Queering Urbanism Lecture Series

Petra Doan is Professor in Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University. She conducts research on planning issues surrounding the LGBTQIA+ community, having edited two critically acclaimed books ‘Queerying Planning: Challenging Heteronormative Assumptions and Reframing Planning Practice’ and ‘Planning and LGBTQ Communities: The Need for Inclusive Queer Space’. She also works in planning for marginal communities in less developed areas in Togo, Cote d’Ivoire, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Botswana, Egypt, and Jordan. 

This presentation reviews the relationship between urban planning and LGBTQ spaces in North America/ Europe and considers the usefulness of these lessons for urban planners working in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. The author uses a queer and post-colonial perspective to deconstruct these experiences and consider what might be relevant in the context of several cases from the Global South (Istanbul, Cairo, and Cape Town).

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This research situates within the anxieties of doing geographies of sexualities from Global South and attempts at mapping the city of desires for those located at its Social, political, economic and spatial peripheries. Mapping Dalit queer lives in the city of Delhi, it uses auto-ethnographic storytelling as decolonizing and de-brahmanising queer research. It explores the possibilities in reading the city through an archive of sex - invisible, but made possible within its ephemeral frame. It asks for and of the bodies that produce, practice and live through these ephemeral cities, the ways they survive their desires within geopolitics of their everyday lives.

With circulations of a more global gay aesthetic that is produced within the dreaminess and aspirations of a world class city (images that flow from North to South and accessible to only few and through the logic of respectability), many queer lives and their histories and geographies are often overshadowed by this glamour. My work navigates through these shadowed geographies and foregrounds these stories as sites of sexual freedom which erupt and collapse for many within the city’s risky and precarious geographies. In the process, the research articulates the power in ephemerality in enabling a geographical imagination of utopia that is messy and performative; and equally, expresses the potential of an intersectional understanding of queerness from Global South.

Dr Dhiren Borisa is a Dalit queer activist, poet and a urban sexual geographer and is currently employed at Jindal Global Law school as an Assistant Professor. He is also an honorary visiting fellow at School of Geography, Geology and Environment at University of Leicester, UK. Dhiren attained his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on Queer Cartographies of Desires in Delhi. His research engages with sexual mappings and makings of cities from an intersectional and decolonial lens both among queer spaces in India and in diasporic queer worldings.

This event will explore queer futurity through the lens of spatial and environmental imaginaries. It will ask how modes of queer futurity engage with the future, particularly when the pandemic and climate change have highlighted the 'queerness' of this future. Tim Waterman, Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, will be in conversation with Sarah Ensor, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Both Tim and Sarah bring a nuanced and varied approach to thinking through queer futurity in today's world, and to the question of how we plan, design, and build futures which centre the environment, community, and care.

Tim Waterman's research explores imaginaries - moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian - of power and democracy and how they shape of public space and public life. His most recent book is The Landscape of Utopia: Writings about Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design.

Sarah Ensor’s work engages the intersections between queer and environmental thought in American literature from the nineteenth century through to the present. She is currently completing her first book, tentatively titled Terminal Regions: Queer Environmental Ethics in the Absence of Futurity, which turns to queer theory and literature to trace how temporariness and (apparent) futurelessness can engender, rather than preclude, forms of community, persistence, and care. 

This event explores the meaning, significance and challenges associated with queer and queering methods in architecture and urban planning. Amin Ghaziani, Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia and co-editor of Imagining Queer Methods (2019) with Matt Brim, Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, City University of New York, will speak about the origin and framing of their book and share some reflections about the problems and possibilities of queer/queering methods in research on gaybourhoods.

Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia. He researches topics that range from measurement to mobilization, the metropolis, and modes of inequality. Despite this diversity, Prof. Ghaziani consistently investigates how changing societal attitudes and public opinions about sexuality affect its cultural, political, and spatial expressions. He uses this general line of thinking to contribute to theoretical conversations in urban sociology, culture, the sociology of sexualities, and social movements.

Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies at the College of Staten Island and Graduate Center, City University of New York. His most recent book, Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (Duke UP, 2020), reorients the field of queer studies away from exclusionary institutions of higher education and toward working-class colleges, students, theories, and pedagogies. Brim is the author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (U of Michigan P, 2014), as well as an open access study guide for teaching the HIV/AIDS activist documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012). He coedited the collection Imagining Queer Methods (NYU Press, 2019) and has two other coedited collections forthcoming in fall 2022: Queer Sharing in the Marketized University (Routledge) and Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education (Zed Books). Brim has published in venues including the Journal of Homosexuality, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Gay and Lesbian Review, and The Baffler. A former general editor of WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, he is currently an associate editor for the open access James Baldwin Review and a reader for the open access Amerikastudien/American Studies. Brim co-directs the CUNY/Andrew W. Mellon “Transformative Learning in the Humanities” grant.

For the final Queering Urbanism Lecture of 2021/2022, please join us for a hybrid event in room 403 Senate House, University of London, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU. There will be a social with light refreshments following the event for those who can join in person. For those joining from afar, you will also be able to attend virtually.

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