Sex Industry

Although commercial sex work has never been a solely urban phenomenon, it has been most visible in specific areas of towns and cities, creating the phenomenon of the red-light district (e.g., De Wallen in Amsterdam, Soho in London, Pigalle in Paris, and Patpong in Bangkok). In most cases, these areas are particularly associated with female prostitution, though in some instances, they are also characterized by an agglomeration of off-street work in the form of adult-oriented businesses, sex clubs, cinemas, sex shops, and peep shows. In some cities, these areas may coincide with spaces of male prostitution and gay venues (though there is often tension between gay urban entrepreneurs and those who profit from commercial sex). In most cases, however, the term red-light district is reserved for areas catering primarily to the desires of heterosexual men.

The concentration of vice and prostitution in specific areas has long fascinated urban geographers and sociologists, with the pioneering work of the Chicago School of Sociology including several detailed ethnographies of the lifestyles of those occupying these areas. A key idea emerging from such studies was that sex work tended to occur in marginal or “twilight” areas of cities, with prostitution deemed to be one of the pathologies associated with areas where residents had not assimilated into the dominant social and moral order. In Ernest Burgess's classic zonal model, sex work was thus located in the inner-city “zone in transition”—a relatively deprived area typified by high numbers of immigrants and houses in multiple occupation. In one sense, the concentration of sex work in marginal and deprived urban districts should not be surprising, as sex work has proved a vital urban survival strategy for many existing on the edge of poverty (not least migrant women who may be poorly served by social security systems). Yet neither the workers nor the clients who frequent red-light landscapes necessarily reside in these deprived areas, and a growing literature on city sex suggests these areas cannot be understood merely as the outcome of supply and demand economics, but also as the product of historically layered moral codes, legal strictures, and policing practices that have combined to encourage the containment of “vice” in inner-city areas away from the more affluent suburbs.