ancient cities

clustering abound. Studies of these spaces have
contributed to debates about migration, gentrification,
cosmopolitanism, and the branding of cities.
Through their work on the creative class, Richard
Florida and his associates have developed a “gay
index” to measure the extent to which cities are
socially tolerant places that might be attractive to
the class of socially liberal, creative people who he
identifies as the motors of innovation in the cultural
and high-tech industries. This index calculates
the presence of (presumably out) gay men and
lesbians as an indicator of a city’s level of economic
development and its potential as a site for
the accumulation of profit.
Geographies of Sex
Whereas the role of urban space in (re)producing
sexual identities has increasingly been debated by
scholars, much less attention has been paid to the
geographies of sex. It could be argued that this is
because most sex occurs in private, domestic places
and only becomes visible and commented on when
it transgresses the boundaries of public and private.
However, as the earlier discussion of cruising
illustrates, sex also regularly occurs in public
urban space. Indeed those urban sites, such as
parks and public restrooms that are appropriated
as cruising areas have come under close scrutiny
from academics and urban authorities. In Britain
and other countries, there has been particular concern
for the sexualization of public spaces associated
with drinking, loss of control, and disorder. If
sex in the city is a public as well as private affair,
it has also long been a commercial concern. The
sex industry is big business: As well as sites of
prostitution, cities are home to a range of sex-
related commercial sites, such as dating agencies,
sex shops, fetish clubs, and erotic dance venues. In
recent years urban theorists have begun to examine
the messy embodiments of sex itself within the
spaces of lap-dancing clubs and lesbian and gay
bathhouses. Although such sites are numerous,
they are also highly contested and subject to surveillance
of various kinds. Trends toward the
privatization of urban public space have curtailed
and altered public sexual cultures, and some cities
have reconfigured their planning regulations to
disperse sex-related business out of city center locations.
Such processes, alongside the development
Sex and the City
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of the Internet and mobile technologies, have
reshaped the geographies of sex in the city, and, by
enabling new forms of public sexual encounters,
such as “dogging,” may be reconfiguring erotic
desires and reconstituting what and where can be
erotic.
Future Directions
The focus of studies of urban sexualities on concentrations
of gay leisure venues and the sex industry
within city centers has tended to mean that the
relationship between “normal” sexual lives and
cityscapes remains overlooked. There remains a
need to broaden studies of urban sexuality to
attend to all sexualities, all cities, and all parts of
those cities, including the suburbs. To some extent,
it is not that this work does not exist; rather, it
does not acknowledge it is studying the spatial
expression of sexuality. For example, some feminist
writings on women’s lives within cities are
infused with assumptions of heterosexuality, such
that they do not explicitly address how heterosexual
relations shape women’s daily routines and
negotiations of city spaces. In rendering this mundane
heterosexuality visible, such work would
question which women are studied and how their
sexual practices and lives (including reproduction
and childrearing) shape the provision of city services
and the rhythms of urban life—from the
ante-natal class to the school run. Sex is often seen
as marginal to the study of cities; however, sex,
sexuality, and assumptions about the functioning
of normative romantic and familial relationships
are implicated in urban economics, architecture,
planning regulations, and service provision, as well
as the experience of inhabiting urban space.
Gavin Brown and Kath Browne
See also Creative Class; Flâneur; Gendered Space;
Gentrification; Nightlife; Non-Sexist City; Red-Light
District; Sex Industry; Social Exclusion
Further Readings
Bech, H. 1997. When Men Meet: Homosexuality and
Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Bell, D. and G. Valentine, eds. 1995. Mapping Desires:
Geographies of Sexualities. London: Routledge.