Rethinking Urban Planning, Morality, and Sex Work
TW: This article discusses themes of sexuality and violence that some readers may find unsettling.
As a field, Urban Planning sits at an important annex between people, land, and structure, where the practical tools of planning can be used to prioritize equity. But, to overcome the historic, discriminatory functions of urban planning, society needs to rethink planning and its inherent moralistic power, and center equity-seeking communities. This is especially true as it pertains to sex work, where urban planning policies based on fear and stigma end up acting to further harm us all through biased policies.
Urban planning, morality, and sex work
Urban planning is meant to improve overall quality of life, but its historic foundations are deeply rooted in oppressive beliefs. I believe that if we want to improve the quality of life for everyone, it will be integral to perform planning using an equity-seeking lens. Looking at the intersection between sex work and urban planning, we can dive into how urban planning policy works to dictate society’s morals, and how we can do better.
Urban planning is expected to provide insight on how we should spatially organize communities – this materializes through the decision-making tools that urban planners have, which directly affect urban landscapes. Choosing how we should prescribe space inherently defines moralities in the city. These moralities, when left unchecked for many years, often work to manifest and generate stigma, and its associated harms against certain groups. Part of these morals are the limits of ‘acceptable sexuality’, which have, and continue to be controlled through the symbolic ordering of space. At this intersect that it becomes important to interrogate the rules and regulations that urban planners use and to see how they negatively impact all aspects of our culture.
Laws and city-based regulations often cite morals as precedent; however, Nussbaum (2010) suggests that citing morals as precedent is based on beliefs rather than legitimate harm. Nussbaum goes on to suggest that these beliefs are often rooted in ‘disgust’ – which is a feeling that does not inherently give us moral insight. In law and urban planning, harm or nuisance is cited as a legitimate cause to enact regulation. However, the logical basis of harm or nuisance can be difficult to determine and often works subversively to segregate or discriminate against marginalized groups of people. Often, these regulations don’t act to protect the general public, and can further marginalize sex workers.
Urban planning and its inherent moralistic control over what is considered ‘acceptable sexuality’ can be effectively understood through looking at concrete regulations and laws within urban planning and how it affects sex work. This control commonly takes form through land-use regulation of the commercial sex industry and spatial policies surrounding street-based sex work.
Spatial regulations on commercial sex often proceed from the assumption that sex premises promote crime, nuisance, and public disorder. Nuisance regulations protect people from offensive or dangerous things which interfere with their enjoyment of their activities or property. An important distinction for what can cause nuisance in the eyes of the law, though, is whether it is inflicting something onto another person causing a direct offense. The nuisance must be causing something offensive or dangerous, and it must be an imposition to those who are non-consenting. This is not the same as something being considered offensive, but, in actuality, having no direct impact on non-consenting parties. Commercial sex places are often deemed a public nuisance because they are considered a danger to the public by promoting ‘high-risk sexual activity’ and affecting the general health and moral welfare of society (Davies, 2015; Nussbaum, 2010). This is an arbitrary decision, since much of the perceived nuisance from sex work, or sex work premises are confined to those engaging directly with the sex work, thus consenting, and not done publicly. And, any public health issues faced in sex establishments are no more prevalent than in other spaces where private sexual experiences occur.
Another way that this plays out is through land-use planning. Land-use planning is based on the premise that land-use regulations do not act upon people, but upon urban-form. However, historically it is evident that this is not the case. Under the pretext of urban-form, land-use regulations can allow us to avoid or evade issues related to people and shape the city through exclusionary acts. In the current system, commercial sex businesses are often pushed down the land-use hierarchy into less ‘desirable’ areas that do not center personhood in its use. This same process has been linked to other oppressive ideologies, like enacting urban planning regulation based on racism, and always ends up resulting in group-based vulnerability to violence.
Land-use planning also goes hand in hand with gentrification, however, as Luna (2019) states “… sex work stigma is often the selling point of gentrification.” Gentrification centers a narrative of those who are part of the privileged classes and caters to the idea of increased neighborhood safety, new and lucrative business opportunities, aesthetic improvements, and respectability. Gentrification is now more corporate, more state facilitated, and less resisted than ever before and this, in popular culture, does not include sex work. Sex workers, like many other folks from equity-seeking groups are often actively harmed by gentrification. Cultural ownership over space often shifts during the process of gentrification following urban renewal projects, for example, and the displacement of marginalized groups is common.
Finally, this can all be further propagated through ‘police power’, where planners and policymakers enact moral codes, and police enforce them. Urban planning’s impact, along with policing, can be used to push out sex work from certain geographic areas that a city wants to flood capital into. Sex work and crime are linked in the media, as well as by popular political and policing strategies, and the theme of criminal and sexual deviance as a threat to the most vulnerable is sustained.
Rethinking
To better understand why this happens, it’s important to understand the fear that many people have regarding commercial sex. For this, I rely on the concept of ‘miasma theory’. Miasma theory is an obsolete medical theory that thought diseases were caused by miasma or ‘bad air’. I suggest that a social miasma* theory emerges whenever we are enacting policy and regulation using a moral code. This suggests that something socially considered ‘bad’ or ‘gross’ is measured as a danger and at risk of being passed along through sheer proximity. Since sex work in popular culture is ‘bad’, then sex work being done near you will affect you. This fear is what I believe a lot of policies are based on. To combat this in urban planning, we need to interrogate that fear and the foundation of these policies.
*(These concepts are cemented for me through the readings of Kern and Nussbaum)
For instance, with the issues of zoning, it is integral to pursue the ‘use’ versus ‘user’ of a space. Theoretically, zoning relies on being agnostic about users. However, in our current society, we have never been universally blind in planning. As mentioned before, land-use zoning systems have been used to zone regions discriminately against specific groups in the past. Refocusing on the ‘use’ instead of the ‘user’ in urban planning is important but, further, acknowledging when we can’t base spatial decisions solely on their ‘use’. When that happens, we need to center equity-seeking voices in discussions of space.
Equity-seeking groups have the right to speak for themselves and set their agendas, which does not happen in many current policies, especially surrounding sex work. Many issues arise from the lack of agency that sex workers have within policy and law, which rests on the legalization of sex work as a profession. In Canada, sex work falls under a form of legalization where it is legal to sell sexual services, but it is a crime to pay for sex work, which inherently makes all sex work encounters illegal. In Canada, there are also further restrictions enforced on the practice and consumption of sex work which makes sex work riskier for the workers themselves and does not diminish the existence of sex work. In August 2016, Amnesty International released a policy that calls for decriminalization of sex work. It is a policy that has been supported by numerous organizations that work for the rights of vulnerable populations, and, most importantly, this policy is supported by those involved in sex work. This recognizes that the decriminalisation of sex work is integral to halt the broader mechanisms at play between the city and sex work. Decriminalization is also intricately linked with labour rights. By defining sex work as an economic activity, sex workers have the opportunity to be less stigmatized and oppressed. And, in our market-dominated society, denial of access to the market threatens survival.
Finally, cities, and those who regulate them, need to take responsibility. Issues faced by equity-seeking groups are often shirked off to non-profits whereas a lot of their core systemic issues arise from the city itself. Part of this responsibility will be the necessity for more transparency in planning practices and increased engagement opportunities where priority is given to listening to equity-seeking communities.
The idea of ‘Nothing about us without us’, a slogan from disability rights activist origins, offers a stunning motto to center the voices that are most important in these discussions. This is a slogan used to communicate the idea that no policy should be decided by any representative without the full and direct participation of members of the group(s) affected by that policy. Sex workers, among other equity-seeking groups, have the knowledge and expertise we need to make the most equitable and sustainable decisions.
Sex work is a part of the city. It is firmly engrained in the city, has always been, and will continue to be. To center the health and well-being of EVERYONE within a city, we need to continue working on equity, centering the voices of those most oppressed, and using a humanistic lens in our everyday decisions. While this article touched on some key issues surrounding planning in a moral landscape, many relationships between sex work and the City weren’t discussed. More considerations on the intersection between planning, law, healthcare, space, and sex work need to be considered within the field of urban planning moving forward, with special consideration on Indigenous, Black, racial, gender, sexuality, and ability-related intersects.
About the author: Rhianne Fiolka holds a Master of Urban Planning degree from McGill University, a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree from the University of Calgary, and currently works as a Public Engagement Consultant on urban planning and equity-related projects. Rhianne is passionate about Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and consistently integrates social justice into her work. Her passion for community engagement is exemplified through her volunteer roles as Community Engagement Director with Airdrie Pride Society, and as Founder and Facilitator of QueereadsYYC.