Project UrbEx documents videogame creator Ikumi Nakamura's decade-long infiltration of restricted and forgotten sites worldwide — derelict shipyards, military bases, cooling towers, and haunted hotels that feel lifted from a game world.
About This Book
Urban exploration occupies a strange territory between trespass and art, and Nakamura navigates it with the sensibility of someone who has spent a career building worlds from imagination. Project UrbEx moves through locations most people will never access — colossal industrial ruins, mystical islands, top-secret military sites — framing them not as spectacle but as evidence that mystery still exists in the physical world. The book is structured around Nakamura's personal travel diaries, printed on narrower pages in rich Pantone black, alongside exclusively commissioned manga that bring her characteristic humour into the narrative. It is a document of obsession as much as exploration, and a compelling argument for looking at abandoned space through a creative rather than purely architectural lens.
Key Features
- 256 pages of location photography, personal travel diary entries, and exclusive commissioned manga illustration
- Foreword by videogame designer-turned-photographer Liam Wong
- Sites include derelict shipyards, military bases, cooling towers, haunted hotels, and remote islands
- Published by Thames and Hudson, ISBN 9780500026946
What You'll Discover
- How Nakamura's background in videogame world-building shapes the way she reads and photographs abandoned environments
- The travel diary format — printed on narrower pages in Pantone black — as a structural device that separates personal reflection from photographic documentation
- Exclusively commissioned manga sequences that extend the narrative into a third creative register, beyond photography and prose
- The philosophical dimension of urban exploration: the idea that disused spaces hold an invisible world accessible only to those willing to push past conventional boundaries
About the Author
Ikumi Nakamura is a famed videogame creator who has spent over a decade pursuing urban exploration across restricted and forgotten locations worldwide. Known for her boundary-pushing creative practice, she works across multiple mediums — photography, writing, and visual storytelling — approaching each with the same world-building instincts she brings to game design.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 256
- Dimensions: 28.9 x 21.5 x 2.6 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9780500026946
- Publisher: Thames and Hudson
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Designers and architects interested in the aesthetics of ruin and adaptive space; videogame creatives and concept artists; photographers working with abandoned environments; readers drawn to the intersection of visual culture, travel writing, and urban exploration.