Queer Infrastructures: Inaugural Lecture - The Bartlett International Lectures

Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, Prof Ben Campkin will deliver his inaugural lecture.

This event forms part of The Bartlett International Lectures Spring 2022.

Abstract

Queer Infrastructures

Ben's inaugural lecture will consider the transportive qualities and local-global dynamics of London’s queer infrastructures, from the 1980s to the present. This will include the most visible surface of this infrastructure, in the form of collaborations to create, sustain or adapt venues for LGBTQ+ populations, between coalitions of activists, businesses and local government. The lecture will look at the entwining of venues and planning processes in times of crisis: from the Greater London Council-funded initiatives of the 1980s, to recent designations of ‘Assets of Community Value’ in contexts of densification. How have queer premises been accommodated within changing policy conceptions of cultural infrastructure, heritage, or equalities practice? How have diverse LGBTQ+ populations identified with venues, while often critiquing them, and striving for more radical and inclusive future spaces? How have different typologies attached to, traversed, or disrupted dominant models of urban development and social reproduction?

Speaker biography

Ben Campkin is Professor of Urbanism and Urban History in The Bartlett School of Architecture, Co-Director of UCL Urban Laboratory and Faculty Lead for The Bartlett at UCL East. He is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (2013), which won the 2015 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation Award, and Queer Premises: LGBTQ+ Venues in London Since the 1980s (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022). Ben’s transdisciplinary research focuses on imaginaries and practices of urban change in relation to questions of equality, diversity and inclusion. He leads the UCL component of the Humanities in the European Research Area-funded Collaborative Research Project Night-spaces, Migration, Culture and Integration in Europe (NITE).

More information

• Visit Prof Ben Campkin's profile

Image: The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London, 2020, digital scan, UCL Urban Laboratory/NITE