“It is challenging to find a book that gives not just an account of a specific place and people but a theory of how queer space works, how it becomes queer. This is that book.”
—Robert Self, author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
I am an urban historian and designer researching how space affects and is affected by struggles for social justice. I am a 2024-25 Mellon Fellow in Democracy and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC and have previously taught at the University of Florida and the University of California Berkeley.
Click here to read my Q&A on the UC Press blog
Click to read my interview for the SAH member stories series
I have published on urban theory and queer ecology, focusing on the spaces that queer and transgender people have historically inhabited in the United States. I ask what these spaces reveal for intersectional cultural representations of sexuality, gender, race, and bodily ability, and what lessons they hold for designers and planners. My work uses the lens of “queer insurgent citizenship” to rework the meaning of diversity and inclusion in the built environment as a set of rights rather than accommodations and reclaim architectural space away from market-driven development. This is the subject of my first book, Queering Urbanism: Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice (University of California Press, 2024), which is supported with a grant by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the University of Florida’s College of Design, Construction, and Planning.
My next two projects expand on aspects of my research to-date. The first is a study of queer and trans spaces in the U.S. Deep South (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and parts of Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, and Florida) that I tentatively call Building the Queer South. I am structuring this as a set of itineraries through the Deep South to interview people and observe queer and trans social life in the spaces where it takes place. Recent legislation against drag shows and trans athletes and my move to Florida to teach led me to dig deeper into the themes of my previous work: how do LGBTQ+ people resist mainstream assimilation; how do physical spaces inform the construction of insurgent LGBTQ+ cultural identities; and how do their politics work with and against state institutions to safeguard LGBTQ+ people's rights to these spaces and ways of life?
The second project extends the thread of queer citizenship, a critical analytical lens for studying space in my work. For this project, I plan to explore local attachments to physical spaces and the politics of design through contemporary citizenship transnationally. What do designers mean when they talk about citizen participation? And what can contemporary discourse about queer, insurgent, minority, and urban citizenships offer to design for spatial justice in different global contexts?
My teaching experience spans several areas of the architecture and humanities curricula, from design studios to undergraduate surveys, and specialized seminars on queer/trans urbanism and critical sustainability. I strive to incorporate insights from my scholarly work on spatial justice both in course content and the way I teach. In my design work I am committed to addressing contemporary social challenges through collaborations, exhibitions, and public advocacy.
In a different life, I staged and took part in experimental performances, and am still fascinated by the movement of bodies on stage and the conceptual clarity that a good film can achieve.
Research
Queering Urbanism
Insurgent Spaces in the Fight for Justice
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Conflicts about space and access to resources have shaped queer histories from at least 1965 to the present. As spaces associated with middle-class homosexuality enter mainstream urbanity in the United States, cultural assimilation increasingly erases insurgent aspects of these social movements. This gentrification itself leads to queer displacement. Combining urban history, architectural critique, and queer and trans theories, Queering Urbanism traces these phenomena through the history of a network of sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within that urban landscape, Stathis Yeros investigates how queer people appropriated existing spaces, how they expressed their distinct identities through aesthetic forms, and why they mobilized the language of citizenship to shape place and secure space. Here the legacies of LGBTQ+ rights activism meet contemporary debates about the right to housing and urban life.
“It is challenging to find a book that gives not just an account of a specific place and people but a theory of how queer space works, how it becomes queer. This is that book.”
—Robert Self, author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
“In his powerful account of marginalized and dispossessed populations in the San Francisco Bay Area occupying, creatively reworking, and radically transforming their built environments, Stathis Yeros shows how people pursue justice by turning space into place. This is a timely work that offers insight into a pressing problem not just for San Francisco but for our understanding of cities themselves.”
—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History and codirector of Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
“This lively and illuminating book provides a new and needed history of San Francisco since the 1960s, tracing how LGBTQ people remade public and private spaces while contesting the bounds of normative citizenship. Moving from SROs to renovated Victorians, lesbian bars to community land grants, Yeros revives vital questions about how queer and trans communities remake the cities they call home.”
—Stephen Vider, author of The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II
AIDS and the City
Bathhouses, AIDS activism, and the desexualization of San Francisco
Urban History (2023)
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926822000141
This paper traces territorial and discursive shifts in the landscape of homosexuality in San Francisco during the AIDS pandemic. I argue that a ‘de-sexualization’ of the urban landscape occurred, which I trace in debates about bathhouse closures (1983-1985) and in the analysis of ARC/AIDS Vigil, a downtown activist encampment (1985-1995). It was the result of the devastating AIDS toll combined with the professionalization of AIDS activism and the development of divergent forms of ‘emplaced empathy.’ Representations of homosexuality at the Vigil highlighted the iconographies of domesticity and death, whereas bathhouse iconography and associated affective forms of protest highlighted sex and eroticism.
View of the beds in front of the San Francisco Federal Building during the ARC/AIDS Vigil, ca. 1985. Unknown photographer. Collection of the San Francisco GLBT Historical Society Archives.
Trans Territorialization:
Building Empowerment Beyond Identity Politics
With Leonardo Chiesi. Social Sciences (2022)
https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci11100429
Transgender/gender non-conforming (TGNC) people and especially people of color face homelessness and housing precarity in the United States at much higher rates than other LGBTQ+ people. In response, during the past decade, TGNC-centered organizations have spearheaded new forms of housing activism, such as cooperatives and Community Land Trusts, building spaces with distinct spatial and aesthetic characteristics. This paper situates those spaces within histories of LGBTQ+ placemaking. It advances the notion of trans territorialization through the analysis of a case study, My Sistah’s House, an organization led by TGNC people of color in Memphis, Tennessee. We analyze trans territorialization as an activist form of spatial appropriation distinct from the better-studied gayborhood model. We assess its generalizable characteristics at three distinct but interrelated scales: dwelling units, community, and cultural embodiment.
Queering Tactics
Two Case Studies in Oakland, California
Chapter in Contentious Cities: Design and the Gendered Production of Space (Routledge, 2020), edited by Jess Berry, Timothy Moore, Nicole Kalms & Gene Bawden.
This chapter examines the historic strength of gay identification on the west coast of the United States, but also how its strength unwittingly eclipsed more marginalized members of the LGTBQI+ communities. I explore a number of strategies that create the conditions to make the lives of queer and trans people of color livable and visible in the context of cultural homogenization and widespread urban gentrification. The chapter focuses on two spaces in Oakland, California, and is based on observations, interviews, and digital ethnography. Through examining the inclusion processes evident in a monthly queer party, Ships in the Night, I explore replicable strategies for queering nightlife with the goal of creating ephemeral safe spaces beyond just Oakland. My second case study is a mixed-use building in an immigrant neighborhood of Oakland that houses several grassroots queer organizations and individuals. In this, I explore the necessary structural components of queering processes to sustain the lives of queer and trans people of color long term.
Poster on the window of a community space operated by queer and trans people of color at the Liberated 24th Avenue building in Oakland, CA, 2019. Stathis G. Yeros
Queer Ecological Imaginations
With Chandra Laborde. Published in Ground Up 10 (2021)
This article examined contemporary politics of radical environmentalism from the perspective of queer epistemologies through three case studies that were presented during the Fall 2020 working group with the same name that we organized at UC Berkeley. The group was forum to think collectively about place-based strategies to resist the pernicious violence of extractive capitalism, climate catastrophe, and technocratic solutions by imagining embodied alternatives in more-than-human entanglements.
full list of publications →
Exhibitions
Queer Sites
Queer Sites is an exhibition and accompanying publication that employs insights from queer and trans cultural critique and attempts to establish a framework to conceptualize space without recourse to deeply ingrained dualisms such as public/private, male/female, nature/culture, and structure/surface. The project explores these subjects from the perspective of queer and trans habitation of the built environment.
The exhibition will take place in Berkeley, California, in Fall 2021 (schedule pending due to the uncertainties caused by the pandemic) and is based on a small number of case studies that include an AIDS hospice, a separatist rural community, a queer and trans people of color collective, and a BDSM urban district. The accompanying publication will include material related to the sites of the exhibition, but it will also become an additional “site” of projective ideas about queer/trans space.
The three main themes informing the lens through which case studies are presented are (i) undoing identity, (ii) querying gentrification, and (iii) transing gaze.
visit queer sites →
Installation view
View of Matera, Italy, 2013. Stathis G. Yeros.
Rooftops in Jaipur, India, 2013. Stathis G. Yeros
Postcards from the Roof
Spring 2014, Berkeley, CA
As a recipient of the Branner Traveling Fellowship I traveled for one year in three global regions (Asia, Southern Europe-Northern Africa, South America) studying uses of roof terraces and other spaces as providing opportunities for new, “above-ground” urban ecologies. The installation consisted of an exhibition display modeled after Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion World Map with a printed overlay that traced my journey . Visitors could peruse approximately one hundred postcards, while drinking Moroccan mint tea, listening to music from each of the locations visited, and leafing through the annotated books (Lefebvre, Calvino, Pessoa) that were laid out on the table. The exhibition format intended to create an immersive environment for introspection, engendering affective relationships of the spaces depicted in the postcards.
Diagrams of “new ground” conditions printed on the back side of postcards. Stathis G. Yeros
Teaching
The Social Life of Building
instructor of record
Fall 2021, Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley
How do building practices form and inform the ways in which we live — as individuals and as part of different communities? This course explores the multiple ways in which people and buildings interact. Our cultural and economic practices shape the form of our environment which in turn shapes social constructions of gender, race and class. At the same time, as individuals, we are always making choices about how we use our spaces. Intended as a gateway to advanced architectural humanities classes, the course is organized around themes that highlight ways of thinking about individual actions, social constructions of gender, race and class, and cultural associations of the built environment. The course approaches these themes from transnational perspectives to highlight the multiple, culturally specific ways in which architecture intersects with the daily lives of people.
Learning Objectives
Apply theoretical frameworks of spatial agency in the analysis of physical spaces.
Identify and describe how cultural, racial, economic, and political processes influence the design and habitation of buildings.
Understand key terms and be able to debate, with fully developed arguments, the ways that physical space can enable the inclusion of different ways of living, especially in contexts of suppression and dispossession.
Get first-hand experience with methods for studying the social and cultural associations that people have with the world of the buildings and the environment at large.
Wither Sustainability?
primary instructor, syllabus available upon request
Spring 2019 & 2020, Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley
Sustainability is a term that has garnered significant attention in recent decades and for very good reasons. Climate change and social unrest, sea level rise and the migrant crisis are often connected with each other, and represent pressing challenges transcending national boundaries and political regimes. This course will investigate key ideas about sustainability, critically evaluate its main strands, and consider possibilities for the future. How have architects, designers, and urban planners addressed sustainability? Are environmental politics associated with privilege? And how can we advocate for environmental justice from within the design disciplines? As a reading and composition course, the required texts will expose students to different types of writing about architecture, landscape, and the environment and how competing arguments are presented in writing.
![Student work, [In]Arch Advanced, 2013.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605ca075d1c15704614e9494/1616710406923-G81V6VP5J03PX79T0RUP/relief+model+90.jpg)
Student work, [In]Arch Advanced, 2013.
[IN] ARCH Advanced Design Studio
lecturer
Summer 2014, Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley,
course coordinator: Keith Plymale
[IN]ARCH ADV was an six-week intermediate architecture studio for undergraduates who were in their final years of an architecture program, or had already earned an undergraduate degree in architecture. Students completed formal explorations through hand- and digital drawings, modeling, and conceptual representation of design ideas. For the final project, students completed proposals for a cultural center in a vacant San Francisco lot. A brief study of the social and cultural characteristics of the site complimented the final designs. Due to the brevity of the program, we encouraged students to directly apply formal ideas developed in the first part of the course to the design “language” employed in their building proposals. This resulted in engaging speculative designs that pushed the envelop of how architecture can be inhabited at different scales, and what urban community centers could look like.
My responsibilities included developing the course content and assignments with the studio lead, formal and one-on-one design critiques. I also gave presentations on various design topics and on the history of San Francisco, and accompanied the students in site visits.
![Student work, [In]Arch Advanced, 2013.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/605ca075d1c15704614e9494/1616710428291-N4040JRTTA3BI0OP50UJ/Render+1.jpg)
Student work, [In]Arch Advanced, 2013.
more teaching…
Queering the City: Activist Art in the Later Twentieth Century
primary instructor, syllabus available upon request
Spring 2017, department of Art History, UC Berkeley
In the 1980s and 90s, following wider changes in the art world and in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis, queer artists took to the streets. Since then, many waves of queer art and activism have responded to local conditions and developed transnational dynamics that allow us to speak of disparate processes of “queering the city.” In the first part of this course, we will examine the tactics that queer artists developed to merge art with activism inside and outside the museum. How did artists respond to the political climate of the eighties, and how did questions of sexuality become important both with regard to artists’ biographies and to artistic production? How did queer work and the performance of different identities help mount a diverse array of institutional critiques that are still relevant today? In the second part of the course, we will focus on how queer life is experienced in contemporary cities, exploring how sexuality intersects with gender, race, class, and bodily ability through an examination of case studies from U.S., Latin American, and European cities.
Social and Cultural Processes in Architecture and Urban Design
graduate student instructor
Spring 2018, 2019 & 2020, Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley, Professor Leonardo Chiesi, instructor of record
This was a core course in the undergraduate architecture curriculum at Berkeley. It examined how social and cultural processes at large affect inhabitation, and how they can inform architectural design practice in particular. Throughout the course students were introduced to how meaning is produced in and by designed environments, and objects, the operation of taste as a socio-cultural component of decision making with regard to inhabiting designed spaces, and what tools designers have at their disposal to study these processes. We examined established methods of design research such as Post-Occupancy Evaluations, and applied methods that are not often used by designers, but that are common in the fields of anthropology and sociology, such as systematic observations and interviews, to specific design challenges. The assignments encouraged students to think critically about these tools and employ the course’s theoretical content in the study and design of particular environments and designed objects.My responsibilities included content development with the instructor of record, lecturing, seminar leadership, student mentorship and design critique.
Design With Language
graduate student instructor
Spring & Fall 2017-2020, Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley, Professor Raymond Lifchez, instructor of record
This seminar was structured around weekly writing assignments contributing to each student’s “writing portfolio” over the course of the semester. Each assignment included a prompt and a “mood,” intended to help students situate their characters in real life environments and observe the social and physical reality around them through a literary “magnifying glass.” The students were required to include an image at an appropriate point to enhance the story’s staging. My objectives as a graduate student instructor was to highlight the connections between elements of the narrative and craft of writing and the built environment, and help the students to develop their voices as authors, and, for most of them, as budding designers.
full list of courses taught →
Design
Robin Hood Gardens v.2.0
conceptual design project
As buildings in metropolitan regions around the world grow further away from the ground, architects and urban designers are confronted with the question of reinventing the ground as a place for collective activity between, through and above buildings, independent from the earth’s surface.
British architects Alison and Peter Smithson popularized the concept of “streets in the sky” in a series of unbuilt projects that eventually led to the commission of a public housing estate in East London, Robin Hood Gardens (1972). Unfortunately, the project was characterized from the beginning with neglect from the State and vandalism. Despite the complex’s important place in the history of modern architecture, its demolition began in 2014.
This project proposed a mixed-use development to replace Robin Hood Gardens, which takes into account the Smithsons’ legacy and the relative successes and failures of the original scheme, in order to suggest a new design methodology and a hybrid building typology for dense urban areas.
Rendered above-ground semi-public areas
Diagrams and plan of the urban conditions, design priorities, and temporal change
Section through time
Laurel Grove, architect Lisa Gelfand. Photograph by Kyle Jeffers.
Professional Design Practice
with Gelfand Partners Architects, San Francisco, CA
I worked on the following projects:
Laurel Grove Senior Affordable Housing
Five-story, 100 unit housing complex in San Jose, California (completed 2020). I worked on facade studies, schematics for public areas, design development, and construction details.
Yosemite Slough Education Center
Net-zero energy building to host educational field-trips in a former brownfield site in San Francisco, California (on hold). I worked on the schematic design, physical and digital models.
Working on Laurel Grove. Stathis G. Yeros
Yosemite Slough conceptual design - elevation study. Stathis G. Yeros