What Would an Inclusive City for Gender and Sexual Minorities Be Like? You Need to Ask Queer Folx!

From fights against racism to women’s inclusion, from access to education to integration of migrants: “Inclusion” and the “inclusive city” have been used in many ways and at different scales, running the risk of becoming a kind of catchall. Following increasing use by public authorities, media, and urban professionals, the inclusive city now serves as a norm‐ ative framework for urban development. Although it is aimed at social cohesion, one nevertheless wonders whether it has not become more of a buzzword that obfuscates the reproduction of power relations. Moreover, while being some‐ how mainstreamed into institutional discourses, the inclusive city has been quite overlooked so far by academics, and an effort is needed to clarify its conceptualisation and democratic potential. This article provides a theoretical and critical perspective on how the concept of inclusion is used in urban public policies in relation to gender, by examining the public these policies address. Using a multiscalar analysis and drawing on Warner’s framework of publics and counterpublics, I examine more specifically which public is targeted in inclusive policies, concerning gender and sexualities, and how this participates in the reshaping of (urban) citizenship and sense of belonging, as well as the implications this has for social justice. Thus, I argue that while the inclusive city has become a normative idiom imbued with the neoliberal grammar of public politics, it also offers a paradoxical framework of democratic cohesion that promotes consumption‐based equality. A focus on (counter)publics serves to highlight the need for a more queerly engaged planning practice—one that draws on insurgent grassroots movements—to seek to destabilise neoliberalism’s attempt at pacification in its use of inclusion and citizen participation.


Introduction
In her seminal piece "What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, and Human Work," Hayden (1980) points to the inequalities engendered by US architectural and urban planning, showing how the nuclear-family suburban home is promoted as the ideal governing principle of the "American dream." Hayden denounces how architecture, design, and planning foster the capitalist-patriarchal system that confines the woman to the domestic place and assigns her to the reproductive functions that support economic production. She thus calls on society to produce a city that will be more attentive to women's needs and allow them to access the paid workforce. Despite its relatively avant-garde dimension, Hayden's proposal doesn't claim to be an inclusive city. It is with the increase of globalisation and the spread of multiple urban models of governance that the inclusive city arises. Enhanced by equality legislation aimed at social justice, the inclusive city has nevertheless suffered from its popularity. From fights against racism to women's inclusion, from access to education to integration of migrants, "inclusion" has been used in many ways and at different scales, running the risk of becoming a kind of catchall. Following increasing use by public authorities, media, and urban professionals, the "inclusive city" now serves as a normative framework for urban development. While the idea of inclusion remains a driving force in combatting structural inequalities engendered by the capitalist-patriarchal system, one should bear in mind that "such an encompassing term…may gain width but lose depth" (Short, 2021, p.3); this raises the question of whether it has not become more of a buzzword that obfuscates the reproduction of power relations. Furthermore, although it has become mainstream in institutional discourse, the inclusive city has been quite overlooked so far by academics, and an effort is needed to clarify its conceptualisation. What stands behind the inclusive city? Who is it aimed at and how does it consider gender and sexuality? Or, to draw on Hayden's title: What would an inclusive city for gender and sexual minorities be like?
This article provides a theoretical and critical perspective on how the concept of inclusion, as it relates to gender, is used in urban public policies enacted at various scales. Gender is defined as a system of classification that separates men and women and the traits and values associated with each, which includes compulsory heterosexuality. This categorisation thus excludes all those who do not conform to the normalised binary alignment between sex, gender, and sexuality. Drawing on the literature, it examines the public that these policies both address and shape. According to Dewey (2001), a public exists as soon as a collective experience happens that is interpreted as problematic. The public is then defined as a collective concerned with a common problem, which needs to raise attention from institutions. This notion of the public is quite antagonistic to the notion of the public sphere developed by classical political theory, and which has been widely criticised. Feminist scholars have drawn attention to the androcentric and bourgeois limits of the latest. Young (1990, p. 19) argues that the universal, self-claimed dimension of the public space in its liberal meaning works as an ineluctable tool for domination and oppression: "Policies that are universally formulated and thus blind to differences of race, culture, gender, age, or disability often perpetuate rather than undermine oppression." Inclusion in the public thus goes beyond class antagonism and subalternity, as it is about practices, lifestyles, and values. Women, for instance, organise their own spaces to contest cultural masculine domination. As a democratic space of belonging and citizenship, the public space is therefore not a peaceful place of consensus. Rather, it is a site of conflicts and negotiations, imbued with power, and one that various publics use as a meeting place (Massey, 2005) to achieve social change (Young, 2000). Public space, therefore, counts as a space of struggles (Massey, 2005) and encounters with "Others" (Ahmed, 2000). The heterogeneity of pub-lic space supposes that those who are excluded from it, such as women, Black people, and proletarians, organise themselves in alternate spaces that could lead to the emergence of oppositional public spaces (Negt, 2007;Neumann, 2016). These alternate spaces host counterpublics that help invent and circulate new narratives and worldviews (Fraser & Honneth, 2003). While publics, as well as counterpublics-both defined as relationships among strangers-"exist only in virtue of their imagining," counterpublics are mainly "constituted through a conflictual relation to the dominant public" (Warner, 2002, p. 423), although they do not require a reform programme. Counterpublics exist primarily as "mediating space[s]" (Zaslow, 2022) between the hidden oppressed and the mainstream. They are spaces where hegemonic norms infuse and contribute to the ideological, cultural, and material formation and reformation of subjectivities as a condition of belonging to a common world (Warner, 2002). Furthermore, beyond spaces belonging to discourses, counterpublics develop new performative spatialities, through embodied sociability (Warner, 2002). As such, they count as spatio-temporal dispositives from which new knowledge and practices can emerge (Halberstam, 2005) through critical engagement with rational hegemonic norms (Eleftheriadis, 2018).
In this article, I propose to examine which publicas a social space created by the circulation of discourse (Warner, 2002)-is constituted through the attention of inclusive urban policies in relation to gender and sexuality, and what this entails in terms of in/exclusion. I focus on the European context as an interesting case study to explore how the scales of governance intertwine. In so doing, this article aims to engage in discussion on urban planning, social justice, and political and cultural geographies of gender and sexuality. Its origins are twofold: First, whereas academic studies and planning policies in most cases focus on the inclusion of either gender/women or LGBTQ+ people-at best, adding the other category in the margins-it articulates gender and sexuality issues of inclusion from a conception of gender that considers the discriminatory effects produced by heteronormativity. Second, it does so by accounting for a variety of scales of action and their entanglements, highlighting local variations and possible scalar paradoxes that may result. I start by presenting a short genealogy of the concept of inclusion and how it has been used by public policies to highlight how it has become a reference framework for public action. I then address gender inclusion, in particular women's inclusion, outlining the implications of common misconceptions of gender, as well as the entanglements of gender inclusion with critiques of neoliberal governance. I continue by developing on LGBTQ+ issues in relation to urban inequalities and how this has been addressed so far by public policies, highlighting the failure of queer participatory planning. Thus, I argue that the inclusive city has become a normative idiom soaked within the neoliberal grammar of public politics-and one that offers a paradoxical framework of democratic cohesion promoting consumption-based equality. However, a focus on (counter)publics would serve to highlight the need for a more queerly engaged planning practice: one that draws on insurgent grassroots movements and seeks to destabilise neoliberal attempts at pacification that promote inclusion and citizen participation in a way that "overly idealizes open communication and neglects the substance of debate" (Fainstein, 2010, p. 23).

From Inclusion to the Inclusive City: Pathways for an Ambivalent Concept
The term inclusion does not refer at first to the relationship between people and society (Luhmann, 1995) but to the material world of objects, or the theoretical world of law (see, e.g., Plaisance, 2020). The term has been used to refer to the social world since the 1990s when political leaders began to consider how to promote more egalitarian education policies. Inclusive education thus stood at the heart of various European policies that embraced the paradigm of inclusion, in contrast to the prevalent paradigm of "integration," which was derived from the medical-social field of disability (Bouquet, 2015;Jaeger, 2015;Plaisance et al., 2007). While integration supposes one to move towards the hegemonic norms that rule a society to "fit within" by giving up what are considered to be deviant patterns, inclusion aims at adapting the environment to individuals' specific needs. Hence, inclusive education requires public policies to identify and respond to the needs of people with disabilities when it comes to education. This inclusive turn then develops much further. Public policies direct their attention to issues of social precarity in a context where new forms of poverty and marginality are emerging (Paugam et al., 1996). Exclusion is not, however, the opposite of inclusion, as it refers to a fact, rather than to a goal to be achieved. Therefore, public policies mobilise the framework of social inclusion to counteract the growing dynamics of exclusion. As such, "inclusion is not only a policy but is also seen as a value, as an ethic advocating social justice and community cohesion" (Bouquet, 2015, p. 25).
Drawing on this genealogy of public policies for inclusion, the inclusive city has then become an unavoidable reference framework for urban policies. It refers, at first, more specifically to the adaptation of urban planning and design to the needs of people with (physical) disabilities, aiming at enhancing accessibility to urban amenities. Inclusion has reached the European scale to become a priority for EU social policies. Indeed, various studies have stressed the importance of cities, rather than nation-states, as " 'the place where the business of modern society gets done' and as the sites where people become citizens and mobilize politically" (Kaal, 2011, p. 545). While the Amsterdam Treaty-which went into effect in 1999-helped combat exclusion, the Lisbon Council, in 2007, clearly stated the eradication of poverty as a new, common goal for EU members. This goal was to be achieved by combatting social exclusion through the coordination of national inclusion action plans. However-and despite a mid-term reorientationthe Lisbon Strategy has not developed well, and social inclusion will have to be incorporated in the following round of public action, that is, the Europe 2020 Strategy, which aims for "smart, sustainable, inclusive growth," with greater coordination of national and European policies. This move from social exclusion to social inclusion requires, moreover, further clarification. Daly (2008) highlights that, first, as the programme has developed, the framing of social inclusion has been merged with issues of social protection. Second, its focus has been put on "active social inclusion," as participation in the labour market. Social inclusion, therefore, constitutes the basic framework for the development of the Europe 2020 Strategy, based on what has been defined as a "Europeanisation of problems" through a common problem representation (Bacchi, 2012) of social exclusion, and a consequent ideal of inclusion.
Beyond its normalisation at the European scale, the inclusive city was constituted in the early 2000s as a central theme of the UN Habitat Programme Global Campaign on Urban Governance, to combat poverty at the global scale (UN Human Settlements Programme, 2002). Drawing on Brazilian urban experiments from the 1980s, the inclusive city promotes direct democracy for more accessible public services to all (van der Wusten, 2016). The programme defines it as "a place where everyone, regardless of wealth, gender, age, race or religion, is enabled to participate productively and positively in the opportunities cities have to offer" (UN Human Settlements Programme, 2002, p. 5). It also presents "inclusive decision-making processes" as essential to achieving this goal. Inclusion is thus strongly linked to economic equal opportunities, as well as to participatory methods, as a means of including citizens. Two dimensions of this approach are also quite popular in current neoliberal forms of urban modes of governance. Furthermore, in 2015, the UN adopted the Agenda 2030, which aims to help build an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable world through specific Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) united through the pledge to "leave no one behind." Here again, inclusion is economically driven, with SDG 11 referring to inclusive cities in relation to economic growth and "inclusive prosperity." In a looser application, the term inclusion is also used to label the UN platform of networked cities that promotes the fight against racism. Drawing on the new urban agenda of Habitat III, the International Coalition of Inclusive and Sustainable Cities (ICCAR), launched by UNESCO in 2004, prides itself on striving "to fight against societal ills that result from social transformations, including rapid urbanization, human mobility, and rising inequalities" (UNESCO, 2014). The European Coalition of Cities against Racism is presented as playing "a key role in facing social issues related to the European continent, including anti-semitism, rights of LGBT communities, inclusion of persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous people and refugees inter alia; and, in ensuring that all citizens can enjoy a safe, inclusive, fair and respectful urban environment free from all forms of discrimination" (UNESCO, 2014). While gender and sexual minorities are mentioned, they appear as part of a list of vulnerable people to protect, among other publics, casting them as incommensurate subordinates, rather than people with agency of their own who are systemically marginalised. Finally, with its tagline "Everyone counts: Making the cities of tomorrow more inclusive," the World Bank also builds on the concept of the inclusive city. Focusing on developing countries where urbanisation is key, it enhances the importance of economics and consequently orients its action through three main spheres: spatial (land, housing, and services); social (safety, rights, and participation); and economic (production and consumption through education and the job market).
This overview of the concept of inclusion and its use by public policies on a variety of scales accounts for its paradoxical and ambivalent nature across scales (Bain & Podmore, 2021a). Inclusion was initially forged to replace the idea of integration, which was correctiveoriented. Inclusion still aims to combat social inequalities and support a better quality of life for selected citizens who cannot fully access the amenities of society, but it remains ambivalent about who should be included and how to reach that goal. By switching from eradicating poverty and social exclusion to promoting active inclusion, policies focus on enhanced participation in the market economy as the primary measure of inclusion. As organised top-down frameworks for action, social inclusive policies, therefore, target individuals who are expected to demonstrate autonomy, flexibility, and resilience, and to contribute to the (socio)economic growth of the society in which they live, through production and consumption, and regardless of their own characteristics. "Inclusion hence simply supposes following this 'normal' lifestyle, focused on consumption" (Printz, 2018, p. 188), through the forging of a collective sense of belonging that relies on the common ground of economic participation. As such, "those who are seen as excluded, and who therefore should be included, are those who deviate from this standard where consumption and a focus on material goods are the standard" (Printz, 2018, p. 188). Finally, despite the many other urban models that have spread around the globe in the last few decades, and the increased use of the urban project as a tool to counter the post-World War II drifts of functionalism, the inclusive city appears more as a desirable ideal for cities, than as an operational mode of governance (Clément & Valegeas, 2017). It stands as a normative framework for virtuous urban development whose aim is social justice, supporting close relations between the city and its dwellers through democratic participation, thereby promoting new forms of urban citizenship (Beall, 2000), grounded in capitalist values. Inclusion has, nevertheless, remained quite genderblind. In a context of growing claims for equal opportunities for all, one can therefore ask whether, and how, issues of gender have been addressed in relation to inclusion and the inclusive city.

Gender Equality and Inclusiveness in Planning: Women at the Heart of Equality Policies
Feminist scholars have long denounced the androcentric bias of urban planning, which produces cities that favour both the needs and the legitimacy of men over women. Feminist Marxist scholars have argued how the divide between the private and the public spheres supportsand is supported by-the articulation of patriarchy and capitalism (McDowell & Massey, 1984). In her seminal piece of work, McDowell (1999) historicises the spatial division of gender since the rise of the industrial city, showing how the segregation of women into the domestic sphere and the associated construction of their illegitimacy in the public area has been naturalised over time. Hence, while women are assigned to the domestic sphere as the preferential providers of care, men continue to enjoy both the mythologised freedom of the city space and the tranquillity of the home (Blidon, 2017). Feminist scholars moreover argue that men dominate both the professional and the decisional spheres in urban planning (Tummers, 2015), which leads to the design of a male-adapted built environment, rather than a universal one. Women's mobilities are thus much more constrained than that of their male counterparts because planners do not consider their specific needs related to their gender roles (Hayden, 1980). Studies also analyse the ongoing social construction of urban insecurity (Pain, 1991(Pain, , 1997, which translates into a geography of women's fear (Valentine, 1989). This prevents women from circulating freely in the city, which is perceived as a place of danger. As a result, women borrow space rather than dwelling in it and are hindered in the expression of full citizenship. Despite the progressive turn in planning (Thorpe, 2017) and the development of feminist planning scholarship (see, e.g., Fainstein & Servon, 2005;Fenster, 2002;Kern, 2010Kern, , 2021Parker, 2016Parker, , 2017Wekerle, 2005), "the integration of gendered perspectives within professional practice remains limited [and] women continue to endure an unequal position in society" (Beebeejaun, 2017, p. 323)-and in the city, as a central space in our globalised economics-oriented societies (see, e.g., Blidon, 2017).
Feminist research has slowly become infused with public policies (Biarrotte, 2020). As such, Vienna stands out as an avant-garde city in combatting gendered inequalities in access to public space (Irschik et al., 2013). Development of gender-conscious urban planning on the European scale began in the 2000s and continues with the ratification of the Amsterdam Treaty, which led to the inclusion of gender issues in all governmental policies.
In practice, public policies take up gender inequalities through the issue of harassment and concerning women's feelings of insecurity in the public space. Gender mainstreaming programmes, as a "gendered political and policy practice" (Walby, 2005, p. 321), seek to promote gender equality in all domains of public action, through the monitoring of gendered statistics and drawing on methods that prioritise the voices of female urban dwellers (Tummers, 2015;Tummers & Wankiewicz, 2020). Cities engage in drawing up lists of recommendations to be implemented at the city level and in developing shared networks of good practices to combat sexism and gender-based harassment in the city. Many of them develop guidelines for professionals and politicians that seek to improve gender inclusion. This happens through participatory methods, like walking tours for urban diagnosis, aimed at enhancing democratic participation. However, some scholars underline that, "though within planning there has been a participatory turn that emphasizes the importance of engaging with citizens, community influence within statutory planning processes remains limited" (Beebeejaun, 2017, p. 324).
Gender mainstreaming success in "captur[ing] the imagination of policy-makers" (Daly, 2005, pp. 433-434) relies on how it has become "a symbol of modernity" (Daly, 2005, p. 441) through its promotion by international bodies at various scales. While gender mainstreaming might improve (some) women's access to urban areas-the urban being embraced as a compulsory place for emancipation from traditional gender roles-it brings with it new tensions. Walby (2005) points out that while gender equality refers to a feminist goal of inclusiveness, mainstreaming refers to a mode of improvement of governance-and these two dimensions are difficult to reconcile. Moreover, and despite its feminist theoretical premises, gender mainstreaming "is very often not informed by gender analysis, rather it is oriented towards women" (Daly, 2005, p. 441). This limited orientation towards a mere public does not allow gender mainstreaming to fulfil its initial aim of attacking structural inequalities. This also has to do with its operationalisation as it focuses almost exclusively on tools and procedures, often missing an overall strategy grounded in proper theorisation, and therefore remaining at the level of policy processes. This leads to an increased "technocratisation" that prevents gender mainstreaming from achieving a more transformative potential.
While these programmes (potentially) improve gender equality statistics, and selected realities, they are criticised for their lack of consideration of other axes of inequality. Even though an intersectional perspective is slowly introduced, it mostly focuses on ethnicity and class, although "class is more often treated implicitly, embedded within concepts of poverty, social exclusion, and pay rather than as a focus of theoretical debate" (Walby, 2005, p. 330). This relates well with the specification by the Council of Europe (1998) to reach for "individuals' economic independence," while spheres other than economics, such as family and care, remain overlooked. In addition, the lack of a proper gender perspective has driven "the utilization of the category of woman (to be) criticized as problematically essentializing and homogenising" (Walby, 2005, p. 330). While the mention of intersectionality on the one hand, and of gender and sexual minorities on the other, seems to be growing in gender-planning guidelines, the main public that is addressed consists of white, middle-class, cis, heterosexual women, consequently sidestepping the specific needs of other women-identified subjects (see, e.g., Listerborn, 2007). Moreover, this reproduces a naturalised vision of gender that does not contest power relations but rather seeks to accommodate their consequences. Such a vision matches well with an inclusive perspective as it valorises difference, at the risk of reifying it. Designed and implemented from the top down, these entrepreneurial policies focus on interpersonal relations, eluding the potential of collectives, groups, and communities in the transformation of society, and consequently reproducing power relations.
Gender mainstreaming "seeks to institutionalize equality by embedding gender-sensitive practices and norms in the structures, processes, and environment of public policy" (Daly, 2005, p. 435), as a symbol of progressiveness. By doing so, it helps paint those who do not support such a vision-or who have not yet achieved this ideal-as backward and in need of education. The instrumentalisation of gender equality in some nationalist discourses (see, e.g., Hancock & Lieber, 2017) as femo-nationalist rhetoric (Farris, 2017), therefore requires attention. On a global scale, the World Bank has recently been promoting gender-inclusive urban planning (Terraza et al., 2020). Its handbook for good practices, which targets Global South countries, mentions intersectionality in line with developmental perspectives-although it limits it to age and ability. Sexual and gender minorities are nevertheless mentioned in relation to gender-specific needs. Participatory methodologies are also emphasised as part of the decision-making processes. However, an implicit bias remains with the portrayal of developing countries as archaic in terms of gender, in opposition to the "Western" developed world. Furthermore, the photographs picture traditional views of women and girls in so-called southern countries, in contexts of farm work, domestic work, and education, reproducing a very (hetero)normative and biased view of what it should be like to be a woman in the Global South-a developmentalist perspective that has been criticised (see, e.g., Peake & Rieker, 2013). Moreover, this excludes gender and sexual minorities from the main public, relegating them to the status of subalterns, while inviting women-identified subjects to conform to the conveyed representations. This is even more questionable with the increase of LGBTQ+ rights at the global scale.

Planning for Gender and Sexual Minorities: The (Renewed) Need for Inclusive Queer Spaces
While Doan (2016) has claimed the "need for inclusive queer spaces," it is important to emphasise this persistent need, in relation to the reconfiguration of queer spaces. By equating gender with women and remaining primarily within a binary vision of gender, as well as disregarding intersections of gender inequality with sexual orientation, gender mainstreaming approaches have been indeed rather limited when it comes to circumscribing their public. Feminist and queer scholars have raised their voices to make visible existing discriminations towards gender and sexual minorities, due to the heteronormativity of our everyday spaces (Bell & Valentine, 1995;Doan, 2010). Research has long been focused on the "gay neighbourhood" ("gaybourhood") as a place for sexual dissidents-both of refuge and of community formation and political organisation (Blidon, 2011). Scholars point to how the reterritorialisation of the heterosexist capitalist city from the margins supports a "claim for citizenship" (Bell & Binnie, 2002, p. 60). However, while the gay neighbourhood remains a crucial site of identity formation and claims of recognition, critics have emerged-most notably regarding its gendered bias. Lesbian geographies have argued over the differential modes of community and space formation for women (Browne & Ferreira, 2015;Podmore, 2001Podmore, , 2006, as well as for trans and gender-non-conforming people (see, e.g., Gieseking, 2020). Moreover, in a context of urban transformation and increased gentrification (Gorman-Murray & Nash, 2017), this mythical configuration has been challenged through the diffusion of queer people throughout wider metropolitan areas (Bain & Podmore, 2021b;Doan & Higgins, 2011;Goh, 2018;Myrdahl, 2011). This mutation of queer spaces and spatialities has also been affected by the growing role of digital networks in the formation of identity and community. Scholars have highlighted the heteronormative assumptions on which all planning concepts and, more generally, all of our everyday spaces are based (Forsyth, 2001). Frisch argues that urban planning has a historic pattern of exclusion along the lines of sexual orientation, defining planning as "a technology of heteronormality" (Frisch, 2015, p. 134) that relates more to heterosexist bias than to explicit discrimination. Because of their limited rights and access to the public sphere, LGBTQ+ people have long been second-class citizens (Duplan, 2022;Hubbard, 2001;Volpp, 2017).
LGBTQ+ rights have nevertheless increased rapidly since the 2000s in most parts of the Western world which have qualified as "equalities landscapes" (Podmore, 2013). Following the Amsterdam Treaty-which officially includes protection against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation, primarily to guarantee equal access to the job market-European institutions have introduced a normative framework that advances visibility of LGBTQ+ issues in the legal framework of their member states. LGBTQ+ rights have thus been integrated as part of the democratic values of an emerging "rainbow Europe" (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014). EU nations are enacting and supporting laws to protect LGBTQ+ individuals from discrimination through guidelines and advocacy manuals. This results in cities creating job positions dedicated to the promotion of LGBTQ+ equality and designing LGBTQ+ policies or action plans. Participatory methods are favoured to account for the voices of those multiple publics (Sandercock, 1998b) that have long been ignored. This is illustrated in communication campaigns, as well as in the growing support of Pride marches (Blidon, 2009;Browne, 2007;Rushbrook, 2002). Thanks to grassroots activism, the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia was endorsed by the European Parliament in 2005. EU member states adopted it at different times, resulting in a chronologically diverse commitment on the part of Europe's major cities. All these efforts are solidified in the European Commission's adoption of an LGBTQ+ Equality Strategy for 2020-2025, which promotes that, "in a Union of equality, all citizens, in their diversity, are free to pursue their life as they choose and wish" (European Commission, 2022, p. 8). This brief overview bears witness both to the involvement of institutions in LGBTQ+ issues, in conjunction with national and transnational activist movements, and to the interweaving of scales of action and their national and city-level variations.
Contributing to cities' gay-friendly reputation, LGBTQ+ endorsement helps improve their rank as "best places" (McCann, 2004), in relation to their openness to sexual diversity and resulting attractiveness for, among others, the tourism industry (Johnston, 2007). Hence, increased LGBTQ+ visibility is paradoxical: On the one hand, it enhances rights and normalisation and helps build acceptance towards a fuller citizenship; on the other hand, it turns sexual Otherness into a commodity for enhancing capital in the city. Sexuality thus becomes a polished image or theoretical representation to be commercialised within the globalised, abstract space of capitalism (Lefèbvre, 1974). Moreover, critical scholars point to the ways such a shift in LGBTQ+ politics at various scales favours a specific demographic that has become integrated into the European narrative as exemplary citizens of neoliberal society. Through their privileged access to consumption and a (heteronormative) family lifestyle (Bell & Binnie, 2004), some predominantly educated, wealthy, white (cisgender) men manage to counter their partial exclusion from heteronormative public spaces by accessing sexual citizenship (Bell & Binnie, 2004;Richardson, 2018). Expressing an idealised vision of openness and tolerance, this "political economy of sexuality" (Goh, 2018, p. 466), refers more to assimilation-as analysed by Duggan (2002)-than inclusion. It focuses on the "aesthetics of difference" (Gillig, 2016, as cited in Printz, 2018) as closely related to the landscapes of cosmopolitanism (Sandercock, 1998a(Sandercock, , 2000 that are promoted by global city branding strategies (Bell & Binnie, 2004;Duplan, 2021;Leslie & Catungal, 2012;McCann & Ward, 2011;Parker, 2008). Hence, while promoting LGBTQ+ inclusion-and despite the use of participatory methods cast as the best tool to provide democratic consensus (Legacy, 2017)such policies fail to address "any underlying mechanisms of exclusion" (Broto, 2021, p. 311). This results in the subsequent exclusion of other LGBTQ+ subjects who remain saddled with deviance. This failure is analysed as a "queer participation paradox," in that the theoretical potential of queer individuals to destabilise current norms and assumptions rarely finds its way into practice (Broto, 2021, p. 311).
At the global scale, while the UN Agenda 2030 SDG 11.2 explicitly refers to inclusive cities, gender and sexual minorities have been left behind in the attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations (https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal11). Indeed, despite the creation of an LGBT core group in 2008, efforts by UN agencies to advance LGBTQ+ rights as an institutional commitment have failed due to opposition from powerful member states (Lhant, 2019). Recalling that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the basis of Agenda 2030, non-profit organisations argue for better consideration of the specific needs of LGBTQ+ people and communities when it comes to housing, work, wealth, health, or safety. And in SDG 11.2 on inclusive cities, Stonewall UK, a non-profit organisation, argues for the significance of homelessness among LGBTQ+ people, which is not considered a proper issue in Agenda 2030 (Dorey & O'Connor, 2016). The International Lesbian and Gay Association, a transnational activist collective, also plays a major role in the globalisation of LGBTQ+ rights. Other non-institutional transnational networks also organise themselves to exchange good practices towards LGBTQ+ inclusion, like the Rainbow Cities Network, which works at a transnational level to support local administration and planning towards "greater social inclusion" for LGBTQ+ people to create "liveable cities for all" (Rainbow Cities Network, n.d.).
Overall, these dynamics favour spatial market logics, in which public authorities take part through the promotion of an ethos of sexual cosmopolitanism for cities that use the gaybourhood to attract more capitalnotably through global tourist flows. The whiteness and Westernness of this global sexual citizenship have been identified as serving the interest of homonormative strategies (Puar, 2007). Public authorities are criticised for instrumentalising the claiming of rights for queer people-"pinkwashing"-their modes of governance (Hartal & Sasson-Levy, 2018). This criticism comes in relation to communication strategies that simultaneously promote tolerance for, and openness towards, LGBTQ+ communities and people, and also distract from the exclusionary dimensions of existing policies (Duplan, 2021). In the European context, such policies which claim to fight LGBTQ+ discrimination also contribute to the discursive construction of Others, "paradoxically rein-forc[ing] a distinction between the 'modern West' and the 'homophobic East' " (Ayoub & Paternotte, 2014, p. 4). Hence, (European) promotion of LGBTQ+ rights and visibility works "on the edge of urban 'equalities' " (Podmore & Bain, 2019), connecting to homonationalism issues that forge the Other as illiberal and backward (Puar, 2007(Puar, , 2013. Furthermore, it is worth noting that this equality landscape has been changing in recent years with the emergence of organised heteroactivist resistance to the increasing institutionalisation of LGBTQ+ rights (Nash & Browne, 2020). When looking for a queer-inclusive planning (Frisch, 2002), it is, therefore, necessary to account for gender and sexual minorities' experiences in all their diversity and complexity (Doan, 2011(Doan, , p. 2016, beyond "festivalized rainbow washing" (Bain & Podmore, 2023, p. 146), while being mindful of visible and more conspicuous backlash movements.

Aiming for Social Justice Through More Queerly Engaged Planning Practice
Through the joint analysis of two public policy fields that are not generally articulated together, and by considering the travel of policies at different scales and their diversified implementation, this intervention highlights some of the similarities in the drifts that occur when institutions attempt to implement gender equality-either as women's or LGBTQ+ equality-into their agenda. First, is the issue of technocratisation: By focusing on tools and policies, public action runs the risk of being disconnected, both from a broader strategy, which should be permanently re-assessed, and from the lived experiences due to its top-down implementation. Like other urban models, the inclusive city needs to be questioned in relation to the neoliberal shift in urban modes of governance (Harvey, 1989), in which an ideal of liveability (Jessop & Sum, 2000) is set to maintain competitiveness-an ideal which, nevertheless, plays as a normative framework for virtuous cities, despite evacuating lived experiences in favour of statistical indicators. Second, and related to the first, is the context in which such actions are implemented. Both gender/women's and LGBTQ+ equality policies are economically driven, and "the EU has primarily been a project of market-making and so, one argument goes, it has not only systematically prioritized different aspects of economic policy but engaged with social policy mainly to the extent that it is functional for the project of market integration" (Daly, 2006, p. 468). This orientation towards market integration works both for gender/women's and LGBTQ+ equality, and at all scales of action. Through inclusion, public policies define what an emancipated lifestyle is based on contribution to the productive economy and through consumption practices, thereby shaping a sense of self and a sense of belonging according to the liberal, individualist norms that define their public. Third, and a consequence of the previous issues, are the pitfalls of ethnocentric binary thinking. By modelling an ideal figure of citizenship as economically independent, socially emancipated, and driven by individual self-entrepreneurship, equality policies consequently define-by contrast-a figure of Otherness, portrayed as illiberal and backwards, in the need to be educated towards progress and modernity. These elements are found in both femo-and homonationalist rhetoric, in which liberalism effectively disguises some imperialism.
Coming back to the public, the definition of gender deserves further consideration: Gender equality policies mainly reduce their public to one segment of women, despite recent efforts to integrate a more intersectional perspective as part of inclusion strategies, or to consider gender and sexuality (but see, e.g., Fenster & Misgav, 2020). However, this is not about adding to or stirring the pot of equality. How then to account for the "complex and intersectional nature of queer marginalization in urban space"? (Goh, 2018, p. 463). Thinking about gender equality requires outlining how heteronormativity is produced and maintained every day, and how it continues to intersectionally structure our frameworks of thought and actions (Doan, 2011;Frisch, 2015;Irazábal & Huerta, 2016). Heteronormative assumptions thus remain visible in how the implementation of participation reproduces sexually normative behaviours, setting the "radical democratic potential" of queerness apart from citizen participation. Hence: At best, participatory planning practices frame gender and sexuality as identity markers of vulnerable groups, rather than thinking of people interested in queer issues as having particular sensibilities and capacities that contribute to collective decision-making. At worst, they just disregard questions of sexuality and gender as irrelevant. (Broto, 2021, p. 313) Gender and sexual minorities can therefore always count as counterpublics. They enable us to reconnect with the transformative potential of queerness as a counterpublic that can disorientate the linear narrative of the heteronormative order and open breaches towards uncertainties and alternative possibilities; the goal being to "rejuvenate a prefigurative politics of getting on with making new worlds in the here and now" (Kern & McLean, 2017, p. 408).
With acknowledgement in public policies, gender and sexual minorities run the risk of being dissolved into the reign of (hetero)normalcy, as the creeping power of neoliberalism continues to diffuse "through citizens' consent and perceptions of inclusion" (Miraftab, 2009, p. 33). Hence the need to move beyond the vision of a subaltern public contesting neoliberal policies from a secondary and reactive position (Kern & McLean, 2017). Queer counterpublics can help bring to life insurgent planning that will reveal the depoliticisation of joint efforts of collective action and progressive planning, by disrupting "the attempts of neoliberal governance to stabil-ise oppressive relationships through inclusion" (Miraftab, 2009, p. 41). Thinking further in terms of coalitions would thus open up the path to more social justice by working towards "tangible citizenship (that) grows under the skin of the city" (Miraftab, 2009, p. 40). To conclude, rethinking participation for an inclusive city to overcome the drifts of neoliberal ideology and reach its democratic potential requires a reorientation of planning "towards a model of practice that not only recognizes LGBTQ+ populations, but makes them central to the process" (Doan, 2023, p. 277). This will work towards the creation of safer spaces for all marginalised communities across multiple axes of exclusion, through the building of solidarity networks (Broto, 2021;Goh, 2018;Tucker & Hassan, 2020).

Concluding Remarks
In unpacking the uses of the vocabulary of inclusion within public social policies, this article has paid attention to the mutation of the term since its emergence and the dynamics of homogenisation as it has spread at various scales as a tool for urban governance. While the inclusive city has become a referential framework for policies aiming at social justice, it refrains, itself, from challenging the heteronormative structures that produce inequalities. By reducing their public primarily to women, policies thus define a normative path of emancipation and equality. Gender and sexual minorities remain sidelined, and it is always through the joint work of activists and institutions (Duplan, 2023) that new perspectives for an inclusive city for gender and sexuality minorities are slowly carved out within the heteronormative mainstream. All of this highlights how the paradigm of inclusion considers gender and sexual minorities as a superficial layer to be added-a box to be ticked-when introducing gender equality and inclusiveness while relying on top-down efforts of neoliberal citizens' participation. This results in forms of "epistemic violence where…certain lives are erased or reduced, or all futures already known" (Parker, 2016, pp. 10-11).
The inclusive city and its equality policies work as a favoured narrative that shapes both the image of the institutions that frame it and the collective identity of the society in which it operates-namely, its public. By so doing, it also complies with the logic of capitalist reproduction in its neoliberal form (Harvey, 2011), adapting to local contexts of governance and serving the entangled interests of patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. Changes in the sense of belonging and urban citizenship then need to be examined more closely to better understand the potential of inclusion in the making of a more just city for all. Yet in such a context of queer domestication (Warner, 1993), attention must be paid to the collusion between the lexicon of inclusion and neoliberal cis-heteropatriarchy. A more suspicious and informed use of this terminology by grassroots movements-and all those concerned with the disruption of unequal power relations-is thus needed. This should be accompanied by further reflections based on lived experiences of in/exclusion to provide alternative idioms that would distance grassroots activism away from institutionalisation, while keeping a more insurgent orientation towards the opening of (queer) creative urban futures.