Urban Spirit Mapping

Košice is not only the main street or historical centre, which make up one per cent of town's total extent. The remaining underestimated, undiscovered and sidetracked 99% may not offer sights hundreds of years old, lovely aesthetics, easy access nor comfortable services. These disadvantages are balanced by intimity and unique atmosphere of untouched places.
 
There are loads of official books, publications, booklets, webpages and discs translated to many foreign languages dedicated to the former mentioned part of town. The latter, diverse, wide, unexplored and inexhaustible 99% is about to be treated by a few enthusiasts, percieving the town as a fully functional living organism.

Home town exploration, urban safari, industrial inheritage mapping, these are nowadays becoming attractive disciplines for young Cassovians (proud inhabitants of Košice) and their activities reach out to more and more people every day.

This group, in its own words, is working on amateur exploration of areas without public access. They concentrate on mapping such buildings as unused school, old hospital, semi-built hall. The term amateur exploration is not the most fitting one since the group uses architectonic and urban dictionaries and the documentation of places is very precise.

Results of exploration are of technical nature. It is obvious that the explorers love the adrenaline rush that comes along discovering the inside of closed, useless objects.

Faculty of arts' students apply their knowledge acquired at the departments of architecture, design, fine arts and new media when looking for magical places in Košice. Their approach to research differs from the documentative approach of Urban exploration. Their research looks more like happenings full of old rediscovered books, things of daily use and forgotten rubbish. They discover places to merge with their atmosphere, rather than infrastructure, the spirit is important. They concentrate on old houses, rooftops of suburban concrete blocks and old factories.

 

KSC is an international code for Košice airport as well as the main title of an alternative guide to the town. Publication that will finish its tour de printworks towards the end of this summer is created by NGO Východné pobrežie, a registered and official organization unlike the previous two non-formal research groups. Pocket sized book dedicates its 160 pages to the sidetracked 99% of town's extent. Employing history and fiction, subjectivity and nostalgia, city phenomenons and local peculiarities, KSC strives for mapping the spirit of the whole town, not just of some places.

 

These three groups are of course not the total sum nor the representative unit of all the activists and individuals working in the fields of exploration of the town's spirit. What gathers them is the passion for outskirts, nostalgia, concrete blocks and dead industry.