Queer Stories, Unvoiced Spaces: Archiving and Designing Through Storytelling

Abstract

This paper explores storytelling as a critical method in queer urban spatial practices and urban design, focusing on its dual function as a tool for archiving marginalised histories and imagining alternative spatial futures. Drawing from the workshop Queere Raumpraktiken, performatives Erbe und Storytelling at TU Wien and the oral history project Constellations, the article examines how queer storytelling practices preserve ephemeral and often erased urban experiences through oral narratives and speculative fiction. It argues that storytelling not only resists the erasure of queer spatialities but also serves as an imaginative design tool, enabling new configurations of care, resistance, and collectivity. Oral histories provide a relational and affective means to document queer life beyond institutional recognition. In parallel, fictional storytelling — exemplified by the book Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions — acts as a blueprint for non-normative urban imaginaries. Through a combination of narrative construction and visual representation, the Vienna workshop demonstrated how speculative storytelling can function as a design method that foregrounds queer futurity. The paper situates storytelling within broader queer and feminist epistemologies, proposing it as a situated, relational, and trans formative method for inclusive urban design. Ultimately, it advocates for storytelling as a queer urban praxis that challenges spatial norms and envisions alternative futures.