Gentrification and the flexibilisation of spatial control: Policing sex work in Germany

Abstract

Gentrification has often been linked to the spatial displacement of the marginalised, including prostitutes. However, in Germany, the legal spaces of prostitution are to a certain extent defensible, and gentrification processes often cover larger parts of inner cities, leaving little room for displacement. Using the example of prostitution in Frankfurt, this paper analyses how police make sense of and shape the shifting geographies of gentrification. It shows how spatial displacement is partially subsumed by two additional police strategies: intensifying attempts to discursively appease protesting citizens, and flexibilising the containment of prostitution in the inner city (e.g. by keeping street scenes on the move and lobbying for temporary brothel licenses).

Keywords

flexibilisation gentrification policing prostitution space

Introduction

The purchase of sex in the city is shaped by struggles over space, particularly local calls for exclusion. These outcries have been studied extensively (for recent overviews see Hubbard and Whowell, 2008; Laing and Cook, 2014; Maginn and Steinmetz, 2015) and shown to be linked to several processes: moral panics related to the (re)institution of gender, class or race relations (e.g. Donovan, 2006; Löw and Ruhne, 2011; Walkowitz, 1980); the scapegoating of sex workers for sociospatial marginalisation and wider socioeconomic change (Hubbard, 1998); and anxieties concerning increases in sex work populations due to in-migration (Loopmans and van den Broeck, 2011; Maluccelli, 2014). However, in recent times, urban regeneration, including gentrification, has emerged as the crucial process related to the displacement of prostitution from inner-city neighbourhoods (e.g. Bernstein, 2007; Hubbard, 2004; Kerkin, 2003; Künkel, 2012; Papayanis, 2000). Several authors have studied the underlying neoliberal politics and accompanying legal changes regarding the governance of prostitution (Beste, 2000; Hubbard, 2004; Maluccelli, 2014; Sanchez, 2004; Saunders and Kirby, 2010; Weitzer, 2012). They problematise the invoked notions of purified space as well as a deterioration of working conditions, such as diminished safety when sex workers have to hide from law enforcement (Sanders, 2004). This paper adds to such literature, focusing on the role of police in shaping such processes (see also Kingston, 2013). It shows how, against the backdrop of expanding gentrification, police not only intensify their attempts to appease protesting citizens; they also render the containment of prostitution in certain spaces more flexible by keeping street scenes on the move or allowing prostitution only temporarily in certain places. This process can be particularly well-observed in the sociolegal context of Germany, which grants sex work spatial – albeit limited – rights.

Police in neoliberalising cities

Gentrification research, especially that which focuses on the role of the state in encouraging corporate gentrification, has long acknowledged that the intensified policing of marginalised people can be pivotal in creating the conditions for gentrification to proceed (for the debate on urban revanchism, see Atkinson, 2003; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010; Smith, 1996; Swanson, 2007). Police are powerful players in such processes. Police discretion has long shaped the spaces of ‘police property’ (Lee, 1981) such as street sex workers, with differential law enforcement often resulting in a containment of prostitution in marginalised spaces (Hubbard, 1997; Kingston, 2013; Matthews, 2005; Winchester and White, 1988). Police are also crucial for the very definition of crime and disorder, often drawing the line between trafficking victim and offender against prostitution or residency laws based on police cultural norms, political will to prosecute or community interests (for an overview: Farrell et al., 2015). Furthermore, police forces in many Western countries have increased their cooperation with communities (Crawford, 1997; Kingston, 2013; Sagar and Jones, 2012) and are resourceful and influential players in the reshaped local governance structures where urban restructuring processes are negotiated (Herbert, 2006; Pütter, 2006). In the course of urban neoliberalisation and wider shifts towards a new ‘culture of control’ (Garland, 2001), spatial strategies gained importance within policing, not least because inner cities became increasingly contested as strategic places in interurban competition (Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Belina, 2007). Analyses of the spatialities of policing show how police simultaneously use spatial means of control, especially territorial control (Herbert, 1996), and are implicated in the production of space, for example, through crime mapping, spatial imaginations and selective enforcement (for an overview see Fyfe, 1991; Yarwood, 2007). Several authors have analysed a neoliberal ‘de-personalization of preventive strategies’ (Lindenberg and Schmidt-Semisch, 2000: 309) that prioritises the ‘control of spaces, places and situations’ (Ziegler, 2001: 17) while ‘no longer focusing on the perpetrator’ (Krasmann, 2003: 9), and they argue that the policing of street scenes has shifted ‘From Disciplining to Dislocation’ (Belina, 2007: in the title).¹ That is to say, unlike Fordist attempts to re-socialise people deviating from hegemonic norms, neoliberal strategies manage marginalised people in certain spaces, since the ‘spatialization of crime and policing […] serves the specific needs of cities drawn into interurban competition’ (Belina, 2007: 331).

This paper expands on such literatures, arguing that against the background of ongoing gentrification processes, a flexibilisation of spatial control rather than merely a spatialisation of policing can be observed. Spatial confinement has a long history in the policing of marginality, including prostitution (Hubbard, 1999). Early empirical police studies already problematised the contradictory interests regarding vice, which is by definition both immoral and pleasurable (Skolnick, 1988), and police’s key role in governing the urban poor (Lee, 1981; Muir, 1977). These factors were seen to foster spatially selective enforcement, a focus on those out of place/time, and (illegal) use of force to establish deferential behaviour (Reiss, 1971; Van Maanen, 1973). In his classic piece ‘The police on skid-row’, Bittner (1967) portrays police as ‘managing situations rather than persons’ (Bittner, 1967: in the abstract). Such literatures demonstrate that the containment of street scenes relied on principles of de-personalised spatial and situational management long before they were generalised in neoliberal policing. In addition, several authors have argued for more nuanced accounts of policing that take into account the different local regimes of marginalisation, including different degrees of punitiveness (Atkinson, 2003; DeVerteuil, 2006; Huey, 2007; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010; O’Sullivan 2012).

This paper similarly stresses both the continuities and heterogeneity of policing. It explains the observed shift from spatial displacement as the crucial mode of governing marginalisation in early stages of neoliberalisation (cf. Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Belina, 2007; Mitchell, 2003; Smith, 1996) towards additional flexible forms of spatial policing and intensified discursive appeasement of residents, with the specific condition of ongoing gentrification. Gentrification processes and their accompanying population changes, which disrupt the local power relations that underlie established patterns of spatial confinement and control, increasingly expand throughout the city (cf. Holm, 2010). As the case of Frankfurt am Main (Germany) shows, in the course of expanding gentrification, the informally tolerated – or legal and thus, to a certain degree, defensible – spaces of prostitution become increasingly contested, while at the same time, little space remains for further spatial displacement of marginalised groups. This paper asks how the police make sense of these changing geographies of prostitution and act upon them. It proceeds in three steps: first, the paper outlines the methodology of a case study on the policing of sex work in the gentrifying inner city of Frankfurt. Second, the empirical part of the paper analyses how police problematise gentrification-related conflicts, intensify appeasement, and flexibilise modes of control. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for understanding wider shifts in the spatial policing of the marginalised in neoliberalising cities.

Methodology

Shifts in policing that are related to urban restructuring can be well observed in Frankfurt, Germany, where both the central red-light district and the neighbourhoods adjacent to the major tolerance zone for street prostitution are gentrifying (Schipper, 2015; Welz, 2010). This paper presents a case study that draws upon semi-structured expert interviews conducted in 2012 and 2013. The interview subjects included:

constabulary police in different precincts (quoted as: [R4a], [R4b], [R13], [R5])

special units for inner city prostitution [EGM] and the often-related drug use [D510]

detectives policing prostitution [K62a], [K62b] and drugs [K64]

the municipal ‘city police’ [SPa], [SPb] in charge of infractions, including local bylaws

the social-service providers Frauenrecht ist Menschenrecht e.V., Doña Carmen e.V., and Kommunikations- und Beratungsstelle für Prostituierte.

The interviews, which had a duration of approximately one hour, were transcribed for a qualitative content analysis that focused on the police’s framing of the clientele, spatialities and reform of police strategies. While interviews are suitable for capturing how police officers make sense of the spaces of sex work, they only inform about self-reported police practices. This deficit was compensated by interviews with social-service providers, by accompanying police to a street prostitution area in 2012 (quoted as: [field note]), and by a content analysis of the media coverage regarding the policing of prostitution and drugs in Frankfurt (using the daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau from 2000 to 2012).

What’s the problem when prostitution meets gentrification, according to police?

State actors do not merely react to pre-existing problems but are involved in the power-laden processes of discursively producing ‘problems’ that predefine certain solutions. Based on these insights from discourse theory and its application in policy studies (e.g. Bacchi, 2009), I first analyse what spatial configurations are problematised by the police and then turn to the related police strategies.

Contested visibility of prostitution in public space

Since the 1960s in Frankfurt, the visibility of prostitution has been governed by ‘prohibited-area orders’ (Ruhne, 2006). In most parts of the city, the bylaw prohibits prostitution either entirely or in its noticeable forms. Visible indoor venues are concentrated in three areas, particularly the railway quarter, with its 21 brothels (Löw and Ruhne, 2011; Weitzer, 2012). Street prostitution also takes place in a tolerance zone near the fairground, as well as illegally in the railway quarter by drug consumers in the prohibited area (Bernard, 2013).

In police discourse, visible sex work is incompatible with family spaces and bourgeois housing. For example, when discussing acceptable places for legal street prostitution, residential neighbourhoods, especially in wealthy areas, are considered taboo.

Adjacent [to the tolerance zone], there is a residential zone, the Kuhwaldsiedlung. Of course this generated conflict. [R5]

[Next to an unused tolerance zone] there are pretty houses now. No one wants the street prostitution there. [EGM]

Indoor prostitution is not associated with neighbourhood conflict. Police point to a wider unease underlying recent anti-drug and anti-prostitution protests (cf. Künkel et al., 2015) about deviance in public space, even when the activity in question is legal. More specifically, they stress citizen complaints about a proclaimed visibility of prostitute bodies or sexual acts (which are illegal when people solicit in prohibited areas or knowingly cause public nuisance):

There were problems with residents […] who said: ‘[…] Prostitutes stand on the sidewalk and have sex with johns while our children walk by.’ [EGM]

They [i.e. clients and sex workers] drive to a forest path, and then in some dark corner… [the sexual services are provided]. This is okay. If these vehicles park near a resident, it causes problems. [R13]

As Bacchi (2009) puts it, ‘What’s the problem represented to be?’, pointing to the discursive production of political problems. Notably, for police, the problem here is not so much prostitution itself but the complaining citizens. Police depictions of these citizens, who complain about disorder, tend to personify the stereotypical categorisation of late-stage gentrifiers in popular literature (cf. Blasius et al., 2016; Lees, 1996). These are, first, new residents living in new ‘luxury buildings’ [anonymous constable, field note], who are portrayed as ‘newcomers with a sensitive perception of crime’ [R4b] or ‘hip bankers’ [K62a], and, second, people who ‘due to a new situation, […] with children, […] grew more sensitive [R4a]’.

To sum up, police especially problematise gentrifying neighbourhoods, where prostitute bodies, sexuality and deviance get too close to the homes of the well-to-do (similar: Kingston, 2013).

The neighbourhood’s power to complain

Such views are hardly surprising, as they resonate with conservative interpretations of prostitution as immoral (Walkowitz, 1980) and are often invoked by residents in spatial conflicts (Bernstein, 2007; Hubbard, 1998; Kerkin, 2003, O’Neill et al., 2008). In more prohibitive sociolegal contexts, such as the UK, police have been found to enforce soliciting laws selectively in response to local protests, often concentrating prostitution in poor or non-residential areas. Meanwhile, less-contested indoor markets were of little priority until the rise in trafficking discourse (Benson and Matthews, 1995; Hubbard, 1997; Kingston, 2013; Matthews, 2005; Sanders, 2004).

Similarly, police in Frankfurt feel pressured to reduce the visibility of sex work in reaction to local protests against street prostitution. However, the pressure stems not so much from the complaints as such, but from the political support that some protesters are able to gain. Criminology has long acknowledged that police decision-making takes into account how different individuals may or may not foster the criminal justice system’s pursuit of their complaints. Such a ‘power to complain’, as Feest and Blankenburg (1972: 29) call it in a German police-studies classic, is generally considered to be class-related and thus typically low in skid-row-type neighbourhoods (Huey, 2007; Muir, 1977). Interestingly enough, police share this critical criminology diagnosis with regard to prostitution, but attribute blame to politicians. ‘Where there is money, there is power to complain’ [field note]. A constable criticises the political pressure towards spatially selective policing when taking me on a field trip to a tolerance zone. He and several of his colleagues relate a rise in the ‘power to complain’ to gentrification, especially in the central red-light district, the railway quarter. Gentrification processes in the neighbourhood started in the early 2000s, spurred by a municipal housing programme promoting office conversion (Welz, 2010). Despite these changes, the legal brothels are still operating in the area, since they are spatially fixed and were granted a monopoly status by the prohibited-area order, and can thus compete with high-priced real-estate uses. Yet police perceive change with regard to street scenes due to gentrification.

[T]he classical red-light district […] is gnawed away from all sides due to luxury renovation. [R4b]

The railway quarter is upgraded. Therefore, I guess, the quality of complaints changed. Those who move in have more power to complain. [K64]

Some officers even predict anti-prostitution protests to increase, possibly including indoor venues in the future.

[I]n ten years it [i.e. the railway quarter] will be so hip that everyone wants to live there, and prostitution will be more affected [i.e. threatened by displacement]. […W]e will see how much more […], but considering that the rents in the railway quarter are already horrendous… [K62a]

In police discourse, the complaining gentrifiers are not only, as mentioned above, more sensitive to crime and disorder but also politically powerful because of their ‘cultural and social capital’ (Bourdieu, 1986). For instance, they are portrayed as rational strategists mobilising ‘family’ – a concept often opposed to prostitution (cf. Doan, 2015; Hubbard, 2004) – against street prostitution:

It was conspicuous that they would bring their little children [to a neighbourhood meeting about drug scene and street prostitution]. Surely they didn’t do so without reason. [R4a]

Gentrifiers are perceived as politically well-connected, as exemplified in the city of Hamburg, where the police (who were interviewed by the author in a previous research project, cf. Künkel, 2012) raised this issue earlier on:

We have had complainants who, due to their social status, have had such power to complain. They wrote to the mayor directly. (Constable from the precinct Hamburg St. Georg)

You can see this well in Hamburg St. Georg, which is so heavily gentrified that street prostitution was severely under attack. Since young politicians and hip bankers moved there and bought property, of course, something had to be done. [K62a]

Such powerful protests are portrayed as the driving force behind a political pressure – often spurred by local elections – to clean up inner city spaces.² Hence, in police discourse, anti-prostitution protest is clearly linked to spatial displacement via a ‘power to complain’, which is related to class and, thus, gentrification (for other forms of displacement see: Clarke, 1983).

Demands competing with calls for invisibilisation and spatial displacement

Police have often been found to yield to such powerful complaints by increasing law enforcement and pushing sex work into marginalised spaces (Kingston, 2013; Matthews, 2005; Sagar and Jones, 2012; Sharpe, 1998). Also, Frankfurt police consider a reduction in complaints (that is, not just law enforcement) as the aim of policing:

We […] make controls […] to create legal security […] and to work against complaints. [R13]

We prioritized this area […] in order to keep these people [i.e. street sex workers] out of the residential neighborhood. That was successful; complaints decreased. [SPa]

However, as ‘demand negotiator’ (Huey, 2007), the police also actively engage in politics. For instance, police may indirectly influence politics by strategically not enforcing the law, which fuels neighbourhood protest and in turn creates demand for tougher laws (Larson, 1996). Alternatively, police can contest calls for displacement for a variety of reasons, including limited police resources, anti-displacement protests or the ‘street cop’s’ (Reuss-Ianni, 1993) contempt for engaging with marginalised groups. In the following section, I will show how Frankfurt police, in this vein, partially contest the spatial displacement that gentrifiers demand. The following competing ‘demands’ (Huey, 2007), or interests of different groups (including the police), shape police decision making: first, unlike citizens, police do value the concentration and visibility of sex work, since it facilitates police control. Second, certain groups of sex workers are perceived as non-responsive to police displacement attempts. Finally, space for further spatial displacement is limited in a city where gentrification and new construction already cover most parts of the inner city (cf. Heeg, 2012). These three aspects are elaborated in the next sections.

Controllability through spatial concentration and visibility

Criminalisation and policing may cause illicit economies to go into hiding, rendering them less accessible to state control (for the debate on spatial displacement as an effect of policing, see Weisburd et al., 2006). Accordingly, legalised or tolerated markets for economies such as prostitution, drugs or gambling are sometimes favoured – even by law enforcement (Brents and Hausbeck, 2001; Sanders, 2011) – despite their visibility being at odds with neighbourhood concerns (Hubbard, 1997).

Frankfurt police discussed problems controlling the less-noticeable forms of prostitution, whether indoor or outdoor, and stressed a contradiction between the visibility of prostitution as a nuisance and its advantages for controllability:

[A]partment prostitution […] is very difficult to control for us, since it is such a closed space. [K62a]

Some said: ‘If we concentrate it [i.e. street prostitution] in one street, in one corner, we can control it’ […] Most constables thought, it [a tolerance zone] must be closed, since they saw the public order problem. Those colleagues who dealt with organized crime, the detectives, weren’t too happy about it. [EGM]

Overall, the mixed feelings of police about visibility mirror the contradictory functions of modern Western police: keeping up public order and morale versus crime fighting and harm reduction (cf. Reiner, 2010; Sanders, 2011).

The spatial manageability of different actors in the sex industry

A second element that – according to police – clashes with neighbourhood calls for a reduced visibility of prostitution is the limited spatial manageability of certain participants in the sex industry. Police highlight two groups that became increasingly problematic in the course of gentrification as largely irrational and irresponsive to police measures.

First, police discourse characterises the often Roma-ethnic, Eastern-European migrants as a barely controllable force of nature that ‘would get out of hand, if it is handled too liberally’ [R13]. They ‘completely flooded the German prostitution market’ [K62a], like a ‘huge torrent’ [EGM]. Police stress the permanent enforcement effort necessary to keep this group in their designated place.

Due to their educational and social level it [i.e. the police effort] is quickly unmasked and ignored. [R13]

[O]f course one has to put the boot in permanently. [R5]

Second, drug-consuming sex workers are constructed as outright non-displaceable. For example, a recent displacement attempt ‘didn’t work at all’ [EGM], since these sex workers are inseparable from the sites of drug markets and social-service provisions.

[T]he drug addicts cannot be displaced sustainably, since all their social contacts among each other and social services etc. are in the railway quarter. [D510]

As long as social services are located in the railway quarter, there will always be […] the addict women who have to work in prostitution for drugs. [K62]

The police discourse about non-displaceable, drug-related prostitution is based on and at the same time stabilises a political consensus to contain the drug scene in the railway quarter. This consensus regarding local drug policy (which was established in 1992) has been negotiated since the late 1980s by a multi-agency committee comprising law enforcement, prosecution, social-service providers and city administration. Back then, drug consumers were displaced from downtown to the railway quarter after protests, especially from finance-sector businesses (Beste, 2000). At the same time, a drug policy called the ‘Frankfurt model’, which combines public-order policing and harm reduction in part by establishing drug-consumption rooms in the railway quarter, was instituted. Since the early 2000s, this policy has been increasingly challenged by railway-quarter resident and business initiatives (Künkel et al., 2015). Since 2004, protests have led to an expansion of the public-order elements of the ‘Frankfurt Model’ (Bernard, 2013; Vogt, 2009). Furthermore, the multi-agency committee started debating a turn to the ‘Hamburg Model’: a complete displacement of the drug scene from public space and concentration indoors and in the courtyard of one large service provider. However, police and the other multi-agency committee members have argued for continuing the ‘Frankfurt Model’, stressing both its benefits for health and public order as well as difficulties in changing the spatial situation.

It is consensus that we need to carry on like this, period. There is no alternative. [K64]

Wherever you locate it [i.e. a large service provider and the tightly concentrated drug scene], of course, there will be disputes. [… E]verybody would say: ‘You can do this anywhere, but not here’. [K64]

Similar to the debates about the sites for prostitution tolerance zones, which police do not want near the newly built ‘pretty houses’ (see above), police anticipate protests when relocating the drug scene in a city where gentrification spreads – even to places that are suitable for relocation, given that they already contain service facilities for drug consumers.

Overall, while migrant sex workers are seen as difficult to keep in place, drug consumers are portrayed as invariably attached to the geographies of social-service provisions that are heavily contested and thus difficult to alter.

Police strategies: Discursive appeasement and flexible containment

So far this paper has analysed the competing demands that police highlight regarding the spaces of sex work under the condition of gentrification: powerful complaints about visible sex work, resistance to displacement and difficulties controlling less-visible prostitution. In the following section, I turn to the spatial strategies that police employ to accommodate these different demands: discursive strategies to appease protesting citizens and flexibilised containment.

Discursive appeasement: De-dramatising crime based on in/tolerance discourses

Police knowledge may be used to ‘dramatise’ or ‘de-dramatise’ (Behr, 2006: 117) a public scandalisation of crime and disorder. Especially the precinct commanders – who act as ‘management cops’ (Reuss-Ianni, 1993) and are often the first to respond to citizen complaints – describe how they resort to discursive appeasement strategies when facing complaints about street sex work and related drug use. Such strategies involve both highlighting increased police enforcement efforts (discussed below) and ‘de-dramatising’ crime and disorder. For example, one precinct ‘meticulously’ [R13] monitors the numbers of street prostitutes, producing statistical knowledge that contests recurrent public outcries about increasing prostitution:

Of course, media wants to sell. […] So such stories are clearly exaggerated. Numbers, especially the information we get, tell a different story. […] We usually get two or three calls from […] city councilors or outraged citizens. Then we explain the situation, and it’s settled. [R13]

Police also question citizen accounts of high or rising crime and call for tolerance (especially towards legal forms of deviance) in public forums, such as hearings where street scenes are frequently discussed.

[W]e say: ‘Folks, where there are many people, there are conflicts. You cannot be so sensitive all the time. [R5]

And I asked: ‘Did it get worse?’ […] And she [i.e. a resident worried about the street scenes] said: ‘No […].’ And I said: ‘But you described it as burdening.’ She says: ‘Yes, it’s totally unbearable.’ Then she realized herself that it didn’t get worse: ‘Maybe one grows sensitive.’ And I […] asked: ‘Did they ever hurt you?’ She said: ‘No, they don’t do anything, it just looks so horrible.’ [R4a]

Police always filter citizen concerns as worthy of pursuit according to cop cultural norms, bureaucratic procedures, legal constraints and local power relations (Herbert, 2006; Pütter, 2006). What is interesting here is that the appeasement is both based on and fostering discourses about (neighbourhood) tolerance that are linked to three recent (inter)national policy trends regarding the governance of marginality. First, international urban planning discourses and programmes promote tolerant ‘creative cities’, which have come to shape the narratives about gentrifying neighbourhoods around the world (Peck, 2006), including Frankfurt’s railway quarter (Dzudzek, 2012). Second, Frankfurt is locally framed and internationally marketed as a model city for a harm-reduction drug policy that provides resources for sick people in need of help (cf. McCann and Temenos, 2015, and Vogt, 2009 for neglected public order aspects). Third, in 2002 the German prostitution law rendered prostitution contracts valid and de-criminalised the ‘support of prostitution’, based on the argument that an understanding of prostitution as immoral is ‘no longer shared by large parts of society’ (Bundestag, 2001: 4).

Against the background of sex work, including brothel-keeping and soliciting, being legal in Germany (if spatially and otherwise restricted), prostitution is partially normalised by police. Detectives in particular emphasise: ‘We are not opposed to prostitutes or the profession. We don’t judge morally [K62a]’. Constabulary police present themselves as being more tolerant with regard to prostitution than the average population (for similar sentiments towards conservative vigilante groups, see: Kingston, 2013; O’Neill et al., 2008; Sagar, 2005).

For the normal citizen, it [i.e. prostitution and drug consumption] is not understandable. […] We, the police, deal with it in a more normal manner. [R13]

From such an imagined ‘normal’ citizenry, police discourse distinguishes the traditional railway quarter and its long-standing residents, for example, when speaking of ‘a neighborhood with a normal population, that is; not the railway quarter’ [K62b]. The railway quarter, with the exception of some intruding gentrifiers, is constructed as Other; that is, more tolerant and further from hegemonic norms (a characterisation that finds tentative empirical support: Welz, 2010). For example, the local precinct commander tells a fictitious story that situates deviancy in the railway quarter, which he characterises as showing ‘more tolerance’ [R4a], but not in the adjacent bourgeois neighbourhoods:

[A] man, walks from [the bourgeois neighbourhood] Westend down to [the river] Main. He reaches Niddastraße [in the railway quarter], litters, […] sees someone he doesn’t know and insults him. Then he buys a bottle of beer at the kiosk, drinks while walking, […] pees on the wall […], and as soon as he gets to Eiserner Steg [a touristy bridge outside the railway quarter], he stops it, and carries on in normal manner. And the interesting thing about the quarter […] is: the man thinks his behavior is completely normal, and anyone […] who might have seen him thinks so, too. [R4a]

The story, which constructs a space where deviancy is accepted, echoes local media discourses about a ‘tolerant’, ‘authentic’ neighbourhood, fostering a ‘symbolic gentrification’ (Lang, 1998). For a long time, the railway quarter was seen to attract visitors despite prostitution and drugs (Ruhne, 2006). Yet, since around 2003, media coverage has represented prostitution in two ways: a continuing discourse about crime or a discourse about ‘diversity’ and ‘creativity’ that celebrates the marginalised groups (see also: Dzudzek, 2012). According to this discourse, ‘the railway quarter, with its beggars and artists, prostitutes, bankers, junkies and hipsters, is the most interesting neighborhood in the city’ (Helbig, 2011: no page number).

Yet the story also shows how police selectively appropriated discourses of anti-gentrification protests, stressing the tolerance of the ‘old’ railway quarter and depicting the red light district as being threatened by gentrification; the quotes presented earlier in this paper describe the area being ‘gnawed away by luxury renovation’ and intruded by ‘newcomers’ that are overly ‘sensitive’ towards deviance. Social movements have sporadically contested the recent protests against marginalised street scenes, arguing that rising rents, securitisation and displacement – not the street scenes – are the main problems in the neighbourhood (Künkel et al., 2015). Social-service providers problematise – albeit less publicly – the concentration of marginalised people in ever smaller spaces (cf. Werse et al., 2006). In a somewhat similar vein, police – while also highlighting increased police enforcement efforts (discussed below) – sometimes contest citizens’ displacement demands against the street scenes. For instance, police distinguish complaints about illegal behaviour from broader unease about legal deviance, arguing that ‘no one is entitled to […] unlawful policing, just because another person has less power of complaint’ [R4a]. What is more, in the media, police point to urban restructuring processes as a cause of conflicts, and call for an acceptance of legal forms of deviance in particular.

From a police perspective […] possibilities to retreat to empty buildings, courtyards and entrances have diminished. Thus it is inevitable that dealers and consumers are more present in public space. (Iskandar and Palm, 2015: no page number)

There is little sense in chasing the addicts through the city [… W]e cannot lock them up just to provide residents with a prettier view. (Precinct commander, in: Schneider, 2009: no page number)

Far from simply yielding to resident complaints, the local constabulary police invoke discourses of (neighbourhood) tolerance to accommodate the different demands concerning street scenes in the public spaces of gentrifying neighbourhoods.

Flexible containment: Differential attractiveness of spaces, dispersal and temporary licensing

The discursive appeasement is accompanied by repressive measures that are fostered by conservative city politicians and the political management of the police. Several restructuring processes have strengthened public-order policing since the mid-2000s: staff relocation towards the inner-city precincts and the creation of two constabulary police task forces for prostitution and drugs allowed for an expansion to include plainclothes policing, especially in the railway quarter. Since 2004, police participate in the programme ‘Offensive Social Work, Security, Intervention and Prevention’ (OSSIP) to reduce drug-related nuisance. In 2010, against the background of rising migrant street prostitution, upcoming local elections, and the state inner minister running for mayor, a sting operation called ‘Security Initiative’ was launched. Three thousand police controls led to 350 area bans in the first three months and 272 soliciting charges in 2010 (Polizeipräsidium Frankfurt, 2010; Schlepper, 2010). In effect, migrant street prostitution was displaced from the railway quarter and the visibility of the remaining drug-consuming sex workers was reduced.

These measures resemble the policies of inner-city displacement and containment in less-contested spaces that have often been linked to neoliberal urban restructuring (e.g. Beckett and Herbert, 2009; Belina, 2007; Mitchell, 2003). However, at a closer look, they also show notable continuities of inner-city containment as well as a flexibilisation thereof that is based on three elements: differential attractiveness of spaces, dispersal and revocable spatial rights.

First, police attempt to channel sex work into certain places by increasing or decreasing the attractiveness of these spaces by, for example, providing infrastructure in collaboration with other state and civil-society actors. At the same time, police aim at keeping this steering mechanism flexible by opting for the installation of easily removable – rather than fixed – infrastructures. When displacing (migrant) street sex work from the railway quarter to an already-existing but barely used tolerance zone in 2010, a round table comprising the municipality and police decided to make the tolerance zone ‘attractive’ [R13] by installing a portable toilet, an emergency telephone, and social services:

[T]he acceptance of a stroll depends on [the following]: Can prostitutes earn money there? Is it popular […] with clients? And is there a little bit of security? [R13]

The acceptance of the [displacement] measure is a lot higher if I can say: ‘Go to this area, you may stand there, and there you get help’. [SPb]

Yet, the local precinct in particular feared attracting sex workers from other places, creating the types of public order problems seen in Dortmund – the German example for Dutch-style tolerance zones equipped with infrastructure (cf. Wagenaar and Altink, 2009):

[I]n Dortmund, when the stroll was legalized and [equipped] with garages […] the neighborhood very quickly turned into a ghetto. [K62a]

Some said: […] ‘If we create a zone [with infrastructure] we attract all the women and the associated criminality like in Dortmund.’ [EGM]

However, it was also the vicinity of the stroll that caused concern about a future escalation of conflicts. Adjacent to the tolerance zone was not only a gentrifying residential neighbourhood and an internationally known fairground but also Frankfurt’s largest construction site for upscale housing, soon to be completed.

Fears arose that the surrounding residential areas, Kuhwald and the new quarter under construction […] would be used for conducting [prostitution]. [R13]

To prevent escalating conflicts, the infrastructure of the tolerance zone remained limited and temporary. Most notably, no garages for the provision of sexual services in cars were installed. Hence, in a city with a booming real-estate market and large-scale construction sites, police anticipated changes in power relations and lobbied for non-permanent infrastructures.

As a second way to flexibilise containment, police negotiated rules of conduct that break up the fixed geographies of congregated drug scenes and drug-related sex work by mobilising and thus invisibilising these groups within a certain space. In 2004, when introducing the OSSIP programme, service providers and law enforcement negotiated a set of behavioural rules to reduce drug-related nuisance: no public drug consumption, dealing, congregating, noise or litter. Social-service providers – who in Frankfurt increasingly take part in public-order policy (Vogt, 2009) – communicated these rules to drug consumers, announcing that police would no longer tolerate such behaviours. Police subsequently increased enforcement.

However, the aim of police was not to enforce drug prohibition but rather to reduce citizen complaints; notably, to allow for a continued, yet less noticeable, containment of the drug scene:

[T]he aim [is] to prevent a congregation of drug addicts. It is not about prosecuting [drug] consumption but about preventing a renewed establishment of the scene in public space. [R4]

We said we need a program that enforces clear rules of conduct among the clients [i.e. drug consumers …]. Otherwise we run the risk, and I think the clients can understand this, that public complaints rise tremendously. If they behave unruly everywhere, people who may have mixed feelings about the whole thing [i.e. drug consumption] anyways will be provoked and say, it must end. [d510]

In 2010, OSSIP was complemented by a ‘security initiative’ that similarly established a less-visible comportment among drug-consuming sex workers, while displacing migrant street prostitutes. Both programmes demonstrated police action to appease citizens, pushed deviance into less-visible legal spaces (that is, drug-consumption rooms, tolerance zones, or sex hotels) and dispersed the remaining street scene into public space.

[T]he aim is to at least keep them moving. [K64]

A year ago, the women were soliciting openly in the street. Now they are sometimes waiting in the entrances of a sex hotel. [EGM]

Hence, the containment of drug consumers was not ended but flexibilised and thus invisibilized by keeping people on the move: lurking from sex hotel entrances and wandering about rather than congregating or waiting publicly. This disciplining relied on a combination of vast police powers and high discretion (similar: Brants, 1998), including criminal charges for repeated soliciting in prohibited areas or drug possession, and regulatory law allowing for long-term area bans from crime hot spots. These legal powers constituted a Damocles sword that allowed for effecting behavioural changes among the street scenes. At the same time, it was the threat of public outcries about the street scenes that incited the regulators (police, city administration and service providers) to pursue such a disciplining strategy.

Third, Frankfurt police promoted a flexibilisation of containment by lobbying for temporary brothel licensing to complement prohibited-area orders. In Frankfurt, the latter had been proven to grant little flexibility: in the late 1960s, the municipality issued building permits for 27 large brothels to address citizen concerns about street prostitution, and the region defined a tolerance zone (Beste, 2000). This process created a profitable economy, which was able to defend itself because of its legality. In the mid-1980s, conservative mayor Wallmann aimed at displacing prostitution to upgrade the neighbourhood. Brothel owners fought back with lawsuits, and the region blocked the change to the prohibited-area order, insisting on the legal requirement of sufficient space for prostitution. In the end, the railway-quarter brothels largely remained and were discursively rendered non-displaceable – up to now. Recently, the Social and Christian Democrat government passed a national licensing law (Bundestag, 2016), which was prominently supported by Frankfurt detectives (Steiner, 2014, for further police lobbying for licensing, see Doña Carmen, 2012). According to police, licensing will make locations of apartments known (countering the contradiction between controllability and visibility), warrants no longer necessary, and brothels can be governed flexibly, because licenses will be temporary, revocable, and dependent upon conditions that local authorities, including police, devise and supervise (Steiner, 2014). Since conditions may serve to protect neighbours and introduce standards that cannot easily be realised in old housing stock, the law can also be used to govern brothels spatially, as police explain:

[With licensing], large brothels in the style of the railway quarter will cease to exist, since operators have to, for example, provide a tea kitchen, comply with hygiene standards etc. […]. Indoor prostitution may move out of railway quarter, […] maybe to the green belts. [EGM]

Hence, the debates about a licensing law opened up a space to think about reshaping the geographies of indoor prostitution, which had been largely fixed by prohibited-area orders. By supporting the law, police foster a more flexible spatial steering mechanism that allows for dislocation and for small, invisible brothels that are known to police, thus dovetailing nicely the demands of both gentrification and controllability.

Conclusion

The paper started with the observation of unresolved debates regarding the policing of marginality in neoliberalising cities. Some scholars stress ‘banishment’ (Beckett and Herbert, 2009) or ‘dislocation’ (Belina, 2007) as key to neoliberal urban restructuring (for example, Mitchell, 2003; Smith, 1996). Others point to more subtle modes of governing marginality, such as ‘domestication by cappuccino’ (Atkinson, 2003; Zukin, 1995) or ‘coercive care’ (Johnsen and Fitzpatrick, 2010), and highlight heterogeneous regimes of marginality with varying degrees of punitiveness (DeVerteuil, 2006; Huey, 2007; O’Sullivan 2012).

In the case analysed here, these contradictory regimes can be read as a differentiation of policing that is part of late urban neoliberalisation. Frankfurt has shifted from attempts to displace prostitution and the often-related drug scene that were linked to earlier phases of urban neoliberalisation (Beste, 2000) towards two additional police strategies that have developed against the background of ongoing gentrification and comparatively liberal prostitution and drug policies: first, increased discursive appeasement of citizens and, second, flexibilised, less-visible forms of inner-city containment of deviant groups.

While migrant street prostitutes were displaced in ways that resemble earlier forms of spatial displacement, their destination space was rendered temporary by limited infrastructure provisions. Other forms of visible deviance in the inner city, namely legal brothels and drug consumption, proved resistant to displacement because of legal status, refractoriness or political constituency, and also because large groups are difficult to displace in the context of an inner city that is shaped by extensive new construction and gentrification. Police thus aimed at diminishing their increasingly contested visibility by lobbying for temporary brothel licenses and keeping street scenes on the move. Yet, against the background of a gentrification that is fostered in the name of the ‘creative class’, police also invoked tolerance discourses, including selectively appropriated elements of anti-gentrification discourse, in order to stabilise the geographies of those marginalised groups they could not displace. The policing of marginality is influenced both by new neoliberal discourses about the ‘creative class’ and new material conditions that are created by real-estate policies that have aimed at enhanced interurban competitiveness since the 1980s.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, reviewers, editors and Neuordnungen des Städtischen colleagues, particularly Bernd Belina and Phil Hubbard.

Funding

This research was funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Notes

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