Urban exploration: Secrecy and information creation and sharing in a hobby context

•Urban explorers revealed themselves as active participants in creating information in both purposed and incidental ways.•They associated creativity with documenting abandoned sites through photography.•Urban explorers selectively shared their work within and external to the hobby through social media and websites.•The process of creation linked urban explorer to the hobby.•Secrecy and social deviation offered alternative perspectives to accepted social norms around information behavior.

Urban exploration is a hobby that involves visiting and capturing visual images of urban infrastructure often no longer used, including sewers, towers, factories, and military instalments. Hobbyists then frequently share their visual content via social media sites. The urban explorer's multi-layered construction of content offers an important opportunity to understand how people create information and share experiences and content in a hobby context. Data were gathered through face-to-face interviews with 17 urban explorers from Ireland and the United Kingdom and an analysis of urban explorers' digital presence. Results suggest that urban explorers believe their hobby serves both personal and civic purposes. Urban explorers' creative hobby behaviors further lead them to secretive information behaviors.