To recap of last semester's UDP3 "Red Zones! - Mapping urban risk and conflict zones" projects, we would like to share "Behind Closed Blinds. Apartment-based Sex Work as an Urban-Spatial Phenomenon“ by Berit Jagels, Nina Müllen and Tabea Schamp.

"Behind Closed Blinds investigates the multilayered spatial organisation of apartment-based sex work in Hamburg, the dominant yet institutionally invisible form of contemporary sex work in German cities – scattered across ordinary residential buildings, removed from public gaze. This study deals with that invisibility and investigates how this spatial constellation is produced, organised and sustained in Hamburg, arguing that the displacement of sex work from red‑light districts into the apartment becomes a grey zone: a condition in which vulnerability and regulatory conflict are not concentrated but deliberately dispersed across the urban fabric, beyond the reach of conventional governance. Drawing on and critically extending the Re‑figuration of Space framework from Knoblauch & Löw, the study shows that grey zones are not governance failures but structured outcomes of regulatory ambivalence. Its implications reach directly into debates on the Nordic Model, digital platform governance, and the spatial stigmatisation of marginalised labour. Rather than reducing this complexity to a singular narrative, the study attends to the spatial structures and working conditions that organise the field as such. The apartment has become the central workplace for the majority of sex workers, yet remains comparatively underexplored in research.”

If you are interested in learning more about the project, feel free to contact us at UD office to get access or come by and have a look at their book.