Suchergebnisse

Over the past two decades, converted loft spaces have emerged as an important element of the North American inner‐city landscape. Originating within the specific social and economic conditions of Manhattan's SoHo (South of Houston) District in the 1970s, lofts have come to exemplify a conjunction between culture and economy in the restructuring of the contemporary city. In the gentrification literature, however, the idea of 'culture' and its role in urban change remains weakly conceptualized as 'arts‐related investment' and 'heritage preservation'. In this paper I untangle this relationship and realign the cultural with socio‐spatial practice to examine the production of a loft landscape in inner‐city Montréal. This case study illustrates the weak role played by capital accumulation strategies in the production of this landscape in Montréal and highlights the importance of a North‐America‐wide cultural construction of the SoHo loft and its reproduction in other cities. I argue that the media serves as a site and agent in the re‐coding of inner city industrial landscapes by repeatedly representing lofts as the 'authentic' domain of the avant‐garde. In the case of Montréal, the reconstruction of a loft landscape further depends on local cultural forms that map and translate the loft lifestyle and aesthetic in the local material environment and build relationships between local conditions and identities, and SoHo. Finally, drawing on interviews with Montréal loft tenants, I illustrate how inner‐city identities are constructed through socio‐spatial practices.Durant les deux dernières décennies, les espaces de lofts aménagés sont devenus un élément important du paysage des centres‐villes d'Amérique du Nord. Ayant leur origine dans les conditions économiques et sociales spécifiques au district de SoHo à Manhattan (au Sud de Houston) dans les années 1970, les lofts en sont venus à exemplifier une conjonction entre la culture et l'économie dans la restructuration de la ville contemporaine. Cependant, dans la littérature sur l'embourgeoisement, l'idée de 'culture' et son rôle dans le changement urbain ne sont que peu théorisés en tant que 'investissement qui se rapporte aux arts' et 'préservation du patrimoine'. Dans cet article, j'éclaircis ce rapport et réaligne le cultural à la pratique socio‐spatiale afin d'examiner la production d'un paysage de lofts dans le centre de la ville de Montréal. Ce cas d'étude illustre le rôle minime des stratégies d'accumulation du capital dans la production de ce paysage à Montréal et souligne l'importance d'une construction culturelle du loft de SoHo, connue dans toute l'Amérique du Nord, et de sa reproduction dans d'autres villes. Je soutiens que les médias servent de lieu et d'agent de recodification des paysages industriels des centres‐villes en représentant régulièrement les lofts comme le domaine 'authentique' de l'avant‐garde. Dans le cas de Montréal, la reconstruction d'un paysage de lofts dépend aussi des formes culturelles locales qui tracent et traduisent le mode de vie et l'esthétique du loft dans l'environnement matériel local et qui construisent des rapports entre les conditions et identités locales et SoHo. Finalement, me basant sur des entrevues avec des occupants de loft à Montréal, je montre comment les identités du centre‐ville sont construites par les pratiques socio‐spatiales.

Aujourd'hui, les multiples mouvements autonomes de lesbiennes des années 70 et 80 sont souvent dépeints comme univoques et homogènes sur le plan des idées et des pratiques. En proposant que les identités lesbiennes et leurs mouvements sont depuis toujours intersectionnels, les auteures ont pour objectif d'ébranler cette image. Leur examen des divers courants au sein du mouvement lesbien montréalais de 1970 aux années 2000 leur a permis de mettre au jour les complexités dont il se tisse, et ce, en privilégiant une approche intersectionnelle et « intracatégorielle ». Leur analyse révèle que le lesbianisme et le féminisme ont entretenu des rapports tantôt de complémentarité, tantôt de tension, cette ambiguïté se trouvant aussi parmi les lesbiennes au gré de la classe sociale, de la langue, de l'idéologie et de l'identité nationale. De portée préliminaire, le texte ainsi produit est une invitation à multiplier les travaux sur les mouvements lesbiens à Montréal, dans une perspective tant historique que contemporaine, en explorant d'autres marqueurs identitaires, dont l'âge, la région, l'appartenance culturelle et la religion.

Cities are synonymous with the production and consumption of culture. It is their material and human cultural infrastructure that also makes them archives and works of art. The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities critically re-examines the relationship between the urban and its cultures. It expands our understanding of the concept of urban cultural infrastructure and highlights the foundational role of culture to the materiality and sociality of urban life and the governance of cities.The book begins with a theoretical overview of the cultural and infrastructural turns in urban studies scholarship. It then explores definitions of cultural infrastructure and its 'hard' and 'soft' dimensions before critically considering the vulnerabilities generated in the cultural sector by the Covid-19 pandemic. Chapters are organised in four thematic sections focusing on aspects of producing, performing, consuming and collecting culture, which feature detailed case studies from 17 cities across the global North and South.This book will be of interest not only to students and scholars of urban studies, but also to policy-makers planning and creating cultural infrastructures as well as those working in cultural institutions and creative industries.

Just urban planning recognizes sociocultural differences and addresses inequality by implementing redistributive mechanisms that move beyond urban neoliberal practices of aestheticization and festivalization. Such planning practices are only beginning to address sexual and gender minority recognition in central urban areas while metronormative assumptions about their geographies absolve suburban municipalities of accountability for LGBTQ+ inclusions. In suburban municipalities, therefore, an LGBTQ+ politics of recognition rarely synchronizes with a politics of redistribution to foster sustained and transformative responses across the professional and managerial boundaries between planning and other local government functions. Consequently, a reparative civic "rainbowization" stands in for transformative urban planning, producing only partial and commodifiable inclusions in the landscape that become absolution for inaction on more evidence-based goals and measurable targets. Drawing on a database of public-facing communication records referencing LGBTQ2S themes for three adjacent peripheral municipalities in the Vancouver city-region (Burnaby, New Westminster, and Surrey), this article analyses the tension between contemporary planning's civic actions of LGBTQ+ recognition and outcomes of redistribution. In suburban municipalities, a rainbow-washing politics of recognition sidelines transformative planning and policy resulting in little more than the distribution of the LGBTQ2S acronym across municipal documents.

To queer urban planning and municipal governance requires explicit civic engagement with sexual and gender minority inclusions, representations and needs in urban plans and policies across departmental and committee silos. This collection questions the hetero-cis-normative assumptions of urban planning and examines the integration of LGBTQ+ issues in municipal governance at the interface of community activism, bureaucratic procedures, and political intervention. The editorial summarizes the contributions to this thematic issue within a tripartite thematic framework: 1) counter-hegemonic reactions to hetero-cis-normativities; 2) queering plans and policies; and 3) governance coalitions and LGBTQ+ activisms.

AbstractLGBTQ2S municipal governance is a contentious policy domain that is often publicly framed as 'morality' or 'niche' politics, yet urban sexuality scholars have shown its fundamental dissonance and incommensurability across spatial scales. Within polycentric city‐regions aspiring to 'progressiveness', LGBTQ2S‐supportive municipal social inclusion policy is further subject to arrhythmic diffusion. In this article we introduce the neologism of scalar arrhythmia (a biomedical metaphor that parallels the pace of diffusion with the irregularities of a heartbeat) in conjunction with scale‐contingent coalitional moments (spatiotemporal junctures that bring people together to enact social change) to advance an urban social justice agenda. We argue that the analytical vantage point of scalar arrhythmia reveals differences in the longitudinal temporal (a)synchronicities of peripheral municipal inclusion policy diffusion and locates transformative scale‐contingent coalitional moments. Through an analysis of the interplay of diffusion processes and mechanisms across the adjacent peripheral municipalities of Burnaby, New Westminster and Surrey in Canada's Vancouver city‐region, we demonstrate provincial–municipal hierarchical 'coercion', core–periphery metropolitan relocation 'imitation' and municipal inter‐peripheral contagious 'competition'. While peripheral patterns of scalar arrhythmia rupture Vancouver's illusive progressive regionalism, the concept offers civic leaders an inventorying opportunity that redirects attention away from cursory LGBTQ2S policy performances towards substantive policy integrations and local innovations.

Social inclusion frameworks to enhance 'diversity' inform late neoliberal municipal governance in North American metropolitan areas, especially in central cities, but suburban LGBTQ2S constituencies are neglected by researchers. This paper, therefore, uses linguistic discourse and content analysis of an LGBTQ2S-inclusion archive of municipal public-facing communication in the Canadian peripheral municipalities of Burnaby, New Westminster, and Surrey, in the Vancouver city-region to trace the micro-patterns of linguistic ambivalence shaping suburban sexual citizenship. It demonstrates municipal variance in vernacular vocabularies of LGBTQ2S social inclusion that signals equivocation within divergent local linguistic political opportunity structures for suburban sexual and gender minorities. It concludes with a typological narration that details varied gradations of linguistic obfuscation, revealing patterns of civic ambivalence towards LGBTQ2S social inclusion amidst suburban diversity. Across a shared regional geography, the paper shows that LGBTQ2S populations are infrequently referenced relative to other marginalized social groups and that their presence in social inclusion frameworks is dictated by the extent to which they align with civic priorities, particularly festivalization and marketization, but also safety, welcoming newcomers, integrating seniors, and anti-discrimination initiatives.