Please join us for the second winter installment of Power, Pleasure and Space: Planning the 21st City, a speaker series brought to you by the Urban Sociologists of the Department of Sociology, Drexel University.

Phil Hubbard, professor of urban studies, King’s College London, will be joining us to present "Municipal Law & the Sex Industries: Space, Time, and Moral Geographies."

Though the sex industries are mainly discussed in relation to criminal law and policing, this talk will explore the role that municipal law— zoning, licensing, planning and environmental health — has on the location and nature of commercial sex in the city. Focusing on the regulation of brothels, lap dance clubs and other adult businesses, Hubbard will argue that municipal law is increasingly important in limiting the visibility of sex-related businesses in the cityscape, particular in situations where the enforcement of vice laws is a low police priority.

Drawing on recent studies in Australia, the UK, Brazil and the Netherlands, this presentation will outline how changes in the legality of different land uses has impacts upon workers, sometimes making their job safer and less precarious, other times exposing them to violence and forms of illegality, and will make the case for the recognition of sex businesses as a legal category of land use, with assessment of their appropriate location in the city based on objective assessment of their environmental impacts, rather than prejudicial perceptions of immorality.

About Phil Hubbard
Professor Hubbard has a BA in Geography (1990) and PhD (1994) from the University of Birmingham, and has worked in the Departments of Geography at Gloucestershire University, Coventry University, and Loughborough University. He is particularly interested in the city as a site of social conflict. His work draws on theories of the city developed in urban geography and urban sociology, and also engages with debates in socio-legal studies given his particular interests in the way urban 'disorder' is regulated. Professor Hubbard’s book "The Battle for the High Street," (Palgrave, 2017) investigates he impacts of retail gentrification on working class communities.