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Red light districts have long been a traditional feature of many British cities, but the last two to three years has witnessed growing interest in and policy debate concerning the ways in which the state seeks to regulate the oldest profession. This short article offers a brief introduction to prostitution, focuses particularly on street prostitution and red light districts, and examines the arguments for and against the introduction of formally delimited ‘tolerance zones’ for prostitution. The article draws its illustrative material from the recent policy debates in Scotland and specifically from three Scottish cities, namely Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

This study aims to explore and discuss the ethical challenges that the authors encountered in the SWIPSER project, a study about the well-being of West-African women who work in the red-light district in Brussels.

The study was commissioned by the municipality of Schaerbeek and executed by a Nigerian–Belgian research team. Data were collected using a multi-method qualitative approach, predominantly through ethnographic fieldwork that consisted of detailed observations, informal interviews (with 38 participants), complemented by document analysis and stakeholder interviews.

The study presents the main ethical dilemmas in four themes: (1) representing diversity, i.e. how do we get access to all members of a migrant community that is inherently hierarchical?; (2) in the margin, i.e. how can we conduct research with undocumented migrants and what do we do when faced with violence and injustice?; (3) attraction and repulsion, i.e. what ethical consequences are involved when working in a multi-ethnic research team?; and (4) unveiling secrets, i.e. which ethical challenges are we faced with when presenting the results of research on vulnerable migrant communities?

This study goes beyond procedural research ethics and highlights the specific relational ethics (related to the relation between research(er) and participant) and the socio-political ethics (related to the relation between the research(er) and the socio-political context) involved in qualitative research with female migrants who work in prostitution.

This article examinees how vulnerability operates within the intimate economy in Hong Kong’s prominent entertainment district of Wanchai. Best known in its portrayal of The World of Suzie Wong, Wanchai’s historicity is anchored in a legacy of colonialism, orientalist imagination, and Western militarization. Presently, the area continues to cater to Western expatriate men, foreign travellers and the US Navy. An influx of Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers to Hong Kong in recent decades has led to the rise of new intimate relationships fostered in the bar district. While Wanchai is renowned as a red-light district celebrating white Western masculinity, a complex portrait emerged after a year of ethnographic fieldwork observing the intimate exchanges between Western expatriate men and Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, as two groups who are positioned on opposite ends of the city’s socioeconomic spectrum. Contrary to recurrent portrayals of female victimhood in commercialized sex industries, this article illustrates how other experiences of vulnerability, particularly those of the Western male expatriate partner, also deserve critical attention. By exploring the decommercialized transactions within Wanchai’s intimate economy, this piece demonstrates how the intimate relations forged between Western expatriates and Southeast Asian migrants can help negotiate longstanding gendered relations of power and shared senses of structural precarity.

This paper aims to shed light on the spatial constraints of sex work in Greece. The objective is twofold: to illustrate the intertemporal stance of the Greek state to push sex work at the edge of both the city and the law produces sex workers as always already marginal subjects and to identify how a spatial-based understanding of sex work could help in acknowledging sex workers’ full community citizenship.

This article examines the legal geographies of sex work in modern and contemporary Greece. The author is a doctoral student in critical jurisprudence with a professional background in urban planning law, who also works voluntarily with Athens-based sex worker’s organizations. Law’s materialization within space (Bennet and Layard, 2015, p. 406), namely, the implication of law in the discursive and material production of place, is examined through archival research with primary and secondary sources, including legislations and LGBT publications such as Amfi and Kráximo from the 1980s and 1990s found in the Archives of Contemporary Social History (ASKI) in Athens. Additionally, as the author is currently conducting fieldwork with people who are working or have worked in the past in sex in Greece as a part of her PhD dissertation, the paper contains data provided by ten interlocutors to highlight their own personal experience. The researcher has used the critical oral history method, as it is committed to recording first-hand knowledge of experiences of marginalized community members who are often unheard or untold, with the additional goals of contextualizing these stories to reveal power differences and inequities (Lemley, 2017, Rickard, 2003).

The paper provides insight into how regulationism establishes the brothel – a metonymy of prostitution – as a heterotopia within the urban space. Contemporary approaches, such as LULUs and broken window policies, are used to indicate the historically marginal placement of sex work.

The interviews presented here were conducted in the summer of 2022, in the context of the author’s PhD research. Despite her six years of activist-level involvement with sex workers’ rights organizations, due to ethical constraints, only the findings of interviews conducted up to the writing of this paper are presented here, while details of private discussions with members of these organizations are omitted.

The paper examines a significant and timely matter of place making and spatial justice. Unlike earlier research on prostitution in Greece that focused on the brothel either as a heterotopia or as an undesirable land use, the novelty of this paper is that it highlights the intersections between policing, planning, public hygiene, anti-immigration policies around the regulation of the sex market. By critically discussing the implications of the de facto illegality of sex work in Greece, the study highlights the importance of including the voices of sex workers in decision-making and contributes to the debate around the decriminalization of sex work in Greece.

Ethnographers, as tools of data collection, are uniquely positioned in a paradoxical relationship between intense immersion and objective distance from research and participants. This relationship can be particularly intense when researching hidden or marginalized communities in violent contexts. Yet, the emotional consequences of research on the researcher are rarely discussed and little literature exists. When emotions in research are revealed, researchers can be confronted with stigma surrounding issues of subjectivity, “going native” and implications of failed research. This paper seeks to address these issues.

Drawing on research from Lee, Hume, and Nordstrom and Robben, this article presents a reflexive analysis of the author's ethnographic PhD experience. It examines the transformation undertaken to adapt and cope with in‐depth research with vulnerable groups in dangerous environments. It also explores the post‐fieldwork transition and consequences of post‐traumatic stress syndrome which were viewed as the author's feet of clay, or possible weakness which could derail or even invalidate the research.

This article delineates the risks of emotional trauma in ethnographic research, and outlines the symptoms of post‐traumatic stress syndrome and secondary trauma in order to facilitate their identification in future researchers.

The practical implications of this paper are to raise awareness about the emotional consequences of research and revealing how essential it is that awareness be included in the training of future researchers.

The paper aims to raise awareness about the acute emotional consequences of conducting research with marginalized populations in violent contexts. It specifically looks at the insider/outsider position, highlighting those isolating affects which can lead to post‐traumatic stress syndrome. It aims to reveal the attitudes within academia which tend to hide emotional struggles in research.

Microfoundations of institutions are central to constructing place – the interplay of location, meaning, and material form. Since only a few institutional studies bring materiality to the fore to examine the processes of place-making, how material forms interact with people to institutionalize or de-institutionalize the meaning of place remains a black box. Through an inductive and historical study of Boston’s North End neighborhood, the authors show how material practices shaped place-making and institutionalized, or de-institutionalized, the meaning of the North End. When material practices symbolically encoded meanings of diverse audiences into the church, it created resonance and enabled the building’s meanings to withstand environmental change and become institutionalized as part of the North End’s meaning as a place. In contrast, when the material practices restricted meaning to a specific audience, it limited resonance when the environment changed, was more likely to be demolished and, thus, erased rather than institutionalized into the meaning of the North End as a place.

Dutch policing has followed the three generations of community policing identified elsewhere. The paper outlines the three waves, arguing that progressive Dutch society has influenced policing styles, giving Dutch policing a strong social orientation. The material draws on action research projects from the 1970s and 1980s and current innovations with special attention to developments in Amsterdam and Utrecht in which the authors are involved as researchers or consultants. Following models from the USA there is a tendency to run hard and soft features of policing together. Contemporary community policing has then both a problem‐solving and a crime‐control rhetoric. New‐style community beat officers are better integrated into the organisation and are strongly involved in crime prevention. Difficulties arise in areas that are not conventional communities, such as inner cities, with a diverse public, an accumulation of social problems side‐by‐side with “entertainment”, and a potential for public order disturbances. Policing in The Netherlands has changed significantly in recent years to an emphasis on problem solving, partnerships with other agencies, crime prevention, fostering self‐reliance among citizens, and sponsoring the return of early social control mechanisms in public life – in schools, transport and with “town patrols” on the streets. Police have taken others on board and have relinquished their monopoly on safety and crime.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the art-based project of Full Llove Inn as a tactical urbanism intervention and urban tourist attraction. The project consisted of an elevated room-car, displayed in the public space of Amsterdam from August 2006 to September 2007.

The research was conducted between December 2017 and November 2018 in Amsterdam. The study applied the methodological tools of semi-structured interviews, textual analysis and participatory observation.

Full Llove Inn provided an extraordinary allure for visitors and residents. It created a sense of intra-personal and inter-personal existential authenticity for local and non-local guests, respectively, while introducing a pop-up hotel as a new form of tactical initiative.

Due to the inability to contact non-local guests for interviews, the only source of data was based on tourist experiences about Full Llove Inn derived from the hotel guest book.

The research suggests that pop-up hotels may be used by Destination Management Organizations as a means of strengthening the brand image and creating a competitive edge for cities.

The research indicates that art-inspired tactical interventions in the public space of civic environments could constitute a social capital while generating interactions between residents and visitors.

For the first time in the tourism literature, this study investigates the impact of tactical projects on destination branding from the perspective of both locals and visitors.

Sex tourism is well documented in the literature, but what about porn tourism? Whether it is a Ping Pong show in Phuket or the Banana show in Amsterdam, porn and tourism have an encounter and gaze no different from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or magnificent views of New Zealand’s Southern Alps. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper explores the intersections of tourism, porn and the future as a conceptual framework.

Four intersections are derived from the conceptual framework. Intersection 1, the Future of Tourism, portrays the evolution of tourism and explores its technological future. Interaction 2, Porn in Tourism, distinguishes between soft- and hard-core porn tourism. Intersection 3, Portraying Porn as a Future Dimension, delves into futurism, science fiction and fantasy. The fourth intersection, the Future Gaze, conveys the thrust of the paper by exploring how technological advancement blends with authenticity and reality. Thus the porn tourist seeks both the visual and the visceral pleasures of desire. The paper concludes with four future gazes of porn tourism, The Allure of Porn, The Porn Bubble, Porn as Liminal Experience and Hardcore.

The originality of this paper is that this is the first paper to systematically examine porn tourism beyond sex tourism overlaying with a futures dimension. Porn tourists actively seek to experience both visual and visceral pleasures. Tourism and pornography both begin with the gaze. The gaze is an integral component of futures thinking. Technology is changing us, making us smarter, driving our thirst for liminal experiences. Like the transition from silent movies to talking pictures the porn tourism experience of the future is likely to involve more of the bodily senses.