Erasing queerness in the neoliberal city: The democratic limitations of community consultation in planning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tension between anti-normative queer politics and the assimilative pull of liberal identitarianism are a fixture of queer life and queer space (Cohen, 2019; Warner 1999; Nash, 2006; Nash, 2013). Recently, this is visible in the actively contested commodification and gentrification of queer neighborhoods that often sterilize spaces of their queerness (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2015; Bell & Binnie, 2004; Patrick, 2014; Doan & Higgins, 2011; Renninger, 2018). Through this lens, it comes as no surprise that a condo development proposed on the site of a prominent Toronto drag bar has been met with strong community concern or opposition. While the developer is leading a community consultation process that ostensibly seeks to maintain the presence of the bar and to support the cultural legacy of the community (Bousfields Inc., 2020), the possibility of the continued sterilization of Toronto’s gay village demands critical investigation. This study applies a queer approach (Cohen 1997; Cohen 2019; Browne & Nash 2010; Foucault 1978) that makes visible the forces of normalization at work, to assess the capacity for community consultation to protect queer interests. I raise several concerns over the democratic limitations of community consultation in planning. The neoliberal logics of urban growth at work are fundamentally anti-queer. As such, the capacity of existing planning frameworks to make space for queer life in Toronto is questionable. At this nexus of shifting queer geographies, community consultation, and urban development in the neoliberal city lie important questions about how power is geographically structured, deployed, and contested. ReferencesBell, D., & Binnie, J. (2004). Authenticating Queer Space: Citizenship, Urbanism and Governance. Urban Studies,41(9), 1807-1820 Bousfields Inc.. (2020). Public Consultation Strategy Report: 506-516 Church Street. Prepared on behalf of Graywood CM GP. Retrieved from, https://506churchstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/PublicConsultation-Strategy-Report.pdf Browne, K., & Nash, C. (2010). Queer methods and methodologies: an introduction. In K. Browne, & C. Nash,Queer methods and methodologies: intersecting queer theories and social science research (pp. 1-24). Ashgate.Butler, J. (1999). Gender Trouble . Routledge. Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? GLQ, 3(4),437-465. Cohen, C. J. (2019). The Radical Potential of Queer? Twenty Years Later. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and GayStudies, 25(1), 140-144. Doan, P. L., & Higgins, H. (2011). The Demise of Queer Space? Resurgent Gentrification and the Assimilation ofLGBT Neighborhoods. Journal of Planning Eduation and Research, 31(1), 6-25. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality. Random House Inc. Nash, C. J. (2006). Toronto's gay village (1969-1982): Plotting the politics of gay identity. The CanadianGeographer, 50(1), 1-16. Nash, C. J., & Gorman-Murray, A. (2015). Recovering the Gay Village: A Comparative Historical Geogrpahy ofUrban Change and Planning in Toronto and Sydney. Historical Geography, 43, 85-105. Patrick, D. (2014). The matter of displacement: a queer urban ecology of New York City's High Line. Social &Cultural Geography, 15(8), 920-941. Renninger, B. (2018). Grindr Killed the Gay Bar, and Other Attempts to Blame Social Technologies for UrbanDevelopment: A Democratic Approach to Popular Technologies and Queer Sociality. Journal of Homosexuality,66(12), 1736-1755. Warner, M. (1999). The Ethics of Sexual Shame. In, The trouble with normal: Sex, politics, and the ethics of queerlife (pp. 1-40). Free Press.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.093 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".