Making room for the unexpected. Street sex work and the indecorous city

The spatial dimension of street sex work allows the unfolding of a wide range of emerging issues. Firstly, the gendered dimension of urban space: sex work requires observing how sexualities are expressed outside of private spaces but also the explication of power relations between male and female, as well as the concept of decency and its materialisation onwomen’s bodies. In this sense, the contribution will highlight some forms of gender-based violence exerted by urban space and its governance. Secondly, the removal of sex workers’ presence from the streets of Italian cities is an indication to understand the broader conception and governance of public space behind it: the contribution will critically analyse some gender-based instrumentalisation of safety/security in urban policies, which increasingly seem to feed on the rhetoric of “decency”, making a clear distinction between citizens who are entitled to be present in public space, and those who are not. Finally, street sex workers are often evidence of a more or less significant marginality. This marginality arises in the economic and social dimensions but can be contrasted or amplified in the spatial dimension, for example, through public space governance or housing policies. Whoever is involved in designing urban space has to question the fundamental role it can play in the emancipation, affirmation, or marginalisation trajectories of those who live in it and question their disciplinary tools in this sense. Following these assumptions and drawing on the ethnographic research carried out for a doctoral project on the geographies of street sex work in Rome, this chapter will try to draw some guidelines for a gender-sensitive design, based on the experience of sex workers, those ‘unexpected’ subjectivities are rarely consulted in the context of urban planning.