Brochu-Ingram. 2021. Reimagining Queer Infrastructure: Planning for ecologies of care (in a decolonizing world during multiple emergencies). Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. CRP3852 / CRP5852 / ARCH6408 Queer Space / Queering Space.
powerpoint presentation: 2021 March 19 Brochu-Ingram * Reimagining Queer Infrastructure
synopsis
At a time when many businesses, services, and spaces crucial for LGBTQ populations are being transformed and are even closing, planning has a heightened role in community development. This discussion explores how the spaces, ecologies, and political economies of LGBT2S communities function together (though more often disjointedly) as crucial forms of social infrastructure. Through a range of opportunities and services from socializing, entertainment, and culture to protection, education and health care and to digital networks in corners of apps such as TikTok and GRINDR, queer networks take care of each other. Parsing this queerer infrastructure from broader social programs, cultural spaces, and neighbourhoods remains problematic. Queer infrastructure is always nested in larger contexts of community planning. So how can we as planners identify unmet needs and imagine new events, programmes, and spaces — especially in convulsing economies with renewed challenges to racial inequities and state violence? The notions of utopia explored by José Esteban Munoz are relevant as is the thread in its fifth chapter back to Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoir, The Motion of Light in the Water, linking science fiction writing and reimagining queer life. How can we explore new goals for community health while coping with and anticipating environmental change and new risks? A wide range of information is needed in planning exercises as well as new visions. Much of this data will involve new field research. As for new kinds of queer imagining, the cusp of contemporary queer culture and theorizing provides some starting points such as through three, 2020 works: A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray an indigenous tenant of GRINDR; Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by ecologist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson whose queer ecologies include animals and ancestors; and The Freezer Door by community activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jeff Chusid and Chris Hinman, of Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, for kindly inviting and supporting this discussion! Also thanks to Montréal-based, queer community mapper Lucas LaRochelle for this month‘s inspiring, three-part zoom workshop on queer mapping, mutual aid, data opacity, and interactive websites.
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Introduction:
Chaotic times for LGBTQ spaces & new needs for community planning
“Asin is watching for bird ethics. They are watching for how birds interact and communicate with each other. They are watching for how bird communities understand consent, care, self-determination, sovereignty. They are watching for queerness.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020
“Explain gentrification to me, says the ice cube.
Crushed ice, says the ice cube tray.
What about global warming, asks the ice cube. Even I’m
going to melt, says the ice cube tray. Let’s watch Olympic figure
skating.
Stop, you’re giving me nightmares, says the ice cube.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020
How do we defend, anticipate, and plan for the “messiness” of the lives of LGBTQ2S populations in a time when century-old patterns of queer community formation, space, and services are convulsing and being transformed? This essay explores how planners can work to defend, expand, and diversify the communal supports on which LGBTQ2S populations depend.
Unless referring solely to the physical space occupied by LGBTQ2S bodies, this essay replaces the term “queer space” with “queer infrastructure.” I have two reasons for preferring “infrastructure” over “space.” First queer infrastructure can function as the label a non-judgemental, conceptual ‘big tent’ that includes a wide range of needs and desires experienced by particular LGBTQ2S individuals, populations, and networks. Secondly, “queer infrastructure” is inherently spatial at multiple scales. As many of us know, getting the site details correctly is a huge task within community planning.
Three arguments are central to this discussion. First, a number of political economic factors have converged to make more comprehensive planning queer infrastructure both an important social goal and an imperative. Secondly, the imperative for planners to intervene more aggressively and transparently for queer infrastructure is based on rapid changes taking place that are undermining a century of modernist formations of social relations, space, and political economies – particularly in North America. The following are the most destructive processes: intensifying gentrification, broadening housing insecurity, and homelessness; the social isolation necessary to cope with the COVID pandemic which could be a harbinger of other highly communicable diseases;
the resulting economic contraction of the service sector; and the over-dependence on digital surrogates for actual social spaces. My third argument is that to conceive, plan, design, and operationalize new queer infrastructure, a wider range of data sets, than are typically used in community planning, will be necessary extending to imaginaries in contemporary culture. Today’s planners, engaged in supporting queer infrastructure, could have more impact on the shape of LGBTQ2S communities and supports for the coming decades than at any time in history.
The central question in this discussion is how can we query contemporary culture to more fully identify needs, pressures, and opportunities for new queer infrastructure especially for the more vulnerable LGBTQ2S populations? In trying to imagine a fully decolonized queer infrastructure for my region in north-western North America, I am inspired by the experimental writings of two indigenous scholars influential in Canada: Billy-Ray Belcourt’s 2020 A History of My Brief Body whose “NDN” and “indigiqueer” experiences often centre on being a young and sexually active, queer scholar and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s 2020 Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. In addition, The Freezer Door by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore explores queer community and alienation in Seattle. This work on LGBTQ2S infrastructure is inspired by the notions of queer futurity explored a decade ago by the late José Esteban Muñoz in his 2009, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, the fifth chapter of which explored “the massed bodies” of sexual dissidence was inspired Samuel R. Delany’s 1988 memoirs, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1960-1965. Delany’s memoirs, reflecting on the balm of imagination for a black and queer adolescent were written under the shadow of the first, most horrific, wave of AIDS in New York. More recently, Joshua Chambers-Letson’s 2018. After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life outlines how contemporary culture can lead on politics (and development of new infrastructure).
In this discussion, I move from reimagining care as infrastructure as planning goals and
protecting, expanding and diversifying queer infrastructure to exploring infrastructure for LGBTQ2S populations as part of ecosystems and queer ecologies as dynamic processes for both desire and survival. Moving on to more questions of equity and intersectionality, I explore decolonial & reparative processes. We can then explore data sets for identifying emerging needs and desires for new queer infrastructure moving on to imagining new spaces and modes of interaction including contemporary culture and collective reimagining. Out of new imaginings, new goals and practices for community repair and planning begin to emerge. I conclude reviewing some characteristics of infrastructures of queer repair and imagination.
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Problem statement:
Reimagining care as infrastructure as planning goals
“Esiban important practice number four: Take very, very good care of each
other, always, no matter what happens.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020
“[L]ife is at its most rewarding, productive, and pleasant when large numbers of
people understand, appreciate, and seek out interclass contact and communication
conducted in a mode of good will.”
Samuel R. Delany 1999
Times Square Red Times Square Blue
So how can we as planners identify unmet needs, gather enough wisdom and inspiration, and imagine with rightfully distrustful communities new events, programmes, and spaces — especially in convulsing economies with renewed challenges to racial inequities and state violence?
In his 2009 blueprint for queer futurity, Cruising Utopia, Muñoz, provides three principles for queer imaginings. First, there is “the essential need for an understanding of queerness as collectivity” and not as a assemblages of atomized consumers. Secondly, Muñoz worked with a modernization of Adorno’s notion of “utopia” as “the determined negation of that which merely is” giving us more space for negativity as part of a fuller imaginings of queer infrastructure. In other words, a bit of negativity can go a long way. A third principle is that a reading and analysis of a work of contemporary culture can be used “as a resource for the political imagination.” In discerning these utopian vistas, new “theory” for queer infrastructure often requires emotional processes highlighting the precarity of many populations that is exacerbated by today’s ecological emergencies.
But there are a lot of needs, expectations, and functions embodied in queer strategic sites and spaces, social interactions, and service programmes and queer infrastructure exists to facilitate the care necessary to maintain the following interactions and related self-sufficiency:
“community” ;
demographics (especially health);
networks;
conviviality;
needs;
mutual aid;
support systems;
events such as demonstrations, festivals, dance parties;
entertainment and cultural spaces;
erotic expression;
cultural expression;
repair;
businesses; and
political economies.
Today, queer life support is largely controlled through the market with a few programmes for the most vulnerable of LGBTQ2S population shunted off to poorly funded non-governmental organizations and charities. Imaginings and “imaginaries” of a more comprehensive, queer infrastructure re-centres LGBT2S participation in the communities, landscape and ecosystems through work towards mutual “care” nested in sustainable life support during an intensifying ecological emergency. And there are different kinds of “care” as with the example below.
I care for you (because we just spent a great night together).
I care for my aged parent.
We care for the compost in this community garden.
We care about climate change.
Let’s care for the earth.
Through articulating queer “ethics of care” as a basis for envisioning queer infrastructure, we can conceive of new initiatives to keep communities alive and entertained. Let’s return to Muñoz and cruising to utopia. Much is said in right-wing politics about the so-called “Nanny State” where underpaid female service workers provide most of the care. In contrast, I want to imagine a feminist ‘Daddy State’ with males doing a fair share of the care. In these imaginings, there is a dialectic of responding to vulnerabilities, as in provision of social services, versus creating more spaces for expressing desires and entertainment (for having fun and more). How this survival-and-pleasure tension is going to be played out, in coming decades under the worst challenges of particular ecological emergencies, remains unclear.
So if we accept the general consensus that we are living in ecosystems (often under duress) that support queer ecologies, so what? More specifically, it is time to explore what new investigations and analyses of ecosystems, life support, and infrastructure can mean for the work of theoreticians , designers and activists? I argue that the central goal of this work is to create better queer infrastructure centred on systems of mutual and collective “care.” But there are different forms of care some of which have been racist, misogynist, and homophobic too often imposed on vulnerable communities. So queer infrastructure is a break from political economies that drive forms of the malevolent “state” extending beyond the colonial, “neocolonial,” and modernist periods.
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Protecting, expanding & diversifying queer infrastructure
“What my body needs in order to be a body that’s not just a body of
needs.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020
“I’ve evoked this formulation in the past to understand the metaphysical thrust of queerness; in a late-capitalist world in which individuality is a fetish, a mass object of desire, a political anthem, what remains queer about queerness is that it entices us to gamble with the ‘I’ in the name of love, sex, friendship, art, and so forth.” Billy-Ray Belcourt
One of the most difficult aspects of beginning to conceive of planning for queer infrastructure is encompassing the diversity of functions, combinations of functions, durations, dependencies, and scales present today and those that are necessary for the future. In other words, we have needs for and from other human beings that manifest through various forms of infrastructure some of which is more focused on blends of LGBTQ2S networks. We need some of this infrastructure or we will die (or possibly be killed).
So what are more comprehensive definitions of queer infrastructure? The core are organic mechanisms for sufficiently equitable distribution of options for social contact, space, economic transactions, services, and knowledge across local LGBT2S populations as to remove basic forms of precarity in terms of survival, desire, and expression. Built environments, meeting, entertainment, and service delivery sites, and a myriad of economic relationships are being conceived, constructed and dismantled with increasing rapidity. And what was needed or economically or politically viable one decade could be redundant the next. As one example, the shift from gay and lesbian bars to on-line hook-ups is one of many rapid changes that have taken place over the last century.
Each form of infrastructure involves a political economy (with relationships to decolonial processes), local and global ecological relationships, and specific kinds of informal and formal design. To illustrate the range of infrastructures, the following are but a few examples:
demonstrations and marches
homes;
residential gardens;
public parks;
retail sites;
bars and clubs;
museums and archives;
art galleries, sculpture parks, and performance spaces;
sports facilities;
bath houses and sex clubs;
theatres and entertainment venues;
educational sites including parts of universities;
programmes for language supports and learning;
health delivery centres such as clinics and hospital;
protected areas and public sex areas;
social media; and
public art and indoor art works.
All of these strategic sites and transactions enable LGBT individuals to engage more fully in collective experiences and to enjoy and provide mutual care. These days, all of these strategic sites and transactions involve environmental costs and benefits including carbon footprints, output of plastics and other toxic substances, and impacts on local and global biological diversity.
LGBT populations, interactions, transactions, and spaces constitute distinct parts of human ecology with wider relationships across the biosphere. These queer ecologies increasingly involve social policy, planning, and design along with community development initiatives. In exploring some imperatives (and opportunities) for imagining and constructing new queer infrastructure in the face of multiple emergencies, I also argue for the use of a wider range of design practices. Spanning formal and professional design processes and the fabulously amateurish, practices can be rooted in vernacular and DIY approaches along with those grounded in new forms of community participation and ecological assessment.
Any human being who participates in queer transactions and sites, through expressions that are not normative in terms of gender or heterosexuality, enjoys local ecologies and in turn makes trophic and spatial decisions that are effectively forms of designs — albeit often intuitive, unprofessional, and short-term. Recognition of queer ecologies re-centres design processes on architectures of life support and human social service delivery. These queer designs are often nested within broader community plans and the market place as part of community development initiatives. It would be simplistic to envision these kinds of design as a new functionalism because LGBT2S expressing includes enjoyment of culture, pursuit of desires, and a wide range of consensual erotic expression uncoupled from reproduction.
In our first discussion in the University of California Berkeley College of Environmental Design 2021 (zoom) queer ecological imaginings seminars, there was a question of what happened to the early descriptions of queer architectures from the 1990s, notably the 1994 Queer Space exhibition in New York at Storefront Art and Architecture , the subsequent monograph by Aaron Betsky and the STUD and and Queers in Space anthologies. Much of the template for this research and theorizing was set in 1992 with publication of Beatriz Colomina’s Sexuality and Space. And the early theorizing on transgender “architectonics” by Lucas Crawford , though a generation later, was part of this movement of confirming a diversity of queer relationships to built space.
That initial moment of acknowledging queer architectures was quickly was appropriated by human geography and sociology, with scores of monographs and hundreds of peer reviewed papers, along with the late capitalist fusing of marketing and geomatics (what is often referred to as “GPS”) that a few years later contributed to the social dominance of social media from Facebook to Grindr to Twitter and TikTok as part of “surveillance capitalism.” In other words, the blueprints for expanding constellations of queer ecologies, over the last two decades, have only sometimes been those of social activists, community planners and collaborative designers. Rather, today’s queer ecologies are as much the result of market algorithms often mediated through social media. The problem is about the shifting lines between public and private space. Any new theory of design as having a beneficial impact on queer ecologies requires understanding of these public/private lines for a range of environments and for a wide spectrum of stakeholders – far beyond just infrastructures defined by entrepreneurial actors out to monetize transactions within LGBT2S populations.
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Infrastructure for LGBTQ2S populations as part of ecological life support (in a climate emergency)
“I can’t breathe.” Eric Garner, George Floyd &
Black Lives Matter (2014 and on and on)
“‘Emergency’ is a noun that yanks us from the normality of daily life, but its invocation also promises to grab us by the hand and lead us to safety. The addition of ‘state of’ here is also important insofar as it butts up against ’emergency’; it stretches the word out, which denotes its protracted nature, its velocity and scale. The emergency isn’t one emergency but a pileup of emergencies. On the other hand, the state of emergency can be understood as a singular emergency; it is the emergency of Canadian history.”
` Billy-Ray Belcourt 2020
After COVID and intensified gentrification and homelessness, the ‘name of the game’ for the majority of LGBTQ2S populations will be survival, housing, economic and professional development, and migration away from environmental emergencies. But there will be fewer and fewer places to go. In exploring new ways of conceiving and parsing out expanding and diversifying LGBT2S infrastructures, inherently communal, ecological and global processes can be viewed in the context of chronic “precarity” with ecosystems and communities experiencing various kind of “emergencies.” Given the communities from which I originated, in which I grew up, and currently with which I engage and depend, some of the following examples are from indigenous communities and territories.
Care is a lot of activities and is at the core of communities and culture. Care is often in response to emergencies, such as fire fighting, and today the Anthropocene as manifest in multiple climate crises is a series of indefinite emergencies. Queer infrastructure constitutes a series of strategies to make communities more functional in order to optimize and diversify opportunities for expression of all gender experiences and consensual eroticism, on one hand, and to prepare for, cope with, and in some cases preclude, a steady stream of emergencies that will make the twenty-first century.
Care is intertwined with social and ecological processes that insure both survival and pleasure. For example “care” for rural communities in the northern half of North America, where the majority of young people are often indigenous, requires a nest of spaces and interactions to avert the largest threat to queer youth that is too often suicide . And suicide, in the context of knowledge-keeping for communal survival, becomes a particularly horrific social and ecological contagion .
In a series of global emergencies, no one, the designer, the recipients (and victims) of designs, the scientist, the critic, the theoretician is immune from both ecological breakdown and, in the face of the enormity of problems, the breakdown of their spheres of responsibility. Perhaps the most fundamental difference between global culture since modernism and contemporary indigenous perspective is the relationship to deep time. Deep time is a set of experiences and a concept that often sustains communities. Deep time decentres architecture in design resituating buildings within communities, landscapes and ecosystems over a broader time-frame well beyond mythic and modern times.
To conceive of queer infrastructure, more comprehensive notions of place, community and region is necessary. Queer ecologies represent an early twenty-first century confluence of the progressive bankruptcy of homophobia and heteronormativity, a modernization of the sciences of biology and ecology, and the proliferation of ecological design practices often in response to both threats to life support and a range of violence from the overtly racist and homophobic to state neglect. In these dynamic new ecosystems, there is an ambiguity inherent in ‘queer’, as a relatively stable noun related to LGBT2S populations on one hand, and as a verb implying potentially indefinite transformation of notions of gender, erotic expression, and social bonds. So we have queer ecologies, which reliably support populations with same-sex intimacies, on one hand, and, on the other hand, the queering of ecosystems recombining acts, cultures, populations, and institutions under crises such as climate chaos and loss of biodiversity. In this context, there are intersections of some other related theoretical movements:
a. New Materialism , as a way to recognize a range of human and non-human intelligences and objects, has further destabilized the lines between humans and ecosystems and the primacy of hominid intelligence over other sentient beings ;
b. fuller understandings of climate change and the social implications of the Anthropocene especially for the survival of queer communities in the face of the exacerbation of social and regional disparities through unequal distribution of environmental risks and economic costs;
c. documentation of the fuller extent of indigenous legacies in ecosystems and landscapes as well as First Nations more fully asserting sovereignty over aspects of life support ; and
d. with the discrediting of totalizing Western narratives of “Nature” new theorizing on weird, “Novel ecosystems,” and designed ecosystems.
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Queer life support as decolonial & reparative processes
“Akiwenzii finds the book hilarious and offensive and they read it aloud and substitute the word ‘Indians’ for trees: The Hidden Life of Indians: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World. They both laugh, although it hits a little too close to home.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020
Decolonial and reparative initiatives (and liberation movements) have been working, and often successful, for over a century. But repair has often been slow for both the most under-served and vulnerable of LGBTQ2S populations and for minority erotic communities more generally. How can planning for queer infrastructure be part of more squarely challenging chronic violence and inequities?
Over the last eight years, Black Lives Matter has profoundly transformed notions of social equity, decolonization, and social repair. For example, the June 14, 2020 All Black Lives Matter march in Los Angeles was a historic event, perhaps a rupture with past notions of public space for LGBT communities, that wedded the social movements for racial justice and queer activism in profoundly new ways.
Today, the role of decolonial and reparative processes are explored in re-inscribing both queer life support, that should also create space for particular aesthetics and pleasures, as queered infrastructure. Design of queer infrastructure could decolonize by reflecting on the impact of how a more accurate recognition of ecosystems, perspectives lacking in homophobia and heteronormativity, could provide new opportunities for conceiving of social goals and environmental solutions and in turn inspire new goals for meeting places and services with subsequent public policy, community planning and design practices. So in arguing for queer infrastructure, carefully conceived, designed, and nested within repaired (and queer) political economies and ecosystems, a number of crises and resulting ruptures have emerged with the following opportunities for theorizing.
1. First, the recent revisions of biota and ecosystems initially described as biological exuberance, recognizing erotic expression as part of ecosystems not linked directly to reproduction, have created the basis for the still in-progress, queer ecologies paradigm.
2. Secondly, late recognition of the ecological roles of biological exuberance, essentially censored from more than a century of modern science, calls into question more general biases modern scientific investigations rooted in the colonial era while highlight other systems of investigation such as some of those associated with indigenous knowledge keeping. So if nineteenth and twentieth century biology was in part a way to gain further sovereignty over ecosystems, biological exuberance effectively demolish that colonial project as extending to scientific paradigms.
3. Third, the turn towards queer affect draws us back to new blends of feeling and empiricism inspiring reconsideration and reconstruction of the lines between Homo sapiens and other species including making room for a wider range of cultural, including indigenous, perspectives on human and other organisms.
4. Finally and perhaps most importantly, recently constructed notions of consent are as important in understanding queer ecologies as re-inscribing LGBT2S identities (and acts) within ecosystems. Modern notions of sexual expression, including queer aspirations and challenges to homophobia, are largely based on relatively new, and transformative, forms of consent. And fuller consent undermines any remaining social currency of heteronormativity, homonationalism , racial and cultural superiority, and the supremacy of Western Civilization. As much as challenging heteronormative biases, queer ecologies re-inscribe a wider range of sexualities and gender identities within ecosystems and human communities.
5. Fifth in this progression of logic from biological exuberance to queer ecologies to queer infrastructure, all manner of erotic expression, and pleasure more generally, is going to be necessary for individuals and communities to cope with and to get through indefinite ecological emergencies. Belcourt’s concept of “ecological harms” inscribes toxicity and inadequate life support within the spectrum of social inequities from environmental racism to higher risks and mortality due to climate change and subsequent emergencies of the “Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, and / or the Chthulucene.” So without sufficient inspiration, erotic expression, and pleasure activism, and more general sexual health, it could well be even more difficult to face daunting and potentially lethal challenges.
6. Deriving from the Anthropocene, and its many other names, are the problems from the divergent cultural experiences of (“The”) “Apocalypse.” In the face of apocalyptic threats, queer infrastructure could function to support erotic communities and cultures of survival. Again, the decolonization required to understand queer ecologies recognizes uneven and divergent experiences of and vulnerabilities to ecological crises and collapses. For example, there are huge cultural divides between certain Christian conceptions of the Rapture and Apocalypse and the oral studies of indigenous communities surviving five hundred years of genocide. Even as participants in relatively successful indigenous resurgence movements , our lives as survivors are under the shadow of a kind of “melancholia” derived from realizations of the full extent of losses — even without the pain and perishing of the Anthropocene. As we move into the difficult times, not entirely different from the recent past of homophobic state violence, these divergent experiences of stress, threat and survival will have new importance in the formation of erotic cultures and queer ecologies.
The methodologies that can provide the basis for applying deeper understandings of queer ecologies for imagining and designing badly needed infrastructure are specifically decolonial and are rooted in anticolonial struggles. Queer ecologies provide bases for reconsidering sites, populations, and communities as assemblages of living things bent on survival — with infrastructure part of efforts toward minimal levels of life support – including for gender diversity and sexual health. In other words, the homophobic blind-spot that lead to avoidance of recognition of biological exuberance was part of a broader colonial notions of science for domination, the irrelevance of indigenous land management, and the marginality of ecosystem conservation. And this colonial nexus was at the formation of modern states and markets. The recent implosion of that old paradigm, that ignored more than just biological exuberance, warrants a broader interrogation of the residues of colonialism, global markets, states and apparatuses, and cultural chauvinism.
These twenty-first century queer ecologies critiques, of both older LGB+(T?) enclaves and forms of environmental conservation, are pointing towards a more diverse set of scientific investigations, renewed forms of site and landscape empiricism, that are in turn needed as part of design exercises. These kind of postcolonial queer ecological studies destabilize the lines between taxa and ecosystems and ‘unnatural’ and ‘natural’ (often conflated with indigenous cultural sites and stewarded landscapes) as well as those boundaries between individuals and communities and between professionals such as designers, ecologists, theoreticians, artists, and farmers.
The landscapes in which we live, that we hope to reconstruct with better queer ecologies, have been contested for a long time. So colonization and decolonization have always had spatial dimensions. Colonization has always faced resistance, if only because of the absurdity of particular projects with only a few generating profit. And eventually colonial projects fail or morph while facing local resurgence. The development of expanded, more effective and defensible queer infrastructure is one dimension of that resurgence.
Most of us have acute experiences of social injustice especially if we are female, people of colour, LGBT2S, and / or disabled with contemporary inequities often still maintained through some violence. And these differences in access to resources and life support are colonial projects initiated by over-privileged thugs for their own benefit. So social policy and design for queer infrastructure centres through redistributing resources through countering contemporary inequities rooted in centuries-long, colonial projects:
a. white supremacy , racism, and eugenics;
b. cultural chauvinism (including aesthetic systems) and cultural erasure;
c. homophobia and transphobia as part of colonial systems;
d. establishment of colonial languages and erasure of local languages;
e. settlement, displacement, gentrification, and loss of livelihood and shelter;
f. slavery, racialized incarceration, and institutionalization;
g. plantations and ecosystem conversation;
h. denial of access to food and agricultural production;
i. denial of the freedom of meeting and socializing (and have sex);
j. eradication of species (in favour of a small number of species of economic importance);
k. uneven granting of citizenship;
l. coerced labour and unjust contracts; and
m. denial of public benefits spanning medical services, education, and culture.
If we ground local queer infrastructure through insuring the life support denied above, in a time of ecological crisis, then we may be able to hang on, and expand access to, the good things already enjoyed by more privileged members of LGBT2S populations.
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Data sets for identifying emerging needs & desires for new queer infrastructure
How can planning for queer(er) infrastructure better listen to vulnerable demographics and a fuller set of stakeholders while more creatively combining a wider range of data and cultural expressions? Modern community and environmental planning is largely driven by politics and selective uses of information. So a central question becomes which data? And a central task is sifting through and combining a range of modes of representation and data sets organized through metaphors and narratives.
Ascertaining, analyzing, combining, and safeguarding new data on LGBTQ2S populations is a huge and expanding field. Queer community mapping, and community resource and counter-mapping more generally, are proliferating. But in sharing such rich information, there are huge potentials for misuse of data. In response to threats to privacy, there is an entire movement of creating data opacity for queer community projects. There is a broader movement for data justice.
Today, we are seeing a proliferation of cartographic data and uses such as,
a neighbourhood map on harassment of women in public spaces in Cairo , a black trans archive cultivating empathy and support depending on the viewer’s self-identification, and a kind of cross-solidarity site for young queer women with African and Asian heritages. Without careful protocols and engineering, intimate information about LGBTQ2S populations can be misused – and misrepresented indefinitely. On a relatively minor note, the Queering the Map web-site was hacked, in 2018, to generate pro-Trump propaganda.
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Re-imagining for planners:
Contemporary culture, including queer science fiction, as markers
“Suddenly my radio stopped its music and the newscaster came
on to announce, with great excitement, the successful Russian launching
of Sputnik, the first satellite to circle the earth. He finished with an account
of Little Rock, Arkansas, that day, where local students and their parents had
demonstrated angrily against the Supreme Court’s ruling that the schools should
no longer be racially segregated ‘…standing outside the school shouting insults
and even hurling stones and beercans at the Negro students.”
Samuel R. Delany 1988
“This city [Seattle] that is and isn’t a city, but I guess that’s what
every city is becoming now, a destination to imagine what imagination
might be like, except for the lack.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020
Delany’s The Motion of Light in Water chronicles his tender transitions from growing up in Harlem as a bastion of the African American church and middle-class to his adult “queer” identity exploring a wide range of erotic expression and space, often in the Lower East Side, with science-fiction writing as much a balm as a source of income. Delany’s optimism was in the face of risks of violence as a black adolescent and racialized barriers to actually remaking technology. Along with an alliance with a white woman, he made a living writing about imaginary worlds of scientific and sexual possibilities (and working in a bookstore). Of a distant time only a half a century later, Sycamore’s reflections on queer Seattle, an American city especially transformed by the promises of technology, often hover around acknowledgement of social voids and the need to imagine a host of so far unimagined communal possibilities.
So how can fiction, including science-fiction, inspire planning and planners?
Delany reflected that,
“[A]t that time, the words ‘black’ and ‘gay’ – for openers – didn’t
exist with their current meanings, usage, history [in the late 1980s’].
1961 had still been, really, part of the fifties…There were only
Negroes and homosexuals, both of whom — along with artists –
were hugely devalued in the social hierarchy.”
In the kinds of pressurized contexts where expanded queer infrastructure is desperately needed, fantasy and other forms of cultural express can function to make conceptual and experiential ‘space’ to find, defend, transform physical space, fiscal resources, and organizational frameworks.
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Imagining queer infrastructure as
“Regenerative Interactive Zones of Nurturing”
“Gidigaa Bizhiw drew maps on the sides of buildings with stencil and green spray paint. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was a coordinated system of secret care, hidden under the guise of homeless, pest, defeated and indifferent.” Leanne Betasamosake Simpson 2020
Data does not heal (though culture can be a balm). Communal imagining of possibilities can inspire. And queer infrastructure can provide the basis for stable, remotely happy life support. In this way, queer infrastructure is integral to the spaces, transactions, services, and erotic and cultural expression of entire societies – in order to be complete and fully functional. If we accept that heteronormativity functions as a broader policing force over erotic expression, queer infrastructure opens eroticized space for all. And it is for this more societal or socializing reason that queer infrastructure is so difficult to envision and is too often ignored or trivialized.
Why do we need expanded, better built, and more equitable queer infrastructure? Certainly we need queer infrastructure so that young adults get correct information and not kill themselves because of their desires. Certainly we need queer infrastructure to build, maintain, and fully enjoy our social networks (including a lot of partying after we’ve all been vaccinated for COVID19). Certainly we need queer infrastructure to lower the risk of violence and certainly we need queer infrastructure for information and treatments for our sexual health. But the ‘our’ here is broader than LGBT2S populations.
Central to more fully understanding local queer ecologies and pressures and opportunities for new infrastructure is a kind of expanded stakeholder analysis and client identification across demographics and at a range spatial and temporal scales. And decolonial infrastructure requires some engagement with regional history extending to local experiences of deep time. So in the imagining and reconceiving of expanding and diversifying queer infrastructure especially as a prelude to planning and design exercises, contemporary ecologies warrant far more study that simply site analysis. Similarly, more supple demographic studies, leading to needs assessments for the most vulnerable, can better recognize trends. And the most important means for such imaginings is to nurture expansive forms of cultural expression especially within the most vulnerable LGBT2S demographics.
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Planning consultation as communal reimagining
“I’m stuck between losing the hope for connection in the places and
spaces I used to believe in, and wondering how to find that connection in
spaces I will never believe in.” Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020
What if we don’t bother envisioning and building new and better forms of queer infrastructure? Queer infrastructure will be envisioned and built by less representative actors – as it often is today. What we have today to sustain LGBTQ2S communities is the product of the priorities of a few privileged gay and fewer lesbian entrepreneurs, a tiny group of designers, the social media behemoths, economic and community planners, and increasingly AI. To transparently plan and design LGBT2S infrastructure is to insure that vulnerable populations and individuals defined and provide their own services. This can be the central principle in exercises of collective imagining.
Planning consultations for LGBTQ2S population to conceive and create queer infrastructure involves a kind of intersectionality on steroids. The theorizing gets turgid. Communal imagining exercises, as planning workshops, are increasingly necessary and involve more creative and community-based events and ongoing relationships. These exchanges will be well-documented, on-line, but post-COVID, there are increasing pressures for more physical contact.
Communal consultation frameworks can appear (and sometimes function) as games. This seems to be kernel of the design for H.O.R.I.Z.O.N. (Habitat One: Regenerative Interactive Zone of Nurture) by the Institute of Queer Ecology.
https://www.are.na/block/10886998
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Advocating for new queer infrastructure:
Some goals & practices for community repair & planning
“To care in a more feminist sense is to think outside of a singular life, and to this is to participate in a process of self-making that exceeds the individual. With care, one grows a collective skin…Care detonates that which precedes it; it pulls us outside our bodies and into that which one can’t know in advance.” Billy-Ray Belcourt 2020
Every decision made can be considered a form of planning and design. But few of these less purposeful designs can lead to proposals and structures sufficiently powerful to overcome historical obstacles and violence. Here, assessments of queer ecologies can lead to expanded forms of imaginings only a tiny portion of which will ever be agreed upon and installed or built. It is from this critical space spanning imaginings and actual designs, grounded in material realities, human demographics, and trends, that community initiatives can originate.
We can envision new queer infrastructure as mutual aid. ” Mutual aid projects are a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions, not just through symbolic acts or putting pressure on their representatives in government, but by actually building new social relations that are more survivable.” Big Door Brigade https://bigdoorbrigade.com/what-is-mutual-aid/
So in characterizing the kinds of planning practices to explore for the queer infrastructure needed in the coming decades, the following are some shifts in approaches:
expanding planning and design agency, who gets to be considered a professional to include users, a wide range of design professionals, scientists, artists, and theoreticians;
re-centring many design exercises for LGBTQ2S populations as direct responses to the hazards and resulting precarity from violence from racialized murder by the state to homophobic violence to suppression of queer erotic expression;
expanded frameworks for research, site analysis and community participation, in both information sharing and design, for most re-designs of public space that include, more specifically, LGBT2S demographics and needs assessments;
queer ecological stakeholder analysis that includes traditional territories (and governments), future generations, and non-human beings;
stakeholder assessment and resulting collaborations and consultations at various steps in design exercises well into installation, construction, and post-occupancy evaluation;
new kinds of education and preparation for design involving both spaces of LGBTQ2S users and “queering” architecture in the context of ecological emergencies nurturing more expertise in demographics, ecology, local history, and political economy;
acknowledgement of layered and contested, site ownership and with challenges for reparations to correct contemporary disparities especially in access to public and private space and more generally public resources – extending to some recognition in design processes of movements challenging land dispossession , resource extraction, gentrification, and displacement;
queer ecological designs become of net contributions to counter ecological breakdown and for repair;
a requirement of design for queer infrastructure is a kind of site-play involving hands-on involvement in respective ecologies and human populations with designers getting their hands dirty through working with experimental spaces and precedent sites; and
‘wild’ and natural landscapes as re-inscribed as diverse cultural zones involving a wider spectrum of human and non-human stakeholders and expanded and indefinite frameworks of joint and collaborative management (between human groups) of public sites.
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Conclusions:
Infrastructures of queer repair & imagination
“Queerness: at once what never was and what is still to come.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt 2019
“Maybe the dream of queer is just another consumer mirage.
Maybe we need to bury the dream in order to imagine something else.”
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore 2020
“Through a complete disregard for the politics and ethics of care, contemporary power clearly desires to banish the commons from collective consciousness.” iLiana Fokianaki 2020
If we are going to protect the queer communities that have nurtured us while providing more space and services to the most vulnerable and under-served LGBTQ2S communities, we will need to listen more carefully to each other, find deeper inspiration and compassion through the exchange of experiences embodied in contemporary culture, use a wider array of data sets more precisely and creatively, and find new ways to celebrate life together (and in ways that won’t make us sick).
This exploration of queer ecologies and infrastructure, with some implications for design, has taken place in a difficult but illuminating year. Challenges to the very specific forms of violence against African heritages have highlighted the persistence of violence and pain that in turn have had a huge, and poorly explored, impact on erotic expression including within LGBTQ2S communities. COVID19 has kept people apart while reminding us how central are social spaces both more generally and for erotic expression. And the horrific losses from COVID have highlighted the centrality of care-givers and the racial dimensions of the uneven distribution of risk. This is a good year to consider the range of care and infrastructure on which we depend: for social contact, entertainment, and sexual expression, on one hand, and from medical treatment to child-care to ecological life supports. As for Zoom and social media, 2020 represents the peak of screen time especially as surrogates for queer social connections and intimacies.
It has been fun to theorize on expanding and diversifying queer infrastructures while beginning to identify a wider array of design processes and best practices. These strategic sites and routes within landscapes, built spaces, service programs, aesthetic statements, and cultural venues, increasingly transformed by LGBT2S populations, have been coalescing for well over a century. It now time to find ways to imagine and design for the most vulnerable, for unmet needs, and for new possibilities. The longer-term public policy issue for this myriad of design processes is whether or not markets can provide the basis for organizing the necessary political and fiscal resources for viable designs. While, infrastructures conceived and operated less comprehensively will leave some LGBT2S populations, especially people of colour, under-served and sometimes at risk on an indefinite basis, government programmes have rarely had much success beyond providing spaces for basic needs. So queer pleasures are bound to be captives of capital for some time.
As for imagining the unmet needs of LGBT2S populations through the prism of queer ecologies, I could rewrite this discussion from the standpoint of the darker side of oikos as in economics and political economy. But such an approach would avoid some of the implications of today’s ecological emergencies. Without the prism of queer ecologies, a narrower focus on political economy could lead to blind spots that could in turn make us vulnerable to losing many people, places and other aspects of the communities in which each of us depend.
Manuscript with endnotes
Brochu-Ingram 2021 Reimagining Queer Infrastructure for Cornell Q Space