Queering Growth in Mid-20th Century Philadelphia

In this essay, I highlight a critical, if under-examined, dialectic between dominant urbanism and Black queer urbanism. First, I demonstrate the ways that dominant urbanists drew on a sedimented historical imaginary of the slum as a racialized site of debilitation and death in their articulation of and support for new urban infrastructures designed to support long-term stability through capitalist growth. Anti-blackness formed a fundamental aspect of the syntax and grammar of urban renewal and redevelopment. Next, I examine the efforts of the adherents of Father Divine’s Peace Mission Movement to build a world centered in spiritually appropriated, communal architectures wherein their disruptive forms of social-geographic life challenged heteronormative futurity and segregation through the haptic politics of touch and what I term ecstatic consecration.