity of exploring. As someone who lives in a major city it seems almost impossible to find non-active sites to explore without traveling tens of kilometers away and all the active sites are getting impossibly hard to infiltrate. It seems not so much a matter of if UE is dying but more a matter of when it will go completely extinct. Is it time to pack my bags and move to Europe or am I just making it seem worse than it is.

Part of the problem is there is way more people engaging in UE now than there ever was.

In my capital city locations that were once taken for granted are getting blocked off. I'm talking about underground cavities, but generally buildings don't seem to last as long as they used to.

Not dying, just changing (in Australia anyway).

Absolutely is.

It's over for us

Over here it seems to just be coming alive, after decades of mostly foreigners exploring. And the more people who are getting involved, the more locations that are being discovered in places we previously never thought to look or try.

It's not dead, far from it. There's arguably more stuff around now than there ever was, and way better means of finding new locations. But the trick nowadays is to completely distance yourself from whatever the hordes of social media clout chasers are all rushing to at once. That's where the true exploration lies, ignore all the nonsense on social media, find some cool shit, and don't become just another social media explorer doing it for online likes.

The problems faced by UE in the USA are just as bad, if not sometimes worse, in Europe than they are there, believe me.

Video killed the radio star

It's absolutely not dead at all and I would say it's probably more popular than ever, this forum is a poor representation of the scale of this hobby

For the abandoned mine exploring community, the future is bleak. The federal government is funding programs in every state government to gate ALL non-operating mines. While I agree that mine safety is important, the danger is blown way out of proportion. I've read so many news articles recently bleating on and on about how dangerous they are, pointing to a small handful of incidents over the last few years. They dramatically tell about how danger lurks at every turn, and that you will certainly be killed if you even think about going underground.

At the beginning of the year, there were three small plane crashes that killed eight persons, ALL IN ONE DAY. That's more deaths than the last 20 years of mine deaths. Yet the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to gate every mine. Recently a friend of mine who has a valid claim showed up at his mine to do a bit of prospecting, only to find it gated off. Last I'm aware of, he still can't gain access to his claim. Apologies for the rant.

I agree with Mookster, there are a lot of locations out there. Without trying to preach, hard work leads to great results. A friend of mine recently got down into the most amazing mine. Dynamite boxes stacked up in a pile (absolutely unheard of now days), ore cars scattered about, the whole deal. But it was a serious effort to reach it with approx 400 feet of rope-work to access it. It's physically and mentally challenging to undertake these kinds of explores, but the results can be worth it.

Abby Normal

Urban exploration has always been past its prime. Regardless of who you talk to, all the best locations had been demolished or otherwise ruined by the time they got into the scene.

Posted by Pearson It's absolutely not dead at all and I would say it's probably more popular than ever, this forum is a poor representation of the scale of this hobby

It's popularity is a real double edged sword though. Now you get whole crowds of morons parading around locations that should be kept on the quiet plastered all across Tiktok or Youtube or Instagram faster than you can blink.

I would love to go back to the time before social media had a completely irreversible detrimental impact on the hobby.

^^ Ye, word.

Posted by Pearson It's absolutely not dead at all and I would say it's probably more popular than ever, this forum is a poor representation of the scale of this hobby

Wouldn't say poor representation it's vast forum down there.
People documented history on a fever pitch in it's heyday.

I think this is a really regionally influenced question and therefore answer. I’m based in the periphery of Southern Ontario. I think it’s dead here. My experience is that post-COVID, while many folks have abandoned their newly acquired hobbies, there is still an immense saturation of this hobby to the extent where the general population has really been turned against it and landowners are much more interested in heavier handed enforcement to dissuade more of this activity. I also don’t think it helps that probably the most popular, on social media, “urban explorer” in Southern Ontario has really taken to moving on from abandoned things to breaking and entering into disused but cared for properties and posting them on the internet. As far as I’m concerned, looking around MLS for empty houses and then entering them isn’t in the spirit of this hobby and I think that’ll probably be a contributing factor to the further downfall of this hobby.

I also think liability plays into this as well at least in Canada and probably the US. We saw during COVID that people started doing things that they didn’t have the experience or education to safely do and people did die and did get seriously injured. This activity is no different. At least where I am locally there have been numerous calls for service to abandoned places that didn’t happen to the same extent as before. Locally to me that’s led to municipal government forcing landowners to board up, repurpose, or knock down.

Conversely to all I’ve written here, I think UE is alive and well in less populace areas or areas that, not to be cliche, aren’t reachable with a 2WD car. If it takes a substantial walk, mechanized transport (ATV, dirt bike, bicycle), or a 4X4.

Posted by selectedgrub ^^ Ye, word. Wouldn't say poor representation it's vast forum down there. People documented history on a fever pitch in it's heyday.

In its heyday yeah, today is not the heyday.

It's only dead if you stop exploring.


The hobby just has evolved onto other platform, the ones who gives back likes, follower and attention to the wanna be's.
The "easier" platform , that require less work and give back more "reward".

But there will always be UE and real explorers.

Posted by Urban Downfall It's only dead if you stop exploring.

Facts, it doesn't really matter if it's 'dead' if you truly enjoy it!

Of course it's not dead- as long as there's abandoned places, there'll be people to explore them. It's just that, as much as I love UER, I can admit that it's a dinosaur of a website running off legacy code from before the Twin Towers fell. Many newer explorers are just on more prevalent, easier websites like Instagram or Tiktok where you don't need to figure out an off-site hosting workaround to post photos, and the UI is convenient for phones, and you can get tons of internet likes quickly. Or, for more experienced explorers, many have moved to private Signal chats where the encryption is better and access is more restricted from the public.

For those who don't want the public seeing their stuff, UER is too public- and for those who want clout, UER isn't public enough. And for both, it's an inconvenient website to use because of it's age. But the community isn't dead- UER just isn't where folks gather anymore. It's become more of an archive than a hub.

Posted by Aran But the community isn't dead- UER just isn't where folks gather anymore. It's become more of an archive than a hub.

UER is the old folks home of exploring, same goes for other forums. They are dinosaurs in an age of instant gratification.

No, but now there's more brainlets than ever posting their antics to tiktok for likes. They start fires, break shit, and get hurt there. Sure, there have always been people disrespecting these sites, but social media gives them much more incentive to "go all out" and do it for clout, good or not.

UE isn't dead, it's just become more spread out for the worse. Gatekeeping was essential to UE but it's more easier than ever to find locations.

Posted by mookster It's not dead, far from it. There's arguably more stuff around now than there ever was, and way better means of finding new locations. But the trick nowadays is to completely distance yourself from whatever the hordes of social media clout chasers are all rushing to at once. That's where the true exploration lies, ignore all the nonsense on social media, find some cool shit, and don't become just another social media explorer doing it for online likes. The problems faced by UE in the USA are just as bad, if not sometimes worse, in Europe than they are there, believe me.

Totally agree Mookster, There was a time when I kind of gave in a bit to the idea of social media being a good platform for exploration, but after seeing some of my favorite spots, places I spent months researching and cultivating and learning about, seeing these places get literally lit on fire, vandalized, scrapped, after some alpaca hair cut clout chaser with a 5th grade vocabulary geotagged it and did a click bait Vlog, I literally deleted almost everything I explored from public view.