 You are listening to Make Change Happen, the podcast from IIED. Recently, IIED has started to explore how urban development and climate action can be more inclusive of LGBTQI plus communities and learn from queer thinking and practice. In this episode, senior researcher Tucker Landersman talks to two professionals who are working with queer communities and activists to bridge gaps between urban justice and climate justice and LGBTQI plus civil society. Hello and welcome to episode number 22 of IIED's podcast Make Change Happen. My name is Tucker Landersman. I'm a senior researcher at IIED focused on urban inequalities and climate action and I lead a project called What Does Queer Have To Do With It? Making Space for LGBTQI plus contributions to sustainable urban development and climate action. This represents a new area of work for IIED and it arose when a core group of staff working on gender justice started having conversations about missing voices across our priorities and programs. The work can sometimes feel uncomfortable and there are many steep learning curves but one year on we feel stronger than ever that we have an ethical obligation to include people with diverse genders and sexualities in our work. We recognize that we have a lot to learn from queer thinking and practice and from working with LGBTQI plus civil society and queer approaches can improve our work in areas such as informality, housing justice, gender justice and transformative climate action. For this episode of Make Change Happen, I spoke with two activist researchers that are building bridges between urban justice and climate justice and with LGBT civil society. The first guest is Rodrigo IoClovini from the Institute of Paulies or Paulies Institute in Sao Paulo and focused on issues of urban justice and the right to the city. Later we will hear from Sarah Louise Montgomery from the NGO and International Network Gender CC Women for Climate Justice. Welcome Rodrigo. Hi Tucker, nice to be here. Rodrigo, can you give us a brief introduction to Institute of Paulies and your role? Well Paulies Institute is a Brazilian NGO devoted to the fight for the right to the city. It was founded 36 years ago and we fight for the right to the city through different strategies and understanding the right to the city in different dimensions as well. We believe that if people build the cities daily in their lives, they should also decide it too. We also believe that the right to the city means some very different concrete dimensions such as housing, urban mobility, a healthy urban environment but also some very important political and symbolical dimensions such as history, heritage and artistic dimensions of the city. In order to achieve the right to the city we adopt different strategies such as advocacy initiatives, capacity building initiatives and research and communication actions as well. And I'm going to be really interested to hear later about how you've been able to incorporate queer inclusion into the work especially when it comes to right to the city. So in mainstream development queer thinking and practice are so largely invisible and IID is looking to kind of challenge what we call heteronormativity in development sector and heteronormativity often refers to assumptions made that heterosexuality identity and lifestyle is universal across the world and very often I think I'm not sure about you. I looked around and I was asking myself where are the queer people? It really felt like I was the only one in the room sometimes. So I wonder for you how maybe from a personal or from an institutional perspective how did you start to incorporate a queer lens or start to work with LGBT civil society at Institutes of Police? That's a great question Tucker because actually I think we have to start from a personal perspective because I'm a small town boy. I was raised in a very small town in the countryside of Brazil which had at the time 40,000 people and this small town it was a very conservative one and I had no LGBTQI reference in this town. When I looked back to that time of my life I wasn't able to to remember any LGBTQI person that I could have as a role model as an example. I had no meaning then what was to be a gay person, a gay man. So that changed a lot when I moved to Fortaleza which is a wider city with over two million people and it had a pride parade and when I saw the pride parade in Fortaleza it showed me that there was a lot of different ways to be an LGBTQI person as well. So the city showed me how different we can be and showed me that I wasn't alone. After that when I was traveling around the world and in other Brazilian cities I started to look how LGBTQI persons they would behave on street where they were at if there was LGBTQI venues there and I remember of course being amazed by cities such Amsterdam but I was also looking for those small towns to see the signs because they are there. We have to train our eyes because there is LGBTQ people in all cities of the world but since we live in a heteronormative society we have to search for them and that's why I began to connect the struggle for LGBTQI life for the struggle to write the CD and this becomes something that I was able to push for within Poly's Institute. So we started conversations with LGBTQI activists and we convened workshops and seminars and then we started partnerships and then that lead us to projects and projects such the one we are working today in mapping LGBTQI venues in Sao Paulo. So maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that process. It sounds as if Institute of Poly's turns 30 in internal conversations you're looking around and you're saying okay who's been at the table these past 30 years and you noticed some missing voices including black and brown voices as well as kind of LGBT voices and what did you do from there? From there we first decided that we have to change our agenda but to shift this agenda we have to change ourselves. So Poly's had to change the institution has to change the organization had to change and we started thinking how we could do that change. First we had to look to who are the people who are building Poly's Institute in their daily lives. There was some LGBTQI persons for instance but there was just a few black and brown people in our technical team. So we have to change our human resources policies and we have to actively search for black and brown people to be part of our teams. So this is very important because if we have to shift the way we do the work we cannot do the work with the same people that we did before. We have to shift our own technical bodies we have to shift our main directors we have to shift our partners as well. And you mentioned earlier that Institute of Poly's is now kind of mapping LGBT spaces within Sao Paulo and can you tell us a little bit more about that work? Yeah that's an amazing work and I'm very fond of this work that we are doing. Right now we are mapping LGBTQI places and cultural references in Sao Paulo and why we are doing that to understand to mobilize and to change. We are doing that to understand current territories and territorialities in which LGBTQI people they organize themselves within the city of Sao Paulo. We are trying to map and to understand patterns of urban dynamics mobility, leisure, housing, political activism of LGBTQI people and in order to do that we are starting from the point of mapping cultural references of that group of people. We are using collaborative and participatory method which is called participatory inventory of cultural reference and we are also doing some community... I forgot the word in English. What is it in Portuguese? Leituras comunitárias. Oh yeah like community understandings maybe? Yeah yeah. It would be it would be like public readings right it's a very Portuguese concept yeah. I think you can roll with it but Rodrigo let me let me ask you a question because some of our listeners who aren't geographers or urban planners they might be thrown for a loop when you say something like territory and territoriality. Can you tell us what is LGBT territory or what is you know queer territoriality? Well LGBTQI territory it's a compound of places and dynamics that together they say where LGBTQI people they live they work but they also are political activists it's a combination of space and social relationships so when we are looking for LGBTQI territories we are not only looking for instance oh here beside my house there is an LGBTQI bar and there there is an LGBTQI museum for instance but we are looking where they are in the city and how LGBTQI people they appropriate those places in the cities within their daily lives. So it's almost like how people on the day-to-day basis live in the city and build communities. Yeah how they build friendships how they build political trust how they connect with each other how they convene other people from their same groups because we as gay and LGBTQI people we choose our families as well. So it sounds as if a lot of these kind of LGBT territories or places where queer people are living and building communities and relationships they've gone unnoticed or unmapped. Can you tell us why is it important for organizations like Institute of Polis to map these spaces like what's the goal here what can you accomplish? It's very important not only to understand the patterns and the dynamics of the city but also to connect with different LGBTQI groups and people and activists. When we are doing the map we are doing actually a mobilization process as well we are engaging with each other and try to see what we are all doing how can we connect our initiatives how can we divide to be in different spaces and cover more ground as well. So it's a very very rich process of mobilization and it's also a possibility to change because when you know in depth a reality when you start to look with a zoom in of these LGBTQI presence in the city you can see where it can be better where we can push for change. This reminds me a lot of the rich history of community mapping projects and informal housing settlements and this has been something that IID has been involved in you know for decades especially with partners like SDI, SLUM and Shack Dwellers International and I hear you talk about you know producing knowledge in order to drive change and one of the kind of key added value of community mapping and informal housing settlements is that communities then have knowledge and data that they can use in negotiations with local governments for you know basic services and improved infrastructure. So it sounds like there are kind of mutual learnings that can happen here. Have you learned anything new or do you have any emerging findings from this participatory mapping project? I know you're not you're not finished yet but anything hot off the press that you'd like to share. Yeah sure we found that we I mean LGBTQI people we are still invisible we are still invisible. There is few produced data on LGBTQI people here in Brazil especially data that relates to cities and urban policies and urban development. For instance we found here in Sao Paulo that there is a lot of different concentrations of activities in the city of LGBTQI people. They are mostly concentrated in the city center of Sao Paulo but there are other territorial focus as well. When we are talking about hate crimes against LGBTQI people here I'm talking about hate crimes from 2016 until 2021 which we have the numbers from the government to do that and when we mapped these hate crimes against LGBTQI people we tried to see if they were connected with LGBTQI venues. We found there is a lot of coincidence among those two territories but there are differences as well. There are some places that concentrate LGBTQI venues such as bars theaters services that they are concentrate in a part of the city which doesn't have a lot of hate crimes against LGBTQI people and why is that? So we are now bringing up some hypothesis on that and one of the things that we are looking it's because maybe this place because we know this place we are urban planners here in Sao Paulo we know that this place concentrates a little bit more white people with higher income so one of our hypothesis is that the difference among those two concentrations one that concentrates both LGBTQI venues and hate crimes and the other that only concentrates LGBTQ venues is that the later concentrates also housing of white and rich people in the city but can we affirm that there is a correlation between hate crimes against LGBTQI people and rich and white neighborhoods the answer is no and why we can't correlate that because we don't have data on housing of LGBTQI people in Sao Paulo we don't have data on the urban mobility of LGBTQI people in Sao Paulo so since we are invisible for those public policies and for those data we cannot understand what threatens us as LGBTQI people in the city Rodrigo I think you are pointing to a key challenge to making urbanization and sustainable development truly inclusive and that is the lack of data when we don't collect when we don't include gender and sexuality in large data sets at amounts to kind of a queer erasure and I think this is something that we've heard from a lot of partners working with LGBTQI people even the World Bank for example when the World Bank was trying to determine the correlation relationship between poverty and gender identity and sexual orientation they were very hesitant to say yes we can show a strong relationship between poverty and LGBT status and it was simply because they lacked these large data sets and like you said they were relying on civil society so I think this points to a priority moving forward where civil society can can start partnering with government ministries in order to make sure a data collection is more inclusive I wanted to ask you about how you're you're working with an intersectional lens because you're already pointing to how sometimes race and class privilege are intersecting with vulnerabilities that LGBT persons experience and intersectionality is really a kind of a key term right now in civil society a lot of people and organizations are struggling to to use it beyond a buzzword and really turn intersectionality into practice into action in a lot of my colleagues and external partners say yes we want to do this you know but how so can you tell us a bit more about you know how Institute of Polis is committed to to working on urban justice through an intersectional lens? Institute of Polis believes that the intersectional approach is key to address inequalities in the city in the regions and in the countries so in order to change inequalities in order to shift inequalities we have to adopt an approach that puts people at the center people's race at the center of the discussion people sexual orientation in the center of the discussion people's gender in the center of the discussion so that's the main goal today for a Polis Institute is how do we reframe urban planning and how do we reframe urban policies to start from people and from people's body from people's experience in order to plan the city in order to produce cities that are good for everyone to live in because when i have a city that's good for a black young women that is lesbian or bisexual we have a city that's good for everyone thanks Rodrigo last question for you and this is a question we ask all of our guests on make change happen podcasts what's your biggest change priority looking to the future where should we be investing our energy to make change happen in the close future i think that we have to invest our energy to shift and to change our organizations first we have to consolidate within our organizations the notion that to put people at the center of urban policies that it means to racialize urban planning it means to adopt policies from a gender perspective but it also entails defending LGBTQI dimension of the right to the city it means that we have to pay attention to the LGBTQI city that we live in because we are everywhere and we have to be visible and we have to be taken into account and we have the right to decide the city that we live in Rodrigo and Covini thank you very much Sarah Louise Montgomery welcome to make change happen can we start just by introducing yourself and maybe you can tell us a little bit more about gender cc yes thank you Tucker thanks for having me today i'm Sarah Louise Montgomery i'm working at gender cc women for climate justice secretary at in Berlin we are a global network and we have around 160 members in the global north and global south our members are basically organizations researchers feminist organizations and individuals and we are also providing research educational work doing advocacy work on on all levels so from UNFCCC climate process to the local level we also work on the urban level that's great thanks a lot for that and i know that gender cc has been working on climate action and climate policy through the lens of gender and gender justice and its inception i'm a big fan of the work that gender cc did around urban policy and how to integrate meaningfully kind of feminist perspectives into climate policy in cities i understand that gender cc has kind of recently in past couple years gone beyond the gender binary and started also including trans and non-binary activism as well as queer activists into your work can you tell me a bit about how that came about and why you think it's important yes we are actually a bit at the beginning of this work i must say yeah as you mentioned we have been mainly working on the crossroad of gender and climate justice so analyzing climate policies mostly in the urban areas our biggest maybe i can just mention our biggest project that we have had in the recent years yeah of course there was a project with four partner organizations or four partner countries and Indonesia, India, South Africa and Mexico and our partners or partner organizations have analyzed climate policy of big cities and made a gender analysis of these climate policies and then developed recommendations for the urban policies basically so that was the main idea recently we have had two projects that tried to use that tool this is called an agenda impact assessment and made make our work more intersectional we recognize that gender is just one part of a lens that we can look through when we analyze climate policy so i think one project that you know quite well Tucker is the LGBTQI project that we have done in the last year funded by the Urgent Action Fund and what we wanted to do first of all is create a little bit of a base of research we produced a briefing paper with the help of Jerry Serrano in New York a student who did a capstone project and supported us with this right so it sounds like you were really responding to a gap in the literature and a gap in knowledge between how the climate justice movement is operating and how kind of queer and LGBT people are contributing to that yes i think that is true and so we were responding to this gap however this project was really a small pilot project so we just have this relatively small briefing paper and i mean what we would like to do of course is to have more of a database here in a different project we use the gender impact assessment that has been developed in previous years and try to make it more intersectional i think you're you're you're on to something really key right here with this how can we make gender assessment tools or gender responsive tools more intersectional and of course intersectionality is a key term that a lot of organizations a lot of researchers and a lot of donors are are grappling with especially how to turn this kind of concept or a buzzword into action and i'm i'm wondering if you have any insights so what did that look like to take a gender analysis tool and try to make it inclusive of gender diversity and sexual diversity for the moment this is a german project and what we have done we wanted to make the gender impact assessment more accessible for young people or for people who work with youth groups so we wanted to on one hand make it a bit simpler and then on the other side a bit more complex which was i don't know how to say that it was quite a challenge obviously and the idea was that they could take any action they're taking or any measure or any policy and then run through the gender impact assessment like a checker and you mentioned that making it intersectional is is quite a challenge obviously and so we wanted to shift from the theoretical approach of intersectionality to a very practical approach so basically what we have done is we have involved a lot of groups like groups of people who can also represent these different perspectives because we think if those groups are not at the table then it is difficult to develop the right questions for this intersectional checker and so we had queer groups, youth groups, union groups, even queer religious groups we have had people with disabilities and BIPOC people so i think what was important for us is that people in the room could also contribute from their own perspective without necessarily having that responsibility i mean we we try to include everybody's perspective but also had this sounding board a group of young activists or young people who work with youth organizations as a sounding board i want to just clarify because you use the term BIPOC and just for for listeners who aren't familiar with that term it stands for black indigenous and people of color and would you then go so far to say that kind of ensuring this diversity of participation it becomes easier to kind of work in intersectional ways so it might not necessarily be a group of researchers before they start their action sitting in a room kind of tapping their heads with their pencils thinking about now i'm intersectional or how am i intersectional but it sounds as if what you're saying part of the participatory process and ensuring that you have diversity of people in the room and at the table is part of that work is part of implementing intersectional concepts into action yes so what we did was develop a sort of like a check with seven topics or seven fields where we thought well it was derived from a gender impact assessment where we look at certain dimensions so-called dimensions like for example at economy care economy or public spaces or health and safety gender roles this kind of dimensions we call them and when people run the check like run their measures through the check they can look at all these different dimensions and what we did is provide questions for them to see how people would be affected by that measure in different ways depending on power structures in society basically and we also provided examples so it would be quite accessible so for example a huge climate camp and we try to develop that example according to all these dimensions i think achieving that simultaneous simplicity and accessibility with the complexity of outlook and participation is that sweet spot right and it seems like that's what so many of us are trying to do with our work if i could circle back to the work that gender cc has done with lgbtq climate activists i know that the work spoke with activists and community leaders in different parts of the world and i know that you've worked in Germany and throughout europe and but also in other geographies and i wanted to ask what are some of the ways that climate policies and climate change are impacting queer communities thank you for that question i mean we look at the impacts and vulnerabilities of course but we also look and that's mainly our work at the way climate policy is affecting people because well mainly i mean we know about vulnerabilities a lot already but we also want to i mean not feed into this narrative about oh maybe women or lgbtq people are more vulnerable because yeah that's a bit like an old shoe or something it's a sad story that we hear over and over again yeah and also feed into a sort of sexist narrative or homophobic narrative of being victim or something oh and that these are communities needing saving help and yeah also neocolonial narrative like oh poor black women in the global south need our help so what we do instead is look very much at policy i mean what we have done in the project in the lgbtq project is mostly to look at urban planning because also today i mean 55 percent of the world's population already lives in urban areas and this is going to increase a lot still and there's already a movement of cities around the world it's called c40 cities because and to reduce climate emissions because 75 percent of the global co2 emissions are already created by cities i mean cities are accountable for those emissions and so yeah city planners or people who make policy for cities are actually quite important in terms of climate justice and to what degree did you find that urban policies and city planners are responding to the maybe differentiated vulnerabilities or the potential potentialities of kind of feminist groups women and lgbt groups what would be important to see is that there's no negatives or like social or distributional outcomes so that's basically if you do climate policy like a positive climate policy you should also make sure this doesn't have any adverse effects on specific groups i wonder can you maybe for our listeners who struggle a little bit to understand the direct explicit or implicit connections between climate change and lgbt communities and how would you spell that out for them sure when we talk about climate justice we basically mean that those who have contributed the least to climate change are those who actually struggle the most because they have hugely less resources of course this goes along the lines of discrimination so it has to do with gender with class disability with grace and also with your position on political global north or political global south and maybe to give you an example is that in the u.s but also in britain up to 40 percent of homeless youth are describing themselves as being queer in britain i think is between 20 and 30 percent in the u.s there has been a study about this and queer youth who are homeless mainly live in the coastal areas they're more vulnerable to storms or to floodings for example you have also i mean especially a trans vulnerability we talk about the gender pay gap but there's also a pay gap between cis people and trans people and for example trans people two to three times more likely to face unemployment than cis people when you think about fleeing from natural disaster you have bigger adversities for example the shelters are often organized by institutions that are structurally violent against queer people like for example religious institutions or governmental organizations even people have also more problem crossing borders in cases necessary like traveling while trans i think is the hashtag and this can often be because they lack documentation that matches their gender identity right yeah exactly because so-called passing i don't know if the same word in english but basically people who cannot pass as a certain gender but have that in their documents right so it sounds like there's these compounding vulnerability is that that the lgbd qi plus community faces that in kind of a climate linked disaster it can prevent them from receiving relief can prevent them from accessing safe shelter this matches what we've been finding in some of our research we've heard of organizations community-based organizations being denied covid relief for example from local governments because the local government was homophobic and i think this is kind of a growing acknowledgement that vulnerabilities associated with gender and sexuality impact the capacity of individuals and communities to respond in a moment of crisis and to bounce back after a crisis you know what's often referred to as resiliency yeah it also exactly it also has to do with the everyday discrimination that people are facing because whenever there's a catastrophe and you mentioned covid now everything becomes more difficult in everyday life and then other forms of discrimination that are already taking place like people being afraid to be attacked in public transport let's say becomes even more more of a burden in that moment yeah no i think that's i think a lot of people have these difficulties and making these connections and so and this also points to what i think what you what you started this conversation with which was organizations like gender cc organizations like iid are trying to respond to this gap in documentation in united states for example there's far more data about lgbtqi plus populations than around the world but you know the world bank has also documented that people with diverse genders and sexualities are disproportionately likely to live in poverty to be kicked out of their homes when they're young and to be kicked out of schools and this contributes to kind of vulnerability and inequalities that they face throughout their lives sarah thanks a lot for joining us i really enjoy the conversation i'll wrap up with the question that we asked all of our guests on make change happen which is what's your biggest change priority looking into the future where should we be investing our energy to make change happen for us it's as gender cc it is very important to have a databases i think because there has not been this focus on research on lgbtqi communities and in terms of climate justice yet and i think this is still a big gap i think also what is important is to join forces and bring communities together so queer communities around the world as well as climate activists or people who fight against discrimination and in any other way great so more queer solidarity more queer more queer activism and uh more more queer archivists some of my favorite things sarah thanks so much for for joining us today and you can find out more about today's podcast our guests and their work at iid.org slash podcast where you can also listen to more episodes you can leave us feedback or follow the podcast at soundcloud.com slash the iid that's soundcloud.com slash thg iid you can find out more about iid's work creating spaces for lgbtqi plus contributions to sustainable development and climate action on our website where you can also find 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