To browse Academia. Ronald Weitzer. Milena Chimienti. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. Manuel Aalbers. The Amsterdam Red Light District is locally and internationally significant as one of the oldest venues for visible and legal urban prostitution.
Recent urban planning changes in the area, instigated by City authorities, show the Red Light District is directly implicated in municipal gentrifying efforts, efforts that put at risk historic margins like the Red Light District. This introductory paper to the special feature on the Red Light District of Amsterdam offers an overview of key perspectives on red light zones and specifically addresses how the Amsterdam Red Light District both fits, and is an exception to visible urban zones of prostitution.
It is generally accepted that in sexual interaction men are the hunters and women the gatherers. An expressly sexual environment such as a red-light district would be expected to only reinforce this image. Strikingly enough, however, it is precisely prostitutes who seem able to break with these established gender roles. This ethnographic study uses participant observation to demonstrate how assumptions about sexual interaction may be specious: female prostitutes are frequently not the passive victims and male clients not the active sex-hunters they are taken for.
Both the communicative function and protection of privacy play an important role in these processes in a red-light district. In the red-light district, gender interaction is bound by social regulation and unwritten rules that greatly exceed the influence of formal institutions.
In this paper, the case of the red-light district "De Wallen" in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, is discussed in the context of several disciplines including urban anthropology, social psychology, geography, gender studies, and urban sociology. Minna van Gerven. This article examines to what extent Dutch municipalities have adapted new local prostitution regulations to local needs and demands following decentralisation in We examined the extent to which a national template is locally adapted, and which factors inspired such adaptations.
