2023 Theses Master's

Planning for Those Beyond the Grid: Understanding New York City's Queer Nightlife as Transgressive Social Infrastructure

Wexler, Daniel

This research takes a keen interest in queer nightlife as an understudied and underestimated social infrastructure in New York City. In attempting to examine the utility of queer nightlife, with specific attention paid to the importance of queer nightlife for the transgender and gender diverse community, this paper’s purpose is twofold: to articulate the benefit of developing a queered methodology within the context of urban research by providing an example for what that may look like in practice, and to critically examine traditional methods of evaluating social infrastructure to better understand the nuanced thinking required to adequately appraise queer infrastructure systems. Ultimately, this paper contests normative approaches to urban governance, planning practice, and urban scholarship and calls for urbanism which expands beyond rigid and gridded conceptualizations of built and social environments.