Alison L. Bain - Böcker

To subvert the metronormativity of queer urban studies and re-place queer suburbanism, Queerburbia examines LGBTQ2S place-making/unmaking/remaking on the peripheries of Canada’s three largest city-regions (Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal), investigating print media and census representations, civic and para-public allyship, individual and collective activism, and everyday practices of living and dreaming as revealed through photo-elicitation interviews and collective counter-mapping that together unmake and remake suburban places as queer.Queerburbia offers a comparative case study of how large Canadian city-regions become queerer through LGBTQ2S suburban place-making/unmaking/remaking. For urban scholars, it deepens place-making theory with the conceptual introduction of the neologism “queerburbia” as a means to re-envision metropolitan peripheries as sites of queer futures. Practically, it offers civic leaders, urban planners, and policymakers insights into the complex dynamics of municipal LGBTQ2S misrecognition and critical allyship strategies beyond rainbowization. Methodologically innovative, this book combines print media, census, and municipal policy analysis with expert and photo-elicitation interviews, counter-mapping focus groups, and ethnographic fieldwork. It reveals the multiple layers of queerburban place-making/unmaking/remaking, demonstrating how statistical and media representations, municipal services and social inclusion policies, para-public and activist resistance and organizing, and individual living and dreaming emplace sexual and gender minorities in suburbia. An interdisciplinary book at the interstices of Geography, Urban Studies, Suburban Studies, Urban Planning, and LGBTQ+ Studies, its intended audiences are scholars of cities, queer theory, and sexual and gender minority life extending to Women’s and Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, and Psychology. It targets upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, researchers and practitioners of municipal social inclusion, including civic leaders, urban policymakers, and urban planners.

The book explores co-authored dynamics of collective knowledge production in feminist and queer geographies. It examines how to use co-authorship as a generative feminist practice of care, endurance, and institutional transformation in support of feminism’s next generation of intellectual communities.This book reveals the auto-biographical back-stories and emotional registers of geographical knowledge production through the co-written chapter intimacies of letters, poetry, interviews, and conversations. In doing so, it demonstrates the care-full and hope-full power of collaborations, mentorships, solidarities, and friendships to not only sustain lives and careers but also to enable social change. It confronts neoliberal reification of individual scholarship as the celebrated metric of academic productivity and presents co-authorship as a practice and politics of generating hope through the dynamics of collective care that its collaborations, mentorships, solidarities, and friendships manifest and sustain.This is an interdisciplinary book at the interstices of Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Education, Sociology, Women’s and Gender Studies, and LGBTQ+ Studies. Its intended audiences are scholars of pedagogy, feminist and queer theory, and sexual and gender minority life. It targets upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, writers, and educators.

Suburbs can be incubators of creativity: innovative and complex, but all too often underappreciated. In Creative Margins, Alison L. Bain documents the unique role of Canadian artists and cultural workers in suburban place-formation and dismantles mischaracterizations of suburbs as cultural wastelands.Creative Margins interweaves stories of the challenges and opportunities presented by the creation of culture in suburbs, focusing on Etobicoke and Mississauga outside Toronto, and Surrey and North Vancouver outside Vancouver. The book investigates whether the creative process unfolds differently for suburban and urban cultural workers, as well as how this process is affected by the presence or absence of cultural infrastructure and planning initiatives.Bain shows how suburban culture can enhance a city-region’s vitality and sustainability. This book firmly debunks the myth of culture as a solely urban phenomenon and demonstrates the social and economic merits of investing in suburban art and culture.

Suburbs can be incubators of creativity: innovative and complex, but all too often underappreciated. In Creative Margins, Alison L. Bain documents the unique role of Canadian artists and cultural workers in suburban place-formation and dismantles mischaracterizations of suburbs as cultural wastelands.Creative Margins interweaves stories of the challenges and opportunities presented by the creation of culture in suburbs, focusing on Etobicoke and Mississauga outside Toronto, and Surrey and North Vancouver outside Vancouver. The book investigates whether the creative process unfolds differently for suburban and urban cultural workers, as well as how this process is affected by the presence or absence of cultural infrastructure and planning initiatives.Bain shows how suburban culture can enhance a city-region’s vitality and sustainability. This book firmly debunks the myth of culture as a solely urban phenomenon and demonstrates the social and economic merits of investing in suburban art and culture.

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.