ABSTRACT
During an otherwise cold and bleak winter in 1996 the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, became embroiled in a series of controversies around sex and space in its inner city. Earlier that year, the city’s daily newspaper discovered that Latimer Square (a public park on the eastern side of downtown) was the site of a thriving youth prostitution market, where homeless teenagers were selling sex to support drug habits (Keenan 1996). In August, a national news programme featured Christchurch as ‘the sex capital of New Zealand’, reporting that this modest-sized city of 288,000 boasted 22 massage parlours, 297 escorts and an estimated 370 sex workers (‘Assignment’ 25 July 1996; Harris 1996: 10). The programme suggested that the sex industry in the city was out of proportion to its size. Likewise in June a group of concerned citizens voiced anger at the number and concentration of massage parlours and strip joints in the central city which used degrading images of women’s bodies to advertise their services in public space (see The Christchurch Star, 24 June 1996: 1; 9 August 1996: 1; The Christchurch Mail) A certain sensitivity had been building up around the city’s salacious image. Popularly known as ‘the most British city outside of Britain’, Christchurch portrays itself as a small quiet, conservative, middle-class white settlement on the edge of the empire. Its popular landscape hearkens back to a simulacrum of the asexual, upper-class districts of Victorian England and earlier, with manicured public parks, neo-gothic architecture and British toponyms (see Figures 3.1, 3.2, 3.3).1 However incongruous and uncharacteristic they may seem, issues of sexuality and space seem very much on the local agenda these days in the city.
