You have full access to this open access article. Many European city centres have seen increasing investment in the last decades, and policies have targeted centrally-located red light districts in particular for regeneration and clean-up. The literature tends to discuss these interventions and the associated social changes in terms of state-led gentrification.
While such a classification may serve critical inquiry, we argue that the use of the concept may also entail certain assumptions regarding the future of these areas: their eventual demise as diverse areas with sex-related economic activities. We also identify how locals exert some control over how these processes play out.
The outcome, for the time being, has been a continuation of red light activities, albeit modified and adapted to the preferences of new residents, visitors, large investors and the state. Our conceptualisation of gentrification as a locally embedded process demonstrates that the outcomes of state and market pressures are more contingent on local context than ideal-typical or policy-based understandings allow.
Red light districts RLDs have always been paradoxical urban areas; they have been marginalised and romanticised, avoided and frequented, opposed and cherished. In recent decades, however, their existence has progressively come under threat. As cities have increasingly become centres of capital accumulation Smith ; Zukin et al. Cities such as Hong Kong, Taipei, Montreal and Antwerp have instituted policies aimed at transforming their RLDs by, among other things, limiting the number of sexually-oriented businesses and investing in real estate Cheng Multiple reports have conceptualised these policies and their effects as state-led gentrification e.
Aalbers and Deinema ; Sasajima ; Neuts et al. Such a framework allows for a critical analysis of state policy. However, the use of gentrification as a concept for neighbourhood change may also bring a set of assumptions about how the process plays out: as long-term, lower-income residents, shops and amenities are displaced and more affluent residents and businesses come in, the neighbourhood will eventually lose its character.
