Queering Urbanism

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.

'Another Country' expands the possibilities of queer studies beyond the city limits, investigating the lives of rural queers across the United States, from faeries in the Midwest to lesbian separatist communes on the coast of Northern California.

The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader expands our understanding of urbanism, interiority, and publicness from a global perspective across time and cultures. From ancient origins to speculative futures, this book explores the rich complexities of interior urbanism as an interstitial socio-spatial condition. Employing an interdisciplinary lens, it examines the intersectional characteristics that define interior urbanism. Fifty chapters investigate the topic in relation to architecture, planning, urban design, interior architecture, interior design, archaeology, engineering, sociology, psychology, and geography. Individual essays reveal the historical, typological, and morphological origins of interior urbanism, as well as its diverse scales, occupancies, and atmospheres. The Interior Urbanism Theory Reader will appeal to scholars, practitioners, students, and enthusiasts of urbanism, architecture, planning, interiors, and the social sciences.

Although the last decade has seen steady progress towards wider acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals, LGBTQ residential and commercial areas have come under increasing pressure from gentrification and redevelopment initiatives. As a result many of these neighborhoods are losing their special character as safe havens for sexual and gender minorities. Urban planners and municipal officials have sometimes ignored the transformation of these neighborhoods and at other times been complicit in these changes. Planning and LGBTQ Communities brings together experienced planners, administrators, and researchers in the fields of planning and geography to reflect on the evolution of urban neighborhoods in which LGBTQ populations live, work, and play. The authors examine a variety of LGBTQ residential and commercial areas to highlight policy and planning links to the development of these neighborhoods. Each chapter explores a particular urban context and asks how the field of planning has enabled, facilitated, and/or neglected the specialized and diverse needs of the LGBTQ population. A central theme of this book is that urban planners need to think "beyond queer space" because LGBTQ populations are more diverse and dispersed than the white gay male populations that created many of the most visible gayborhoods. The authors provide practical guidance for cities and citizens seeking to strengthen neighborhoods that have an explicit LGBTQ focus as well as other areas that are LGBTQ-friendly. They also encourage broader awareness of the needs of this marginalized population and the need to establish more formal linkages between municipal government and a range of LGBTQ groups. Planning and LGBTQ Communities also adds useful material for graduate level courses in planning theory, urban and regional theory, planning for multicultural cities, urban geography, and geographies of gender and sexuality.

In Building Sex, architecture critic and curator Aaron Betsky looked at how traditional gender roles have influenced architecture. In Queer Space, he examines how same-sex desire is creating an entirely new architecture. Gay men and women are in the forefront of architectural innovation, reclaiming abandoned neighborhoods, redefining urban spaces, and creating liberating interiors out of hostile environments. Queer spaces have arisen out of the experiences of homosexuals in a straight culture. Often forced to hide their true nature, gay men and women have turned inward, playing with the norms of interior space and creating environments of stagecraft and celebration where they can define themselves with out fear. Their experiments point the way to an architecture that can free us all from the imprisoning structures and spaces of the modern city.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016 Rural queer experience is often hidden or ignored, and presumed to be alienating, lacking, and incomplete without connections to a gay culture that exists in an urban elsewhere. Queering the Countryside offers the first comprehensive look at queer desires found in rural America from a genuinely multi-disciplinary perspective. This collection of original essays confronts the assumption that queer desires depend upon urban life for meaning. By considering rural queer life, the contributors challenge readers to explore queer experiences in ways that give greater context and texture to modern practices of identity formation. The book’s focus on understudied rural spaces throws into relief the overemphasis of urban locations and structures in the current political and theoretical work on queer sexualities and genders. Queering the Countryside highlights the need to rethink notions of “the closet” and “coming out” and the characterizations of non-urban sexualities and genders as “isolated” and in need of “outreach.” Contributors focus on a range of topics—some obvious, some delightfully unexpected—from the legacy of Matthew Shepard, to how heterosexuality is reproduced at the 4-H Club, to a look at sexual encounters at a truck stop, to a queer reading of TheWizard of Oz. A journey into an unexplored slice of life in rural America, Queering the Countryside offers a unique perspective on queer experience in the modern United States and Canada.

When imagined in relation to other regions of the United States, the Midwest is often positioned as the norm, the uncontested site of white American middle-class heteronormativity. This characterization has often prevailed in scholarship on sexual identity, practice, and culture, but a growing body of recent queer work on rural sexualities, transnational migration, regional identities, and working-class culture suggests the need to understand the Midwest otherwise. This special issue offers an opportunity to think with, through, and against the idea of region. Rather than reinforce the idea of the Midwest as a core that naturalizes American cultural and ideological formations, these essays instead open up possibilities for unraveling the idea of the heartland. The introduction provides a discussion of the theoretical and critical motivations for understanding the middle as a queer vantage, while the six articles focus on social movements, queer community networks, Midwest-based expressive cultures, and local and diasporic rearticulations of racial, gender, and sexual politics. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Martin Manalansanis Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Chantal Nadeau is Professor and Chair of Gender and Women's Studies, and Richard T. Rodríguez and Siobhan B. Somerville are Associate Professors in the Department of English.

Current planning practices have largely neglected the needs of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) community for safe urban spaces in which to live, work, and play. This volume fills the gap in the literature on the planning and development of queer spaces, and highlights some of the resistance within the planning profession to incorporate gay and lesbian concerns into the planning mainstream. Planning lags behind other disciplines concerned with queer urban issues. In contrast, the field of geography has developed a rich sub-specialty in the geographies of sex and gender that examines spaces and the variety of non-heteronormative populations that inhabit them. This volume brings together both planners and geographers with experience in planning to examine some of the fundamental assumptions of urban planning as they relate to the LGBT community. The first few chapters are substantial revisions and expansions of earlier influential work on planning for non-conformist populations and the preservation of LGBT neighborhoods. Subsequent chapters comprise original contributions that draw on the rich literature from queer theory, planning theory and the geography of sexualities to explore the ways that nonconformist populations struggle with heteronormative expectations embedded in planning theory and procedures. These chapters consider the intersection of planning and a range of populations including transgendered and gender variant individuals. Subsequent chapters examine the ways that variations in the scale of urban and regional governance influence local politics around the implementation of more equitable policies at the city level. In addition, several chapters critically examine the implications of using the tolerance component of Richard Florida's "creative cities" arguments. The final section consists of two chapters that explore the ways that urban planning regimes have been used to regulate sexually-oriented businesses and the way this regulation of sexualized spaces has implications on the heteronormativity of plans and planners. In summary, these chapters interrogate planning practice and pose questions for academic and professional planners about the ways that the queer community and its needs for spaces have shifted. What do those changes mean for the practice of planning 40 years after the North American Stonewall rebellion and looking forward to the next 40 years? To what extent does existing planning practice constrain the evolution of queer communities or seek to commercialize such spaces to the benefit of large developers and the detriment of marginalized members of the community? How might planning practice change to provide more direct support to the evolution of queer people and the spaces in which they live? This volume draws on these insights as well as the experiences of the various authors to lay out possible future directions for the field of planning to create truly inclusive urban areas.

This is the first book devoted to Frank Lloyd Wright's designs for remaking the modern city. Stunningly comprehensive, The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright presents a radically new interpretation of the architect’s work and offers new and important perspectives on the history of modernism. Neil Levine places Wright’s projects, produced over more than fifty years, within their historical, cultural, and physical contexts, while relating them to the theory and practice of urbanism as it evolved over the twentieth century. Levine overturns the conventional view of Wright as an architect who deplored the city and whose urban vision was limited to a utopian plan for a network of agrarian communities he called Broadacre City. Rather, Levine reveals Wright’s larger, more varied, interesting, and complex urbanism, demonstrated across the span of his lengthy career. Beginning with Wright’s plans from the late 1890s through the early 1910s for reforming residential urban neighborhoods, mainly in Chicago, and continuing through projects from the 1920s through the 1950s for commercial, mixed-use, civic, and cultural centers for Chicago, Madison, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Baghdad, Levine demonstrates Wright’s place among the leading contributors to the creation of the modern city. Wright’s often spectacular designs are shown to be those of an innovative precursor and creative participant in the world of ideas that shaped the modern metropolis. Lavishly illustrated with drawings, plans, maps, and photographs, this book features the first extensive new photography of materials from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives. The Urbanism of Frank Lloyd Wright will serve as one of the most important books on the architect for years to come.