Queer Infrastructures
Tuesday 12th September 2023,
5.30 pm networking for 6:00-7:00pm lecture,
Singapore Theatre, Glyn Davis Building, The University of Melbourne
Parkville Campus
Abstract: Queer Infrastructures
How do LGBTQ+ populations and the politics of sexual and gender diversity connect with urban governance and planning? This lecture will present case studies from the orbit of large, international-scale infrastructure projects that have unfolded in London in the first decades of the twenty-first century. It will consider different scales: from international policymaking and activism to local campaigns and planning interventions, to the venues – bars, cafés, nightclubs, community centres – which are the most visible surface of the infrastructure created and inhabited by diverse LGBTQ+ populations.
These case studies unfold into international conversations about sexual and gender diversity, human rights and sustainable urban development, shifts in the imagination of local and global relations in policy, theory and activism, recent conceptions of infrastructural urbanism, decolonial movements, and to changing evaluations of the heritage of minoritized populations and of the culture and economies of cities after dark.
Biography
Ben Campkin is the author of Queer Premises: LGBTQ+ Venues in London Since the 1980s (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023) and Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (2013), which won the Urban Communication Foundation Jane Jacobs Award (2015) and was commended in the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Awards for Research (2014). He is Professor of Urbanism and Urban History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and Co-Director of UCL’s Urban Laboratory. Publications include Urban Pamphleteer (co-founder and co-editor, 2013–), Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies (co-editor, 2016), Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression (co-editor, 2017) and Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (co-editor, 2007). He was the UK principal investigator on the EU Horizon 2020 project Night-Spaces: Migration, Culture and Integration in Europe (2019–23).
