Steven VAUGHAN, Faculty of Laws, University College London, United Kingdom
Brad JESSUP, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne, Australia
The kind of urban heritage that the law should preserve is frequently the subject of public debate. Within those debates, popular understandings of heritage are encountered. Heritage places are material and stylised. They are old and architectural, aesthetic and distinctive. They are remnants of city building (Byrne 2008). This presentation reflects on two planning law conflicts concerning queer venues on two continents – in London and in Melbourne. It seeks to shift planning law away from popular conceptions of heritage.
In both cities, queer communities argued that buildings as places should be preserved because of their history and their importance to queer people. In both conflicts, the relevance of the time that those places had been queer and the buildings’ functions as supporting queer people – the queer social history – was mediated and set against the architectural significance of the buildings as part of decisions about preservation or demolition. An understanding of these two conflicts led us to a view that planning law not only sees heritage in a white or colonial way, a common criticism (eg Waterton and Smith 2010), but also in a heteronormative way. Queerness was hidden in cities until at least the 1970s (Gorman-Murray 2008). This means that to preserve a queer urban history and maintain safe and distinctive places for queer people for the future, planning law must revisit what it prioritises in terms of the time, place, and material of heritage. Gay heritage has been described as vernacular and intangible, but it can also attract development when it is located. These two facets make queer heritage especially fragile (Mattson 2015). We argue that, for those responsible for the laws about heritage, a queer approach is warranted (eg Ahmed 2006). There needs to be an openness to diverse experiences in place, less rigidity around temporality, and a search for value and significance in the less-than-architectural in the preserved material of our cities
Mots clés : LGBT+ |Queer theory|Heritage|Planning Law|Social history
A102791BJ