Phil Hubbard

Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space

Recent studies of sexuality and space have demonstrated that public spaces are constructed around particular notions of appropriate sexual comportment which exclude those whose lives do not centre on monogamous, heterosexual, procreative sex. In a wider sense, such studies have noted that this spatial exclusion of sexual dissidents reflects (and reproduces) notions of citizenship based on heteronormality. Elaborating these ideas, this article proceeds to explore the way in which dissidents have transgressed public and civic spaces in their attempt to undermine this dominant notion of citizenship. In so doing, the article questions the idealization of public space as a site where new notions of sexual citizenship can be forged, arguing that the relationship between intimacy, citizenship and space is less straightforward than some commentators suggest.

Urban Design and City Regeneration: Social Representations of Entrepreneurial Landscapes

Recent accounts of urban political change have been seemingly preoccupied with demonstrating the existence of a transition from managerial to entrepreneurial forms of governance, typified by the speculative deployment of resources to attract investment. Within such processes, the construction of spectacular urban landscapes has become a requisite strategy for making the city attractive as a site for investment, yet, with a few notable exceptions, the meanings projected by these landscapes have been given little attention. This paper sets out to rectify this omission by developing ideas from European social psychology, particularly that of the social representation, to explore the process by which the meaning and symbolism of these new urban landscapes is imposed by dominant interests in such a way as to make them appear legitimate. Using Birmingham as a case study, interviews with local residents are drawn on to demonstrate that even when opposition to the citys entrepreneurial policies was articulated, it relied on the existence of a shared representation of its entrepreneurial landscapes, one which acknowledged their spectacular and post-modern appearance. The paper thus concludes by suggesting that such urban landscapes can potentially play a crucial role in forging a new cultural politics of place conducive to the legitimation of entrepreneurial policies.

Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalisation (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.

Community action and the displacement of street prostitution: Evidence from british cities

Abstract This paper focuses on recent community protests against female street prostitution in Birmingham and Bradford (UK), where groups of mainly South Asian male campaigners have succeeded in displacing soliciting and kerb-crawling from the inner city districts of Balsall Heath and Manningham respectively. Through an examination of the geopolitics of these community protests, and their subsequent impacts on prostitute women, this paper seeks to examine why these residential groups identified prostitutes as a social problem and consequently sought to remove them from their neighbourhood. Specifically drawing on both locational conflict theories and psychoanalytical ideas about ‘difference’ and exclusion, the paper suggests that this NIMBY (‘not-in-my-back-yard’) syndrome reflects a complex mixture of popular anxieties about prostitution which are connected to deep-rooted fears and fantasies about commercial sex-work. In doing so, the paper documents how legal and social processes combine to shape geographies of prostitution, concluding that the regulation of prostitution serves to spatially marginalise sex workers without necessarily solving any of the problems associated with commercial sex work.

Walking across disciplines: from ethnography to arts practice

While walking has long been implicated in ethnography and arts practice, in recent years it has become increasingly central as a means of both creating new embodied ways of knowing and producing scholarly narrative. This introduction explores this cross-disciplinary coalescence of interest in peripatetic practice. It raises a series of questions inspired by the walking/arts event, which was the starting point for this collection, as well as by the articles and works published in this special issue.

Urban design and local economic development: A case study in Birmingham

Abstract Although the enhancement of architectural quality has traditionally been considered by planners as an apolitical issue, a number of urban governments and political elites are beginning to acknowledge the link between urban design and broader economic policies. Birmingham is a case study of a local authority that has explicitly recognized that improved urban design can contribute to local economic regeneration. Birminghams urban landscape has been ‘re-imaged’ in an attempt to attract investment and act as a catalyst for economic rejuvenation. It is demonstrated how the city council have been careful to cultivate a new image for the city through policy initiatives, with the new urban landscape playing a crucial role in the transformation of the city from an industrial to a de-industrialized, service-based urban economy. The citys new urban landscapes are not simply an expression of broader economic and socio-cultural changes, but play an active role in shaping the external and internal image of the city. The paper concludes by reassessing the role of urban design in economic regeneration and suggests that while urban design policies can potentially make a positive contribution to the rejuvenation of a local economy, they can equally serve to distract from more pressing social issues.

Consumption, exclusion and emotion: The social geographies of shopping

In recent years, a productive dialogue has developed between retail geographers and those social geographers concerned with the spatiality of consumption. This has resulted in a series of accounts of shopping that emphasize notions of consumer creativity. Nonetheless, this paper argues that many of these have struggled to reconcile the meaning of shopping with an understanding of the material parameters within which consumers operate. Recognizing that this tendency has distracted from the socio-spatial inequalities evident in retailing, the paper examines how shopping rituals are embedded in social relations that discourage particular shoppers from visiting certain retail locations. Drawing on extensive and intensive data derived in Coventry (UK), the paper questions the extent to which this geography of exclusion is the product of constraint, arguing that shopping is shaped by a more complex spatiality of inclusion and (self-) exclusion. Accordingly, the paper makes the case for a social geography of sho...

Sexing the Self: Geographies of engagement and encounter

Geographic research on the construction of sexual identity takes inspiration from two main sources. The first is the post-structural literature that suggests sexual subjects are sutured to identities created in the realms of discourse. The second is a psychoanalytical tradition concerned with the desires and disgusts experienced by sexual subjects as they seek to reconcile their inner selves with the outside world. In this paper an attempt is made to combine these contrasting perspectives by exploring the way sexualities are negotiated by individuals as they encounter a world that is both real and imagined. The utility of this approach is illustrated with reference to the authors research on sex work, which demonstrates that the making of sexual identities involves a dynamic relation between Self and Other--a relation that is subsequently encoded in representations of space. The paper concludes that the making of sexual identities can only be understood by examining the ways that representation and experience entwine in specific places to create sexual identities that are fractured, contested and always becoming.

Maintaining family values? Cleansing the streets of sex advertising

The Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 makes it an offence to place an advertisement for sex work in public telephone boxes. In this paper, I discuss the background to this Act, exploring the reasons why the presence of sex advertising in a public space has provoked a classic piece of ‘moral panic’ legislation. Highlighting the role of this new legislation in policing the boundaries between public and private space, the paper thus engages with key debates in social and cultural geography concerning the maintenance of socio-spatial order.

A good night out? Multiplex cinemas as sites of embodied leisure.

In this paper, the reasons for the current popularity of multiplex cinemas as sites of nighttime leisure and recreation in the UK is explored. By definition, such cinemas offer a choice of films and viewing times, are usually located in a peripheral urban location and provide free and plentiful parking. Drawing on interviews conducted in Leicester (UK), it is argued that multiplexes are popular with particular audiences because they provide a form of ‘going out’ that facilitates the maintenance of bodily comfort and ontological security. The paper accordingly concludes that we can only understand the appeal of multiplex cinemas by considering the embodied geographies of cinema going - a leisure practice that involves the consumption of place as well as the visual consumption of film.