In Conversation: Ben Campkin on queer spaces and engaged urbanism
Professor Ben Campkin is an urbanist and the author of several books on LGBTQ+ venues in London. 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.
We spoke to Prof Campkin on the eve of his visit to the Melbourne School of Design to deliver the Melbourne Centre for Cities' inaugural annual public lecture in association with Grimshaw Architects on Queer Infrastructures on Tues 12 Sep.
Can you tell us a bit about your area of research and expertise?
I’m an urbanist and my transdisciplinary research focuses on urban change: how it is imagined, discussed and realised. I came to urban studies via a background in archaeology and architectural history so my approach to urbanism is through issues of heritage. I look at these through focusing on questions of
equality, diversity and inclusion. I consider what the outcomes of urban redevelopment are for minoritized populations. Whose narratives drive or come to the fore in processes of change and whose stories are overlooked?
In my research on London, I have focused specifically on large-scale government and property-led regeneration campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s. My work is driven by a commitment to what I call engaged urbanism, which is methodologically experimental, cross-cuts different media, and brings critical urban history and theory to inform contemporary and future cities. At UCL I collaborated with colleagues to set up a new Master of Arts and Sciences degree in Global Urbanism which cuts across different knowledge sectors and disciplines, and the UCL Urban Room, a curated space on our new campus, UCL East, for events, exhibitions, workshops and engagement with local stakeholders, professional audiences, and the wider public in east London.
Your research has looked at international conversations about sexual and gender diversity, human rights and sustainable urban development, as well as shifts in the imagination of local and global relations in policy, theory and activism. What are some of your thoughts on the relationship between theory and activism?
Taking scholarship on sexuality, gender and urban space as an example, theory and activism have been closely intertwined since the 1960s. Work in geography, sociology or architecture on the presence of LGBTQ+ populations, or on what has since the 1990s been called ‘queer space’, has been radically transdisciplinary. It has not just involved multiple, sometimes intersecting academic disciplines and professional groups, but has rather developed in parallel with rights-based movements. Lately, these conversations have been driven by commitments to decolonisation and attention to the need to consider gender and sexual diversity in more plural terms than those which dominate studies focused on Global North cities. Publications like the new Queer Spaces: An Atlas of LGBTQIA+ Spaces and Stories, which I contributed to, attest to this.
Can you explain how you frame social and cultural infrastructure in relation to recent conceptions of infrastructural urbanism?
Earlier enclave-based models of LGBTQ+ space which came from studies of North American cities need to be revised to account for the dynamism of scenes and for divergence and connections across different cities. Queer infrastructure is the term I use to articulate this diversity. It encompasses venues, networks, services and events, which support populations with diverse and non-normative genders and sexualities and minoritized identities. I use it to encapsulate the variety and layering of scenes and the ways that venues, groups and individual experiences are shaped by, attached to, traverse or disrupt dominant models of urban development and social reproduction. I am interested in how these queer infrastructures are continuously adapting to meet new needs, in parallel with changing subjectivities, which are influenced by local and global factors.
Venues associated with LGBTQIA+ populations are important spaces for survival, livelihoods and utopic imagination, especially where individuals or groups are marginalised from mainstream political, health, education, planning or heritage systems. They are scenes for integration, and sometimes conflict, across difference within socially and politically heterogeneous populations. They extend across media, through the print and communication technologies of the day. They have international reach through exchanges in culture and activism. They reflect and actively shape processes of social and cultural production and reproduction.
In your recent book Queer Premises LGBTQ+ Venues in London Since the 1980s, you examine a range of venues from the 1980s to the present, asking how, where, and why these venues have been established and the purposes they serve. What are some of the challenges these venues face?
LGBTQ+ venues have often been embedded in the everyday and ex-industrial physical infrastructure of cities. In some contexts, their locations in gentrifying neighbourhoods have left them vulnerable within the capital flows of global property portfolios, or as transport intersections densify. In response, in London, the most formal of these venues have been designated as part of London’s ‘social infrastructure’ in planning and policy. The book documents and analyses recent activism and work in policy and practice to counter the idea that these venues are simply in decline. However, these venues and the populations they serve face accumulating pressures which currently include the on-going impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living and energy crises; unaffordable rents and exclusionary property and land values; as well as more specific challenges which include uneven resources and services across LGBTQ+ groups and a current climate of transphobia fuelled by the media.