Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalisation (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.     

Book reviews

The Regions and the European Community: The Regional Response to the Single Market in the Underdeveloped Areas. R. Leonardi (Ed.). London, Frank Cass, 1993, 274 pp, £27.50 hb, ISBN 0 7146 3460 3.

Technology Policy: Towards an Integration of Social and Ecological Concerns. George Aichholzer and Gerd Schienstock (Eds). Berlin and New York, De Gruyter, 1994, 418 pp, DM188.0, US$94.95, £59.35 hb, ISBN 3 11 13677 5.

Postmodern Cities and Spaces. Sophie Watson and Katherine Gibson (Eds). Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, VIII + 269 pp, £45.00 hb, ISBN 0 631 19403 7, £13.99 pb, ISBN 0 631 19404 5.

Gender, Planning and the Policy Process. Jo Little. Oxford, Pergamon, 1994, ix + 210 pp, £58.00 hb, ISBN 0 080404 812, ISBN 0 080404 807.

Women and Planning—Creating Gendered Realities. Clara H. Greed. London, Routledge, 1994, vii + 248 pp, £12.99 pb, ISBN 0 415077 810.

Perspectives Towards Sustainable Environmental Development. C. C. Williams and G. Haughton (Eds). Aldershot, Ashgate, 1994, xi + 200 pp, £35.00 hb, ISBN 1 85628 874 9.

Regional Networks, Border Regions and European Integration. Ricardo Cappellin and Peter W. Batey (Eds). London, Pion, 1995, 246 pp, £22.50/US$35.00 hb, ISBN 0 850 8 6124.

Design Review: Challenging Urban Aesthetic Control. Brenda Case Scheer and Wolfgang F. E. Preiser (Eds). New York and London, Chapman & Hall, 1994, vii‐219 pp, US$36.95 pb, ISBN 0 412 99161 6.     

Sticks and Stones: Environmental Narratives and Discursive Regulation in the Forestry and Mining Sectors

As visibly extractive industries reliant on the material and semiotic commodification of nature, forestry and mining have come to be popularly viewed as "environmental pariahs." Yet forestry and mining continue to be successfully profitable enterprises despite a significant increase in environmental awareness and activism in the latter half of the twentieth century. To understand the relative stability and growth of these sectors in the face of overt contradictions arising from their use of the environment, this article revisits the work of regulation theorists who asked similar questions about the persistence and maintenance of capitalism in general.
Two case studies are presented–forestry in British Columbia and gold mining in California and Nevada–which demonstrate how the political economy of forestry and mining is subject to contradictions arising out of the technological and organizational mechanisms through which nature is appropriated during production. Analysis of the case studies shows that the regulation of these contradictions is increasingly achieved through the deployment and cooptation of sustainability narratives. The case studies therefore juxtapose the recent proliferation of sustainability narratives within the forestry and mining sectors with the sectors' persistent challenge to concepts of sustainable development.