CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2024
| Author | Young, Alina |
|---|---|
| Title | Get Thee to a Smart City: A Study on Queer Urban Planning in Seestadt Aspern |
| Summary | This study is a theoretical reflection on the dynamic tensions and interplay between queer space production and the neoliberalising smart city, focusing on queer co-housing initiative Que[e]rbau within the Seestadt Aspern development in Vienna, Austria. As one of the largest urban development projects in Europe, Seestadt is posited as a model for affordable housing and democratic city planning elsewhere. Despite the burgeoning discourse on the smart city concept, which promises a technologically driven solution to urban challenges, little attention has been paid to how queer spaces emerge within this framework. Through a detailed examination of Seestadt, this research aims to explore the compatibility between the concepts of “smartness” and “ queernessȁ d;, whilst being attentive to the neoliberalising functions of the master-planned “smart city”. This speculative question will be approached primarily through observing the dynamic interplay between Seestadt and Que[e]rbau, reflecting on how these urban spaces are coconstituted through competing narratives and imaginings of the smart city. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, including content analysis and qualitative methods such as semistructured interviews and participant observation, diverse perspectives from developers, residents, and other stakeholders are collected and analysed. Architectural visual data such as master plans and photographs of Que[e]rbau and Seestadt will also be incorporated to conduct spatial analysis. Guided by a number of conceptual impulses, embedded in a number of academic disciplines, including governmentality studies, urban studies, geographies of sexualities, queer geographies, and queer urban studies, the research ultimately concludes that regardless of how experimental techno-utopian smart city visions may be, true queer utopias cannot be imagined without centring environmental justice and processes of decolonisation. |
| Supervisor | Renkin, Hadley Z; Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2024/young_alina.pdf |
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