Berlin's queer archipelago: Landscape, sexuality, and nightlife

Abstract

The metaphor of the archipelago has informed ideas about Berlin's post‐war and post‐wall fractured urban landscape as well as recent work on sexual minorities in the city. In the context of Berlin's landscape, the image refers to green islands of spontaneous vegetation on sites left behind by bomb damage and border infrastructure, while in scholarship on sexuality, it suggests a more dispersed distribution of minority nightlife than in the traditional focus on the gayborhood. The two meanings come together in many of Berlin's electronic dance music clubs, which are located in overgrown voids—or Brachen in German—and form a queer archipelago outside the heteronormative grid. Drawing on insights from queer and ruderal ecology, as well as some of the memory literature from the early German reunification era, this paper explores these club islands in relation to the landscape term terrain vague. By focusing on two sites in the former East Berlin borough of Friedrichshain—Wriezener Park, next to the city's most famous club Berghain, and the Brache‐turned‐dance club ://about blank—Berlin's current status as a global centre for queer club culture is understood through the lens of its unusual urban landscape and spectral ecologies.

Here, there, everywhere: The relational geographies of chemsex

“…The first is the association with the discovery of chemsex with a city located elsewhere . The most cited cities are Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Madrid, all well known main gay destinations attracting gay visitors and migrants from Europe and the rest of the world thanks to the presence of established parties (e.g., La Demence in Brussels), clubs (e.g., Berghain in Berlin, see Andersson, 2022b), festivals (Circuit in Barcelona, see Di Feliciantonio, 2019) and ‘gayborhoods’ (e.g., Chueca in Madrid). Likewise other world cities, these are diverse in terms of population (including high queer visibility); however, they can be defined as prime examples of ‘erotic cities’ according to the analysis of Hubbard (2012, p. 186): ‘while all world cities are seductive, some cities are decidedly more seductive than others, becoming de facto erotic cities ’.…”

Nocturnal futures : a necessary reflection in times of uncertainty

“…Appadurai (2013) argues about 'future-making' as an object of analysis, we can establish a list of big research topics on the urban night whose both empirical results and the scientific discussions associated with them could be very useful on the road to more ecological, resilient, inclusive, egalitarian and violence-free nocturnal cities. We therefore identify the following topics : environment ; transportation ; urban planning and development ; tourism and mobilities ; public health management ; personal safety and public security ; governance and policy-making ; nocturnal informal work and economies ; nocturnal formal work ; nighttime culture and leisure (both formal and informal) ; social and cultural heritage ; and, finally, the intangible dimension of the night (Andersson, 2023 ;Aramayona & Guarneros-Meza, 22023 ;Dunn & Edensor, 2023 ;García-Carpintero e tal., 2023 ;Kapitza, 2022 ;Liu et al, 2023 ;Pawlusiński, 2023 ;Zielinska-Dabkowska, 2023). We argue that these big topics are meant to make up a research agenda for the development of the interdisciplinary field of Night Studies in the coming years.…”

Care for Transactions

“…There are many additional themes we have recently foregrounded and on which we would like to publish more in order to expand such geographical debate. These include: Black Geographies (e.g., Hirsch & Jones, 2021); Humanitarian Geographies (e.g., Herrick et al, 2022; Mitchell, 2017; Pallister‐Wilkins, 2022); Intellectual Geographies (Boyle et al, 2019); Migration Geographies (Ho & Ting, 2021); Muslim Neighbourhood Geographies (e.g., Boussalem, 2020; Gökarıksel & Secor, 2022 & Zaman, 2020); Post‐Humanist Geographies (e.g., Williams et al, 2019); Prison Geographies (e.g., Schliehe et al, 2023); and Queer Geographies (Andersson, 2022; Boussalem, 2020). All these topics could also be engaged with a view to illustrating how geographers are contributing simultaneously to important debates beyond the discipline.…”