The World Of Urban Decay

Photographer Martin ten Bouwhuijs's regular urban exploration missions throughout Western Europe have culminated in this second collection of images made in abandoned buildings throughout the world. Each location is described in a brief history.

Photographer Martin ten Bouwhuijs's regular urban exploration missions throughout Western Europe have culminated in this collection of haunting images made in abandoned hospitals, morgues, monasteries, power plants, schools, factories, swimming pools, and castles. Each location is described in a brief history. Capturing the venues in various states of neglect, these photographs reveal remnants of once-habitable spaces: from furniture still in place but covered in thick dust to dramatic vaulted ceilings speckled in mold and water stains to walls that have given way in complete disrepair. More than 150 dramatic images continually heighten anticipation by showing long views down empty corridors and wide views of rooms with doors that lead elsewhere you never really know what you are going to see around the next corner.

A roleplaying game of fast-moving beat 'em up action – take to the streets, take on the gangs, take back your City! As night falls over the City, a storm is brewing in the streets below. The gangs have taken over. They rule with an iron fist, their will enforced by armies of thugs and brawlers. Gutters run red. The authorities have either sold out or are stretched too thin to make a difference. Might makes right. You will not tolerate this any longer. Uniting with a crew of like-minded individuals, you head out to reclaim your home, protecting neighborhoods, inspiring others to take a stand, and clashing with gang enforcers as you work your way through their ranks, seeking to cut the head from the snake coiled at the heart of the City. Urban Decay is a roleplaying game of beat 'em up action inspired by classic arcade video games, movies, and comic-books. Players take on the roles of warriors, martial artists, vigilantes, and ordinary citizens, taking to the streets to face the gangs that control the City and to save the people and places they love. Streamlined character and crew creation produces distinct, capable heroes with shared goals and bonds, while the versatile Clash system emphasizes the brutal, gritty street-fights in which these heroes will find themselves. The City itself is built collaboratively, with players working together to define the districts and neighborhoods for which their heroes will go to war.

Urban explorers find the beauty layers of history, multi-hued peeling paint, antique objects, ancient initials in the dust and the other physical manifestations of memory that abandoned, impermanent urban spaces manifest.

**THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER** Magnus Walker is one of life’s originals. Serial entrepreneur, fashion designer, TV presenter, motivational speaker and one of the world’s most prolific Porsche collectors, the dreadlocked, tattooed hoarder of individual creativity is a very modern incarnation of success. Raised in the urban decay of Thatcher’s Britain, Sheffield-born Magnus Walker left school with just two O levels and drifted for several years before buying a one-way ticket to America. Now, 30 years and three successful businesses later, by following his instincts, rejecting convention and pursuing his passions Magnus has succeeded against all the odds. Here, for the first time, is the full story of his journey from a Northern steel town to the bright lights of Hollywood, from a boy with little hope to an anti-establishment hero. Along the way we’ll witness his potent combination of inspiration and graft, discover his motivations and his ambitions, and come to understand his philosophy and the keys to his success. Inspiring and exhilarating, URBAN OUTLAW is a compelling tale of succeeding through pure instinct and determination by a man who was brave enough to follow his own path.

In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment. Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert

It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us—the cities we live in—that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity. Explore Everything is an account of the author’s escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.

Blood-thirsty carnosaurs ... gangs of hipsters .... post-apocalypse Seattle and Los Angeles are to die for. How did it all begin? That depends on where you were and who you ask. In some places it started with the weather—which quickly became unstable and began behaving in impossible ways. In still others it started with the lights in the sky, which shifted and pulsed and could not be explained. Elsewhere it started with the disappearances: one here, a few there, but increasing in occurrence until fully three quarters of the population had vanished. Either way, there is one thing on which everyone agrees—it didn’t take long for the prehistoric flora and fauna to start showing up (often appearing right where someone was standing, in which case the two were fused, spliced, amalgamated). It didn’t take long for the great Time-displacement called the Flashback—which was brief but had aftershocks, like an earthquake—to change the face of the earth. These are the stories of a group of experienced survivors and their incredible machine, Gargantua: How they came to possess it, and what they did with it after. This is the recounting of a heist in Seattle in which they barely escaped with their lives and a journey to Lost Angeles to find their forever home--which just happened to be occupied when they got there. Welcome to the Flashback.