Rooftopping is popular on Instagram, but the risks are high

"Rooftoppers" are happy to take photos on top of skyscrapers and share them on social networks. Critics call them reckless.

French army sergeant Remi Lucidi died far from a battlefield. His body was found last week next to a Hong Kong skyscraper where he was spotted near the roof.

In his spare time, Mr. Lucidi, 30, was "shorthand for someone who takes photos and selfies from the top of high-rise buildings, sometimes by intrusion. After his death was reported, some Instagram users debated the value and purpose of his art, which involved climbing ledges and antennae in cities across Europe, Asia and the Middle East. .

For friends and admirers, Mr. Lucidi's breathtaking photos were the work of a talented and restless adventurer. For its critics, it was a case study in reckless risk-taking.

This debate reflects tensions within a larger movement called "urban exploration" or "urbex", one that is often associated with people breaking in to tell the story of abandoned properties. Rooftopping is part of urbex, but many of its practitioners are more interested in producing social media content than exploring fringe urban landscapes with an almost academic spirit.

To the extreme For example, Russian model Viki Odintcova hangs from a skyscraper in Dubai without safety equipment. Her stunt generated more than 1.6 million views after it was posted on Instagram in 2017, and many reviews. Your life,” read the title of a Forbes comment. (She did not respond to a request for comment.) Several other people around the world have died doing rooftop work in recent years.

Critics sometimes come from the urban exploration movement. A prominent rooftooper, Toronto photographer Neil Ta, quit the practice a decade ago, saying he was disillusioned to see the hobby turn into a contest to see who could take the most photos. dangerous. Other reviewers are urbex veterans who oppose the rooftop philosophy.

"Rooftopping is more about the thrill and the experience of 'to be in high, dizzying and perilous places, as urbex explores abandoned places in a way that is safer, more documentary and historical in nature,' said HK Urbex, a collective of masked explorers in Hong Kong, in a statement.

HK Urbex, whose members venture to abandoned or dangerous sites across Chinese territory to explore its history, said rooftopers died around the world due to a combination of inexperience, overconfidence and the desire to take exciting photos.

"A life is not worth not a like on social media," the collective said.

Theo Kindynis, a sociologist who has studied rooftopping, said that for many urban explorers, the young rooftopers who indulge in made-for-Instagram antics are known as "dangle kiddies." the same tropes – legs dangling in front of a cityscape, selfie stick atop a mast, silhouette on a ledge – that were already becoming cliché in 2016,” said Mr Kindynis, a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, referring to Mr. Lucidi.