ABSTRACT
In recent years I have received several letters from the London Metropolitan Police updating me about the progress made regarding the expulsion of street sex workers from the neighbourhood in their commitment to increase neighbours’ safety through the implementation of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs). I live in East London, a five-minute walk away from Brick Lane – nowadays a key tourist spot – between Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, where Terence Conran's hotel stands out as one of the many markers of the apparent gentrification of the area. From the Borough of Tower Hamlets to Hackney, it seems that the removal of the sex industry is seen as essential for an area to advance up the urban social hierarchy. But not only here: more ten years ago, thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean to the south, I was living in Palermo, a neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina, when it was being gentrified. These days, Palermo is a place where tourists from around the world hang out, searching for the coolest shops, bars and restaurants, gay-friendly boutique hotels and classy B&Bs. But during the time I lived there, and for many years after, Palermo was the site of one of the most protracted battles over the expulsion of trans street sex workers in an effort to convert this informal red-light trans district into the residential middle/upper-class fancy area that it has become today. And the story doesn't stop there. In between Buenos Aires and London, I spent the first decade of the twenty-first century living in Spain, where I witnessed yet another campaign for the expulsion of street sex workers, in the Market of La Boquería, one of the hottest tourist spots of Barcelona's emblematic Ramblas. Unfortunately, these are far from exceptional urban scenes; indeed, the list could continue endlessly. The controversy around sex work tends to be repeated in a broadly applicable and familiar logic that is easily recognizable by different publics in different cities, currently shaped by the requirements of neoliberal economic tendencies upon urban politics. The pervasive reluctance to meet sex workers’ demands and definitively decriminalize sex work in so many different geo-political contexts goes hand in hand with the controversy over the clampdown on red-light districts following the modernization, gentrification or internationalization of renovated urban environments across the globe.
