Author meets critics - book discussion
AMC 1 - Queerburbia: A Conversation about LGBTQ2S Suburban Place-making
Session Chair
Roger Keil (York University Canada)
Authors
Alison Bain (York University, Canada)
Julie Podmore (John Abbott College, Canada)
Discussants
Karine Duplan (University of Geneva)
Tilen Kolar (Leeds University)
Sylvie Tissot (University of Paris)
Description
Long the archetype of queer invisibility – places that in their built environments and social mores are imagined as synonymous with the reproduction of heterocisnormativity – twenty-first century suburbs have diversified and remain marked by significant intersectional inequalities. Yet, sexuality and gender non-normativity represent a significant absence in contemporary suburban studies research.
The recently published book Queerburbia: LGBTQ2S suburban place-making (2025) in the Routledge Studies in Urbanism and the City series therefore re-envisions metropolitan peripheries as imaginative horizons of queer futurity through ten peripheral municipal case studies from Canada’s largest city-regions.
It introduces the neologisms queerburbia and queerburban, counterpoints to metronormativity’s assumptions about where LGBTQ2S identities are situated, and creating synergies for the potential links between the queer and suburban. Tracing a history of old and new LGBTQ2S inequalities, the book analyzes suburban municipal inclusion misrecognition, critical first- and second-order institutional allyship practices and community activist resistance, and the everyday living and dreaming that makes/unmakes/remakes suburbia as queer.Together, its varied forms of analysis (print media and census representations, civic policy documents, informational interviews with municipal and para-public actors and LGBTQ2S activists, and photo-elicitation interviews and collective counter-mapping focus groups) examine what factors unmake and remake suburban places as queer. With consideration to political contestation about access to power-laden opportunity structures and resource landscapes, it ultimately considers whose voices, memories, and stories are embedded in places and whose visions for their future predominate.
It engages with four key questions:
1) What role is there for municipal governance in queering Canadian suburbs?
2) What forms of institutional allyship inform queerburban place-unmaking?
3) How does suburban LGBTQ2S organizing transform micro-public spaces and everyday interactions
4) How do LGBTQ2S suburbanites create liveable lives in place and dream queerer suburban futures.
The book’s theorization of place-making extends the geographical comparison still further, offering urban scholars a conceptual framework for unpacking the spatial politics of other marginalized social groups who must also navigate the persistent inequalities of contemporary cities.
AMC 2 - Urban Historians Speaking Back to Urban Social Theory: A Discussion of ‘The Cambridge History of Urban Europe’
Session chairs
Stijn Oosterlynck (University of Antwerp)
Patrick Le Galès (Sciences Po Paris)
Authors
Patrick Lanschner (University College London, UK)
Dorothee Brantz (TU Berlin, Germany)
Gabor Sonkoly (Paris Institute for Advanced Study, France)
Discussants
Mona Harb (Political Science, Beirut Urban Lab)
Bert de Munck (University of Antwerp, Belgium)
Liza Weinstein (Northeastern University, USA)
Tommaso Vitale (Sciences Po, France)
Jenny Robinson (University College London, UK)
Judith Bodnar (Central European University, Austria)
Description
Although urban studies prides itself on interdisciplinarity, sustained conversations across its various disciplines remain rare (Wolman et al., 2024). Despite shared thematic interests and the conviction that the ‘urban’ cannot be understood through a single discipline, scholarly knowledge tends to be siloed. This is especially true for urban history and contemporary urban studies fields such as urban sociology. Though they originated from “a single field of discourse,” they have long diverged (Sewell, 2005), reinforced by institutional separations in research units, conferences, and publication circuits.
Nonetheless, urban social theorists have consistently drawn on urban history. From Weber’s comparative-historical method to understand the Western city (Weber, [1958] 1966), to postcolonial critiques of Eurocentric urban discourses (Roy, 2015), history has informed theory. Urban historians, too, engage with social theory (Prak, 2018), yet, as Sewell notes, they “rarely speak back,” prompting his call that “social theory badly needs a serious infusion of historical habits of mind” (Sewell, 2005: 6).
This double ‘Author Meets Critics’ session seeks to foster dialogue between urban historians and urban social theorists, placing historical analysis at the heart of urban theory. Given the complexity of interdisciplinary exchange, two sessions are proposed to allow for deeper intellectual engagement. Both sessions will center on the forthcoming edited volume The Cambridge History of Urban Europe, to be published in autumn 2025. Spanning three volumes, the work combines rich empirical history with theoretical reflections on cities, comparison, citizenship, governance, globalization, and capitalism.
The first session will focus on Volume 2: Medieval and Early Modern Europe, covering European urbanism from 700 to 1850, edited by Patrick Lanschner and Maarten Prak. The editors (attendance confirmed) will present the volume’s main arguments. Discussants will then explore its contributions to urban social theory, particularly regarding citizenship, capitalism, comparison, Weber, and the singularity of urban Europe.
This session will be chaired and organized by Stijn Oosterlynck.
The second session will address Volume 3: Modern and Contemporary Europe, edited by Dorothee Brantz and Gabor Sonkoly. Topics such as urban citizenship, mobility, and governance—central to both historians and sociologists—will be discussed in light of current authoritarian politics and assimilationist policies. The session will explore how historical thinking can illuminate the present and suggest alternative forms of urban citizenship and governance.
Editors will introduce the volume’s arguments, followed by contributions from Mona Harb (Political Science, Beirut Urban Lab), Jenny Robinson (Geography, UCL), Stijn Oosterlynck (Sociology, Antwerp), and Rosemary Wakeman (History, Fordham; attendance confirmed). This session will be chaired and organized by Patrick Le Galès.