Queer Space?

Dipping a toe into queer urbanism... 

[Warning: contains high levels of US content!]

What is queer space? Aaron Betsky [author of the seemingly spurious text Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, 1997] has described queer space as “not built, only implied, and usually invisible,” and as “useless, amoral, and sensual space that lives only in and for experience.” 11 Can we envision a different kind of queer space — space that is more permanent, built and visible, even as we embrace the experiential and sensory?

Excerpted from “Queer Beacon,” an article by by Kian Goh about LBGT resistance to the gentrification of Greenwich Village, New York in Places Journal, June 2011. Accessed 02 Nov 2015. <https://placesjournal.org/article/queer-beacon/>

... and following the debate through to public monuments and the discourse of a gay modernity via abstracts of and excerpts from the chapter 'For Time Immemorial: Marking Time in the Built Environment':

This chapter looks at how Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire (places of memory) emphasized the need to revive queer identity, queer cultural collectivity, and marked environments during the post-AIDS onslaught. Queer spaces were initially identified as areas that are not built, only implied, and usually invisible. However, this issue somehow gained attention after the commissioning of two prominent lieux de mémoire: the Gay Liberation monument in New York and the Homomonument in Amsterdam. The chapter also examines Charles Jencks’“Gay Eclectic” style of house architecture, gay neighborhoods, and gay culture iconizing the character of Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz.

Between 1984 and 1992—that is, while fear and grief over AIDS, the previous chapter argued, played out in proscriptions against queer memory—the French historian Pierre Nora was supervising a massive (seven volume) study of what he influentially termed lieux de mémoire, places of memory. These memory sites, which include both physical places and rituals of commemoration, Nora contends, characterize modernity. Places of memory, Nora argued, enact self-conscious efforts “to block the work of forgetting” that is inherent to the “acceleration of history” in “our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, propelled by change” (“Between Memory and History,” 7, 19, 8). We...

In the book If Memory Serves: Gay Men, AIDS, and the Promise of the Queer Past by Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Reed (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Retrieved from University Press Scholarship online available at: http://www.universitypressscholarship.com/search?f_0=keywords&q_0=Queer%20Space and somewhere else I can't locate anymore...

And returning to the contemporary context to get a sense of the significance of the field and it's consequence in the rebuilding of Christchurch for its LGBT citizens:

Of potential relevance are the examples of queer urbanism in Goh's 'From and Toward a Queer Urbanism' article in which she concludes:

Each of these [radical queer urbanist] initiatives asserts that the safety and welfare of LGBT people in cities cannot be divorced from the social, economic and spatial conditions of urban environments. From direct acts aimed at changing discriminatory bureaucratic policy to the more consuming work of changing prevailing public opinion, these campaigns literally broaden the possibilities of movement for queers in the city. They map, both literally and otherwise, paths forward for urban social movements that are critically inclusive. 

Progressive Planning Magazine April 14, 2015. Online journal. Accessed 02 November 2015. http://www.plannersnetwork.org/2011/04/from-and-toward-a-queer-urbanism/