ancient cities

as they attracted heterosexual consumers keen to
demonstrate their cosmopolitan cultural capital.
For some critical queer theorists, the incorporation
of gay space into urban planning regimes is
indicative of how it has become colonized by the
market and also has become a privileged site
that is complicit in the reproduction of normative
masculinities, class prejudice, and White
supremacy.
For most of the last three decades, theories of
gay space have centered on the experience of innercity
neighborhoods in the metropolitan centers of
the global North. Increasingly, geographers of
sexualities have highlighted how the predominance
of these theorizations may obscure far more than
it reveals; they have embarked on the spatiality of
gay urban life in other contexts, such as the suburbs,
small towns, and cities in the global South,
where gay identities (as they are understood in
Europe and North America) may be the preserve
of a privileged, transnational elite and coexist with
indigenous homosexualities that have their own
distinct spatialities.
Gavin Brown and Kath Browne
See also Castells, Manuel; Discotheque; Gendered Space;
Gentrification; Non-Sexist City; Sex and the City; Social
Exclusion; Social Movements; Spaces of Difference
Further Readings
Brown, G. 2008. “Urban (Homo)sexualities: Ordinary
Cities, Ordinary Sexualities.” Geography Compass
2(4):1215–31.
Browne, K., J. Lim, and G. Brown, eds. 2007.
Geographies of Sexualities: Theory, Practices, and
Politics. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Castells, M. and K. Murphy. 1982. “Cultural Identity
and Urban Structure: The Spatial Organization of San
Francisco’s Gay Community.” Pp. 237–59 in Urban
Policy under Capitalism, edited by N. I. Fainstein and
S. S. Fainstein. London: Sage.
Chauncey, G. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban
Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World
1890–1940. New York: Basic Books.
Hemmings, C. 2002. Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of
Sexuality and Gender. London: Routledge.
Knopp, L. 1992. “Sexuality and the Spatial Dynamics of
Capitalism.” Environment & Planning D: Society &
Space 10:651–69.
Geddes, Patrick
293
Podmore, J. A. 2001. “Lesbians in the Crowd: Gender,
Sexuality, and Visibility along Montreal’s Boul.
St-Laurent.” Gender, Place, and Culture 8(4):333–55.
Rothenburg, T. 1995. ‘“And She Told Two Friends’:
Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space.” In Mapping
Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, edited by D. Bell
and G. Valentine. London: Routledge.
Ge d d e s, pa t r i C k
Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) was a polymath who
covered a remarkable number of disciplines and
subjects. He was a biologist and a sociologist, an
educationalist and an aesthete. Geddes is perhaps
best known for making important contributions
to the development of town planning, especially
the Regional Planning Association of America,
although his influence extended in many directions.
Lewis Mumford acknowledged Patrick
Geddes as “my master” and claimed that Geddes
“was one of the outstanding thinkers of his generation,
not alone in Great Britain, but in the
world.” In Britain, Geddes’s ideas were amplified
further by his close collaborator, Victor Branford.
Although Geddes’s ideas were championed in the
United States by thinkers like Mumford, until
recently, Geddes merited no more than a footnote
in urban studies. In the past decade, scholarly
interest has revived Geddes’s legacy for urban
studies.
Career
Geddes gave up on a career as a professional biologist
after being blinded temporarily in Mexico in
1879. He settled in Edinburgh’s Old Town in 1886
and helped renovate the tenements of the Ramsay
Garden set of buildings and Short’s observatory on
Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. This became the renowned
Outlook Tower and has been called the “world’s
first sociological laboratory.” An educational
museum, the Outlook Tower provided a gradually
ascending overview of, and commentary on, the
evolution of the city in history, from its roots in the
world on the ground floor, through continental,
national, and regional levels, before arriving at the
top floor, where the contemporary vista of
Edinburgh’s topography was contextualized in the