Exploring European Urbanism: Street Art & Beyond

Florian Rivière is an urban hacktivist. Some would call him a genius, I would describe him as a man with an eye for the small things in urban life. One of his latest small urban projects was the creation of a free urban exercise bike in Paris… Take one of those circulating city bikes, swing out the kickstand and you have your personal urban exercise bike! That’s it, so simple but nevertheless people are still paying for biking sessions in their local fitness studio. An absurdity. ...

Benjamin Gaulon, aka Recyclism, has an interesting hobby: For his 2.4 GHz project, he installs wireless video receiver in public space to hack into wireless CCTV cameras… This device (which is now part of consumers popular products), can be used for wireless surveillance cameras, but it can also be used for parents to monitor their children. Such systems are becoming more popular as they get cheaper. But what most users of those devices don’t realise is that they are broadcasting the signal. (2.4 GHz Project) ...

If you start loving to watch lime-lapse videos of metropolises from around the world (here Dubai and here New York & Istanbul), there’s no way to stop watching them… Recently I stumbled upon this very time-lapse video of the Russian capital Moscow. Belarusian photographer and film-maker zweizwei created this beauty around four months ago, using different camera bodies and several lenses. It shows Moscow at its best and is in my eyes, one of the best time-lapse city portraits I ever watched! ...

With a 15 meters high Space Invader game, urban installation artist Luke Egan aka Filthy Luker just invaded Manchester! Made of road work barriers and traffic cones the Space Invader game is fully interactive - the required software comes from Jnr Hacksaw - what makes it becoming something like a center of attraction in the city of Manchester… The project is a work in progress and under deconstruction, coming to some scaffolding near you soon! ...

Top of Shard Tower The Shard Tower already dominates London’s skyline and will become Europe’s tallest building when construction work is finished. Nevertheless, some urban explorers (as you could already watch in the Crack The Surface documentary) entered the Shard’s construction site and took some astonishing photographs, as Sky News recently broadcasted… Urbex Photograph: Around the globe, urban explorers discover secret places, document decaying buildings or walk along subway tracks. If you’re interested in the resulting photographs, check out the Top Urban Exploration Photographers! ...

Looks like the Soviets really built an UFO, or at least a building which looks like an RLV, a reusable launch vehicle… According to Timothy Allen the Communist UFO-shaped Buzludzha building (pronounced Buz’ol’ja) in the Balkan Mountains is Bulgaria’s largest ideological monument to Communism which was left to ruin after the revolution in 1989. Nowadays, Buzludzha is still there, icebound, almost forgotten and abandoned, with stories that sound like parts of science fiction classics… ...

In 1929, Johnny Weissmuller, an Austrian-Hungarian-born American swimmer and actor best known for playing Tarzan in movies, inaugurated the Piscine Molitor (also known as the Piscines Auteuil-Molitor or the Grands établissements balnéaires d’Auteuil) swimming pool in Paris (what is why I call it Tarzan’s swimming pool). As well as the beautiful La Jarry, this wonderful Art Deco building, which hosted the popular introduction of the bikini by Louis Réard in 1946, is planned to be destroyed in 2012! ...

That the Parisian underground includes one of the most spectacular tunnel systems throughout Europe is general knowledge not only since the renowned National Geographic published a nice photo gallery of the catacombs. Now, after their phenomenal New York project with 100 artists mounting an unsanctioned show in abandoned tunnels during a one-year period, also the Underbelly team around Pac and Workhorse discovered the deep paths worming under the French capital and brought some of the most creative heads - including C215, Futura, Conor Harrington, How and Nosm, Saber, and SheOne - to create the Underbelly Project Paris! ...

Out of Sight - Urban Art / Abandoned Spaces, which was published just this month, is the book you want to have if you’re an urban explorer and urban art enthusiast in equal measure! The book features those artists who appreciate the privacy of and feeling in abandoned spaces and presents in that way mind-blowing urban artworks in decayed factories, abandoned warehouses and industrial sites! Not all art craves attention, some of it hides in secret places. Some of it is buried treasure, out in the urban wilderness, left scattered in empty rooms of derelict buildings like strange markings left by an unknown tribe… ...

Urban Exploring | The catacombs under Paris are definitely worth a visit: Deep dark tunnels, skulls and Bones, legal and illegal clubs, graffiti, mural artworks and fire-breather - The Parisian underground is a living theme and exploring park for people (the so-called cataphiles) who want to dip into another, sometimes surreal world… Not long ago, the renowned National Geographic published a nice photo gallery of the catacombs and wrote: Paris has a deeper and stranger connection to its underground than almost any city, and that underground is one of the richest. The arteries and intestines of Paris, the hundreds of miles of tunnels that make up some of the oldest and densest subway and sewer networks in the world, are just the start of it. Under Paris there are spaces of all kinds: canals and reservoirs, crypts and bank vaults, wine cellars transformed into nightclubs and galleries. Most surprising of all are the carrières—the old limestone quarries that fan out in a deep and intricate web under many neighborhoods, mostly in the southern part of the metropolis. (Neil Shea, National Geographic) ...