How Can Designers Help Create Queer Safe Spaces?
/How Can Designers Help Create Queer Safe Spaces?
As designers of the built environment, today’s architects, landscape architects, and architectural scholars frequently discuss how to design for more diverse populations and ensure spaces feel inclusive and welcoming across all demographics. With the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, discrimination based on disabilities became illegal in the United States. While initially applied to social and educational discrimination, the ADA’s impact goes much further. For the last 30 years we have been improving and retrofitting the built environment to ensure that all visitors have equal access to public buildings. While designers continue to identify and correct accessibility issues in our spatial environments, we must evolve this thinking beyond physical differences and safety concerns to incorporate racial, cultural, and gender differences. In other words, we need to work on how to “queer” our public spaces.
public art can support safe queer spaces / image by robert katzki via unsplash
But first, let’s clear up some language. Most of us are familiar with the acronym LGBTQ – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (or Queer). But what about LGBTQIA? That acronym also includes the terms Intersex and Asexual, two identities often overlooked in cis-gendered and heteronormative populations. While decades ago, the term “queer” was used as a slur for a gay man, today the term has become one of empowerment; reclaimed, it is often used to encompass all LGBTQ+ individuals. It is this broader definition of “queer” I am using to discuss designing spaces safe for our queer population.
For Pride Month in 2021, global design and engineering giant ARUP published the findings of a research collaboration with the University of Westminster in the form of a scientific article and short films compiling historical imagery, art installations, research, and case studies that supported the need for queer safe spaces in the public realm. To celebrate Pride Month this year, JA would like to highlight some of these concepts to normalize them and broaden the dialogue around these issues.
up to 40% of homeless youth identify as lgbtQ / image: commuity solutions
Homelessness & Housing Solutions
One obvious, but often overlooked, issue related to the built environment is the dramatically disproportionate number of LGBTQ+ youth who experience homelessness. Studies have found that despite being just 10% of the population, up to 40% of the 4.2 million American teenagers without stable housing identify as LGBTQ+. Those numbers are even more startling when applied to BIPOC youth. While the pathways to homelessness can differ, the primary reason cited in these instances is family conflict around a lack of understanding or acceptance of a teen’s gender identity or sexual orientation. Additional reasons include aging out of the foster care system, shortages in affordable housing and shelters that feel accepting and safe for LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as a higher rate of domestic violence in their living situations. All of these factors can result in excessive trauma that leaves LGBTQ+ youth ill-equipped for living independently and safely as adults.
These sad statistics point to a need for specialized housing for LGBTQ+ youth that is accessible, low- to no-cost, and designed to provide a safe and stable environment for young queer individuals. These projects may also include supportive programs such as mental and behavioral health services, educational opportunities, job placement, and skills training. Such housing solutions exist and have been found to be successful in taking LGBTQ+ youth out of homelessness and improve their opportunities to secure independent housing, gainful employment, and a more stable future. Architects, city planners, housing authorities, and others involved in affordable housing development must open a dialogue around the needs of queer youth when discussing housing solutions and the homelessness crisis our cities and urban areas are facing today.
Similarly, LGBTQ+ seniors make up a marginalized group that can benefit from queer safe spaces. These older adults – whose generation was horrifically impacted by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s – are aging into senior living facilities and many fear backlash and discrimination due to homophobia and the stigmas related to HIV that still prevail in some older groups. The need for living spaces that feel safe for LGBTQ+ seniors, especially those who may be challenged with finding affordable housing or have health issues that require specialized medical support, has resulted in queer-focused multi-family developments for older adults. One such project in Seattle, called Pride Place, is addressing this issue, as well as that of “gayborhoods” becoming unaffordable due to gentrification. This new housing solution, a collaboration between Community Roots Housing and GenPride, will bring 118 affordable housing units to Seattle’s beloved – but now expensive – Capitol Hill neighborhood, all designed for LGBTQ+ seniors making between 30% - 60% AMI (area median income).
seattle’s capitol hill neighborhood celebrates pride year round with rainbow crosswalks / image from visit seattle
Parks & Plazas
Wandering around “gayborhoods” like Capitol Hill in Seattle and other historically LGBTQ+-friendly cities can provide a pedestrian experience punctuated by eclectic sculptures, rainbow-painted crosswalks, colorful murals and street art, Pride flags, outdoor gathering spaces, and festive lighting – and not just during Pride Month, but all year long. It is no coincidence that many of our cities’ arts districts were founded in safe queer spaces long ago. Today these “Pride Pockets” are often home to pop-up music festivals, art galleries, farmers’ markets, and more.
Providing welcoming and safe spaces for queer communities to come together – especially where they have been organically gathering for decades – is one very visible way that cities can use urban and parks planning to build more inclusive public spaces. LGBTQ+ communities are not the only ones who benefit from creating these spaces: they are intrinsically linked to equity and inclusion and are used by other marginalized groups as well because they feel safe and welcoming.
Examples of public space planning for the safety of the queer community can be found in Seattle, perhaps most obviously at Cal Anderson Park in Capitol Hill. Originally designed by the Olmstead brothers in the early 1900s, in 2003 it underwent a landscaping transformation and was renamed Cal Anderson Park, after Washington State’s first openly gay state legislator, who tragically passed away in 1995 from AIDS.
Today, an expanded and reimagined Cal Anderson Park includes a covered reservoir with a water feature and fountain, acres of rolling green hills, a playground, ping-pong tables, and winding pathways with benches that allow for great people watching. During warm months the lawns are covered in picnic blankets while recreation league softball and soccer teams compete on the neighboring Bobby Morris playfield. The park connects the neighborhood’s Pike/Pine corridor to the Sound Transit Light Rail Station on Broadway and a transit-oriented development that includes retail, grocery, restaurants, and both market-rate and affordable housing. Between the buildings is a public plaza and “festival street” which is closed to cars and serves as the new permanent home of the Capitol Hill Farmers’ Market, as well as a gathering space for public events and a pedestrian pass-through for those using public transportation.
For decades, the City of Seattle has empowered this neighborhood to strengthen its welcoming, inclusive energy by deliberately highlighting its queer history through public art (like rainbow crosswalks), closing streets for the city’s Pride Festival each June, renaming a public park after an LGBTQ+ activist and politician, and so much more. These steps made by city officials helps keep a population that often feels invisible, VISIBLE, and educates the broader public through this visibility.
this street mural, a result of the blm protests in summer 2020, is now a permenant art installation in seattle’s capitol hill, next to cal anderson park / image by megan farmer for kuow
During the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Cal Anderson Park became the epicenter of an occupied protest and was used by BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, and their allies, as a safe haven in the midst of traumatic interactions between police and protestors. During this time an oversized Black Lives Matter mural was painted next to Cal Anderson Park, which the Seattle Department of Transportation has worked to restore and protect. It’s now a permanent art installation on Pine Street and serves as a reminder of the important intersectionality of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals.
homomonument in amsterdam, netherlands / image via wikipedia
One similarly celebrated space in Amsterdam is the “Homomonument,” a plaza and public monument that memorializes persecuted gay and lesbian individuals. It uses a pink triangle – the symbol used to identify gay men in Nazi concentration camps that has since been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community – to outline a public space that welcomes all. Designed in 1980 and unveiled in 1987, the memorial is sited along the canal and its three points are strategically positioned: one points to another important memorial at Dam Square, one to the headquarters of COC Nederland (the oldest gay rights organization in the world), and the third toward Anne Franke’s house. Engraved in it is a line by a gay Jewish poet that reads, “Such an endless desire for friendship.” The Homomonument is a response to prior arrests and persecution of LGBTQ+ people and is a visible reminder of the importance of celebrating queer history and creating these safe spaces.
While designing for inclusivity and belonging is at the core of architects’ work, the needs of our community are evolving, and our understanding of what inclusion means is evolving too. How we designed for public accessibility, safety, and engagement in 1990, 2000, or even 2010 is drastically different than it is today. We must continue to think proactively and creatively about what it means to design public spaces that are safe for LGBTQ+ individuals, and we believe the basis of inclusive design begins with listening to diverse voices and providing equitable opportunities for marginalized populations to be heard and seen during the design process. Most importantly, we must ensure they have opportunities to lead them as well.
ARUP’s 2021 report, Queering Public Space, is available free to download, and the accompanying films give much food for thought. Beyond housing and welcoming plazas, Queering Public Space gives tangible examples of how each of us can work to create more inclusive, queer-friendly spaces that feel safer for everyone. Thank you to our queer peers, loved ones, colleagues, and those who came before us, for helping us understand what it means to be inclusive. Happy Pride to all.