On Queering Urbanism: Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice

As part of our speaker series, the IGSF welcomes Stathis G. Yeros. Yeros argues that the spatial practices of queer and trans people have profoundly shaped cities over the last fifty years, despite their exclusion from formal planning. By appropriating everyday, generic spaces and building informal networks of care and mutual support, they produced a form of insurgent urbanism that sustained collective resistance. Taking these practices seriously changes how we understand who makes cities, and what counts as planning. Drawing on archival research and community narratives, Yeros' talk focuses on San Francisco and Oakland, California, and their long history of queer placemaking. It follows the evolution of the Women’s Building of the Bay Area, examines the impact of gentrification on communities of color and low-income residents, and considers ongoing struggles to preserve queer spaces as sites of radical possibility rather than commodified nostalgia. How have trans women of color, sex workers, queer youth, and other marginalized groups created community in hostile urban environments? What can these histories of resistance teach us as cities continue to change?

Stathis G. Yeros is a historian of the built environment, designer, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Queering Urbanism: Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice (University of California Press, 2024), and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Urban History, Places, and several edited volumes. His second book project, Signs of Life in America: Placemaking and Democracy in the Queer South, examines how queer and trans people in the US Deep South carved out spaces of participatory democracy in a hostile institutional landscape. Yeros holds a PhD in Architecture (History, Theory, and Society) and a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and was a 2024–25 Mellon Fellow in Democracy and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University. He is a board member of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

This event is co-sponsored by McGill’s Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (IGSF) and the Research Group on Democracy, Space, and Technology (RGDST) at the Yan P. Lin Centre.