Recovering the Gay Village: A Comparative Historical Geography of Urban Change and Planning in Toronto and Sydney

This chapter argues that the historical geographies of Toronto’s Church and Wellesley Street district and Sydney’s Oxford Street gay villages are important in understanding ongoing contemporary transformations in both locations. LGBT and queer communities as well as mainstream interests argue that these gay villages are in some form of “decline” for various social, political, and economic reasons. Given their similar histories and geographies, our analysis considers how these historical geographies have both enabled and constrained how the respective gay villages respond to these challenges, opening up and closing down particular possibilities for alternative (and relational) geographies. While there are a number of ways to consider these historical geographies, we focus on three factors for analysis: post-World War II planning policies, the emergence of “city of neighborhoods” discourses, and the positioning of gay villages within neoliberal processes of commodification and consumerism. We conclude that these distinctive historical geographies offer a cogent set of understandings by providing suggestive explanations for how Toronto’s and Sydney’s gendered and sexual landscapes are being reorganized in distinctive ways, and offer some wider implications for urban planning and policy.