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While the regulation of commercial sex in the city has traditionally involved formal policing, recent shifts in many jurisdictions have seen sex premises of various kinds granted formal recognition via planning, licensing and environmental control. This means that 'sexual entertainment venues', 'brothels' and 'sex shops' are now not just labels applied to particular types of premises, but formal categories of legal land use. However, these categories are not clear-cut, and it is not simply the case that changes in the law instantiate a change whereby these premises are brought into being at a particular point in time. Countering the privileging of space over time that is apparent within much contemporary research on sex and the city, this paper foregrounds the varied temporalities in play here, and describes how the actions of those policy-makers, municipal bureaucrats and officers allow sex premises to variously 'fade in', accelerate, linger, or disappear as legal land uses within the city. We examine the implications of these different temporalities of the law by exploring how sex premises have been subject to regulation in London and Sydney, showing that the volatile, contradictory and fractured nature of legal space-making does not necessarily provide the certainty sought by the law but produces overlapping and contested understandings of what types of premises should be subject to regulation. More broadly the paper highlights how attention to the contingency and complexity of municipal law can help us better understand the ways that commercial sex is differently manifest in different cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premises associated with commercial sex--including brothels, striptease clubs, sex cinemas, and sex shops--have increasingly been accepted as legitimate land uses, albeit ones whose location needs to be controlled because of assumed 'negative externalities'. However, the planning and licensing regulations excluding such premises from areas of residential land use are often predicated on assumptions of nuisance that have not been empirically substantiated. Accordingly, this paper reports on a survey of those living close to sex industry premises in New South Wales, Australia. The results suggest that although some residents have strong moral objections to sex premises, in general residents note few negative impacts on local amenity or quality of life, with distance from a premise being a poor predictor of residents' experiences of nuisance. These findings are considered in relation to the literatures on sexuality and space given regulation which ultimately appears to reproduce heteronormative moralities rather than respond to genuine environmental nuisances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite continuing contests in Australian states over the validity of sex work as work, Victoria and New South Wales (NSW) have been part of a global trend for states to decriminalise and/or legalise the sex industry. This article argues that although Victoria and NSW are united by their ambivalence toward the legal validity of sex work as work for women, this ambivalence is expressed and organised in different ways in each state, with consequent differences in regulatory schemas, practices of enforcement and outcomes for workers and communities. In particular, this article focuses on the regulation of sex services premises as a key indicator of how the sex industry is regarded and embedded within broader business, social and regulatory contexts. The article examines some specific regulations that affect women's status as sex workers in each state. It concludes by arguing that the failure to fully recognise sex work as work impacts most sharply on the safety and inclusion of workers: those whom the legislative schemas of both states purportedly seek to protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much recent scholarship on sexuality and urban spaces has focused on forms of urban governance. Within this literature an emerging body of work has begun to highlight how formal urban planning processes and regulations are increasingly used as mechanisms to govern sexuality within later 20th century Western cities, particularly through the placement of sex industry premises. This paper contributes to this literature through a case study of the emergence of gay bathhouses in land-use planning process within inner Sydney during this period. It highlights how the placement of these businesses within Sydney depends on a broad range of shifting and competing discourses on how sex industry premises impact upon the amenity of the city, its neighbourhoods and land uses—that is, their secondary impacts, cumulative effects, and contribution to urban ordering. On one hand, planning processes reveal ideas about how these establishments contaminate and pollute neighbourhoods and sensitive land uses such as schools or churches. On the other, there are also emerging arguments that sex industry premises such as gay bathhouses can improve the health and lifestyle opportunities for specific communities and residents within particular city environs. I argue that these latter positive discourses have guided the placement of gay bathhouses within the planning of Sydney over the last few decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]