Intersectionality and planning at the margins: LGBTQ youth of color in New York

Abstract

Through an intersectional lens, this article reflects on the dialog between planning and gender, feminist, and queer studies to analyze the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color (YOC) community in New York City (NYC). The community is subject to multiple disenfranchisements, given their ethno-racial status, class, age, gender, and sexual orientation. This community's limited access to safe public spaces and amenities, housing, health services, job training, and other opportunities is an urban planning challenge insufficiently understood or addressed. Our methodology includes participant observation and analysis of an LGBTQ YOC tour of West Village in NYC, interviews with LGBTQ individuals and NGO staff, life stories, observations in LGBTQ-friendly meetings and facilities, and content analysis of LGBTQ reports and media coverage. The research shows the agency of an LGBTQ youth group as a resilient community organization effectively participating in planning processes and exerting rights to public space and services. Finally, it offers recommendations to planners and policy-makers to facilitate the recognition and expansion of rights to the city for LGBTQ, particularly YOC, by committing to understanding their unique conditions and needs and expanding their access to safe housing and public spaces, poverty reduction programs and job opportunities, and health and social support services.

Learning alliance methodology: Contributions and challenges for multicultural planning in health service provision: A case study in Kent, UK

“…For example, Dargan (2007Dargan ( , 2009) and Greed (2005) have noted that many urban planners frequently understand and address communities as homogenous entities, specifically ignoring the voices of women and other minority groups (Irazábal & Huerta, 2014). It was incorrect and insensitive of the project not to take into account the gender perspective when focusing on ethnicity and race.…”

“…It is expected that these questions should help in maintaining awareness of various power positioning within intersecting identity relations. Nonetheless, this type of questioning has yet to be mainstreamed into planning theory and practice by urban stakeholders, academics, and practitioners (Irazábal & Huerta, 2014;Tovar-Restrepo & Irazábal, 2013).…”

“…Beebeejaun (2012) reasonably argues that in most cases ethnoracial identity is presumed to be self-evident for planners and that little attention is paid to key issues such as the way in which groups are identified and self-identified, and how their power and hierarchical relations are structured. This approach may hide the complex, multiple, overlapping, conflicting, asymmetrical, and fluctuating power relations among group members (Irazábal & Huerta, 2014;Irazábal & Punja, 2009). Moreover, Sandoval (2013) highlights how, in the USA, multicultural planning may inversely affect undocumented immigrant communities in which the private sector and local government officials turn a blind eye to new migrants' legal status in favour of the benefits of a cheap, endless labour pool for employers, rental income for landlords, and property and sales taxes for local government within the area surrounding the places of work where the employees and their affiliates settle (Carpio, Irazábal, & Pulido, 2011;Yiftachel, 1998).…”

Between ontology and representation

“…Analysis of these provisional inclusions and partial exclusions has spurred many nuanced accounts of difference in the contemporary moment. Intersectional approaches have been central to understanding this complicated landscape (Hopkins and Noble, 2009;Irazábal and Huerta, 2015;McDowell, 2008;Peake, 2010;Valentine, 2007), even as some have raised questions about the potential for some work on intersectionality to reinstate limiting forms of identitarian thought (Brown, 2012) or to replace an attention to the mutual constitution of forms of differentiation and their lived complexities with an analytic of distinct, if intersecting, forms of oppression (McWhorter, 2009;Noble and Tabar, 2014;Olund, 2010).…”

Buenos Aires Beyond (Homo)Sexualized Urban Entrepreneurialism: The Geographies of Queered Tango

“…Bell and Binnie note the salience of selective sexual tolerance in city branding. In their view, the rising homonormativity of entrepreneurial global‐city projects led to the promotion of selected urban districts, including fashionable gay neighborhoods and themed gay villages, featured in promotional city brochures, while other less‐marketable spaces were marginalized, as the entrepreneurial desire to produce appealing and sanitized cities “chased out queer counter‐publics and spaces of public sex” (:1816)—for a case study on the exclusionary impacts of these logics on the ground, see Irazábal and Huerta () chronicle in the displacement pressures that the transformation of New York City's West Village has brought about for LGBTQ youth of color.…”