Queer Infrastructures

Join us for this inaugural public lecture as part of a series of Queer Urbanism events, presented by Melbourne Centre for Cities in collaboration with Grimshaw Architects.

About the lecture

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.

The hour long public lecture will commence at 6:00pm, with networking and light refreshments available from 5:30pm outside the Singapore Theatre. 

About the speaker

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).