URBAN TALK
January 19 2022, 16:00 | Online Talk

Queer Infrastructures:

Migration and World-making in East London’s LGBTQ+ Night-spaces

Ben Campkin (University College London UCL)

The event will be held online via ZOOM under the following ZOOM-Link

Meeting ID: 653 0935 7172
Passcode: 242339

Although the ‘superdiverse’ (Vertovec, 2007) qualities of contemporary East London have been noted, these accounts have largely overlooked the experiences of queer migrants. In this paper I present new qualitative evidence drawn from the activities of queer cultural workers who migrated to London in the 2010s, and who have worked in LGBTQ+ night-time venues. Through discussing evidence from a Long Table conversation, individual interviews, and the documentation of night-time events, I will consider how these individuals and collectives directly frame their work and their lifeworlds through optics of migration, nationality or ethnicity. I interpret these activities through the concept of queer infrastructure, which links queer theory and praxis to urban policy and the built environment.

Bio
Ben Campkin is Professor of Urbanism and Urban History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, Co-Director of UCL Urban Laboratory, and author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (2013), which won the 2015 Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Foundation Award. He co-authored the report LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London: Night Venues, 2006-present (2016) which has informed the London Plan 2021 and is completing a monograph on LGBTQ+ venues in London since the 1980s, Queer Premises (forthcoming with Bloomsbury)

The Urban Talk is part of the seminar "Stadt der queeren Räume".

© The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, London, 3D-scan, UCL Urban Laboratory, 2020.