Queering Growth in Mid-20th Century Philadelphia

Abstract

In this essay, I highlight a critical, if under-examined, dialectic between dominant urbanism and Black queer urbanism. First, I demonstrate the ways that dominant urbanists drew on a sedimented historical imaginary of the slum as a racialized site of debilitation and death in their articulation of and support for new urban infrastructures designed to support long-term stability through capitalist growth. Anti-blackness formed a fundamental aspect of the syntax and grammar of urban renewal and redevelopment. Next, I examine the efforts of the adherents of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement to build a world centered in spiritually appropriated, communal architectures wherein their disruptive forms of social-geographic life challenged heteronormative futurity and segregation through the haptic politics of touch and what I term ecstatic consecration.

The relational shift in urban ecology: From place and structures to multiple modes of coproduction for positive urban futures

“…Some are gendered, as in the case of some U.S. post World War II white suburban communities where wives, who stayed at home to care for their households, experienced different worlds than their commuting husbands (England 1993 ), and how the gendered experiences of white housewives contrast to the long history of Black women working both in and outside the home (Palmer 1983 ; Jones and Shorter-Gooden 2009 ). Similarly, cultural worlds of LGTBQ persons can spatially overlap in cities but retain distinct circuits and activities from those who identify as heterosexual (Roane 2020 ). While such social and perceptual heterogeneity may seem distant from the concerns of ecology, it is just such complex worlds that can influence how people perceive, know, and manage the natural components of their surroundings (Delia et al 2017 ; Hoyle et al 2019 ; Kim and Son 2022 ).…”

Rethinking Religion and Secularism in Urban Planning

“…The continuity of thriving and struggling, distinctive and sometimes fugitive religious and religious-racial worldings (Weisenfeld 2018, Ong 2011 help us identify the contours of a once familiar secular 'frame' for religion, which was best equipped to see and contend with religious groups that were already in line with or adapted to secularism. Viewed through the lenses of religious studies, urban environments appear made and remade by religious projects that make and remake city life (Evans 2020, McRobert 2005Roane 2020, Primiano 2004. Numerous religious traditions and practices -and communities -thrive in and remake city space and neighborhoods in their image of the divine.…”