Unlock the Secrets of Urban Exploration with Geoff Manaugh's A Burglar's Guide to the City

Ratty Bee: Which is to say: this book makes you think intriguing thoughts you might not otherwise have had.

United Kingdom on May 18, 2023

Jonathan Turner: A thoughtful and meticulously researched study of burglary’s relationship to architecture, taking in everything from LAPD helicopters to Victorian master criminals and DIE HARD along the way. Fascinating stuff, though it could have afforded to dive a little deeper into some of the more interesting corners.

United Kingdom on Jan 31, 2022

Susan Stepney: There is a standard way to use a building: enter by the doors, look though the windows. There is a standard way to use a city: travel along the roads. Burglars don’t use buildings and cities in standard way: some enter buildings though windows, drop through hatches and ceilings, cut through walls; some move around cities through tunnels, either pre-existing or self-dug. Manaugh describes many of these alternate uses: some exceedingly clever, some just plain dumb. And he describes attempts to thwart the burglars, from law-enforcement helicopter patrols to high security panic rooms.

I have come across, in fiction if not in reality, many of the concepts here, but they are all engagingly presented. One aspect I found particularly intriguing was how law enforcement could get lost in certain kinds of locations. In one case it was helicopter pilots over a regular grid of streets, in another it was officers on the ground in a huge building with several identical parts. Both were lost in “a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”. We know the solution to this: drop landmarks. Law enforcement would like home owners to paint identifiers on their roofs. Alternatively,...

United Kingdom on Jan 01, 2020

somnomania: The developers of the Dishonored video games recommended this book, and I can see why. It's not necessarily a topic I would've been interested in otherwise, which is a shame, because all the info covered in it is extremely interesting. Burglary and architecture as they relate to each other are explored in depth throughout history, because they've been intertwined for as long as humans had belongings that were desirable to others, and places to put them. The different types of urban environments shaping the types of burglary present in them was also fascinating to read about; how the prominence of highways and car traffic in Los Angeles led to the need for a helicopter-based police network, and how the density of London spawned closed-circuit monitoring at street level, on practically every street. The book also delves into the idea of smart cities (which is concept that's becoming more a reality every year) and how those would be burgled, and the history of how burglary itself has been defined (going from "unlawful entry of a house" to some of the absurdly specific constraints that have mostly been added for singular instances).

As someone who plays video games, often with...

United States on May 13, 2019

Bernie Gourley: This is a book about how people exploit the architecture and infrastructure of cities to abscond with other people’s property. Manaugh shows us both how the masterminds of burglary think outside the box “Ocean’s Eleven” style, as well as how the dim dull-wits and junkies botch burglaries in hilarious ways. In the process, the author also shines a light on the ways in which the law enforcement community has had to update its technological and tactical capabilities to counter these threats.

The book contains seven chapters. The first chapter lays the groundwork, particularly through discussion of the aforementioned extremes. On one hand, there is George Leonidas Leslie, an architect turned bank robber who would build accurate mockups in order to accurately rehearse robberies, and--on the other hand--there is the guy who used a ghillie suit disguise in a rock and mineral museum (which, not unsurprisingly, featured barren rock displays [down-playing vegetation] such that the guy stuck out like a guy in a ghillie suit in a rock display.)

Chapter 2 details what Manaugh learned about burglary and the fight against it through his interviews with law enforcement,...

United States on Jan 03, 2017

Trying to be helpful: This is the story of an author doing research for a book which will look at the way in which architecture and city planning influence crime and law enforcement in a locale. To write his book he gathers the details on some burglars and burglaries and does that journalistic thing of interviewing some experts on subjects relating to his subject matter. He keeps a fairly fulsome set of notes of these interviews including thumbnail sketches of the interviewees and other impressions on meeting his selected experts. Somehow this research for a book does not seem to have turned up enough material for the book he (perhaps) intended to write. Whilst he does have some real nuggets on the influence of architecture on crime they could probably be summarised in a couple of pages. Lacking material, the author has written about the process of gathering material.

I would really love to read a proper "Burglar's Guide to the City" which "offers a kind of criminal X-ray of our built environment". That sounds really interesting. I resent receiving this book instead.

In the interests of fairness and balance, let me add that the book is reasonably well-written and if I had been looking for...

United Kingdom on Aug 10, 2016

tallmanbaby: Geoff Manaugh is a professional journalist who is fascinated by architecture and cities. He looks like an intense slightly haunted character from an American indie film. His popular BldgBlog became a remarkable book. Now in a truly insightful piece of publishing chutzpah he has been commissioned and spent a few years pulling together this book on burglary and cities.

It is no surprise that there are not already a variety of books on this topic, but Manaugh manages to find a rich vein of fascinating material, from the etiquette of picking locks, to Ripley’s Believe it or Not style shenanigans from the pages of Harry Houdini.

This is the sort of high quality reportage that you can find in Wired or the Sunday Supplements, spinning a fascinating yarn out of some diverting topic. It is seldom predictable, never dull and just great fun.

United Kingdom on Apr 10, 2016