ABSTRACT
Certain places offer us the freedom to explore, fantasize, and lose ourselves in alternative pasts and alternative futures. They evoke what I in this chapter call imaginative authenticity. Despite being closely related to Wang’s (1999) concept of existential authenticity, imaginative authenticity refers to a more open-ended space of imagination that presupposes that the stories about a place are largely hidden or untold. In the first part of this chapter, I provide a phenomenological characterization of imaginative authenticity based on an empirical study of urban explorers: people who spend their free time searching for and documenting abandoned places and modern ruins. The ways in which they appropriate and discuss these sites illustrate the significance of open-ended decay as a source of imaginative authenticity, which in turn gives shape to a certain mode of touristic, or post-touristic, practice. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss the ambiguous role of social media in relation to imaginative authenticity. On the one hand, social media provide an arena for discussing and circulating spatial information that may guide urban explorers to the “right” places and assist them in their construction of personal representations of space. On the other hand, the escalating spread of urban exploration imagery through social media may also lead to spatial naming processes that interrupt imaginative authenticity, effectively breaking the spell of abandoned places.
