Policing, planning and sex: Governing bodies, spatially
| Author | Jason Prior,Penny Crofts,Phil Hubbard |
| Published date | 01 April 2013 |
| Date | 01 April 2013 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0004865812469974 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Australian & New Zealand
Journal of Criminology
46(1) 51–69
!The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865812469974
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Article
Policing, planning and sex:
Governing bodies, spatially
Penny Crofts
Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Phil Hubbard
School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, University
of Kent, UK
Jason Prior
Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology, Sydney,
Australia
Abstract
Literatures on the regulation of conduct have tended to focus on the role of policing and the
enforcement of criminal law. This paper instead emphasizes the importance of planning in
shaping conduct, using the example of how planning shapes sexual conduct to demonstrate
that planning can, in different times and places, exercise police-type powers. We illustrate this
by analysing the regulation of brothels in Sydney and Parramatta, NSW, Australia, providing a
case study of spaces of sexuality that historically were constructed and regulated as criminal,
but have since become lawful. This paper examines the ways in which these transitions in law
have been differently expressed and accomplished through local planning enforcement. In
making such arguments, the paper emphasizes not only the potential for planners to act like
police, but also the capacity of planning to supplant policing as a key technique of
governmentality.
Keywords
brothels, local government, planning, policing, regulation
Introduction
Policing has long been the subject of sustained criminological scrutiny, with increasing
attention given to policing’s role in producing gender, age, class and ethnic norms (see
Reiner, 2000). In this sense, critical criminology considers policing as an enforcer of
social order as much as a mechanism for eradicating crime. However, with a few hon-
ourable exceptions (e.g. Millie, 2008; Room, 2004; Valverde and Cirak, 2003), there has
Corresponding author:
Penny Crofts, University of Technology, Sydney, Faculty of Law, PO Box 123, Broadway, 2007, Australia.
Email: penny.crofts@uts.edu.au
been little criminological analysis of planning regulators, which on the surface is explic-
able given that planning is primarily concerned with the civil sphere, whilst criminology
focuses on the criminal sphere. Yet given that critical and cultural criminology has
broadened the traditional interests of criminology, extending notions of offending,
offences and offenders (Anthony and Cunneen, 2008: 3), in this paper we argue for a
focus on planning as a means of enforcing social and behavioural norms through the
control of land use.
In this paper, we alight on planning as a technique of governance, albeit one that
regulates people via the regulation of land use (Foucault, 1991, see also Philo, 1992 on
spatial governmentality). From its 19th-century origins, the ultimate aim of town and
country planning was to order and regulate the use of land to secure the physical,
economic and social efficiency, health and well-being of the population. Planning itself
was an expression of the modern fantasy that society could control the worst aspects of
industrialization and urbanization by identifying potential nuisances and segregating
them from other land uses via the exercise of judgements about what properly belongs
where (Blomley, 2010; Sibley, 1995). This is an exercise of spatial governmentality which
is ultimately about the production of particular bodies and identities, with planning
underpinned by ideas of environmental determinism (or at the very least, possibilism),
which suggests that the management of space has the capacity to affect behaviour.
Planning after all was introduced at the bequest of reformers concerned with the
moral and physical health of the populace, and based on an understanding that the
imposition of spatial order was about much more than aesthetic improvement and civic
beautification: it was also about a biopolitics through which the problems of the gov-
erned were diagnosed and ‘solved’ (Rose, 2001).
Planning is thus an appropriate subject of criminological analysis because of the
complex intersection of planning and policing: in many senses, the powers of planners
over land use represent an extension of police power, being justified in terms of the
health, safety and well-being of citizens. For some planning theorists, this represents
the ‘dark side’ of planning, given it inevitably involves an entanglement of reforming
rationalities with practices of social control (Yiftachel,1998). Hence, and following Gill’s
(2002) argument that policing should be viewed as part of a spectrum of enforcement, we
insist that the policing and planning nexus is not solely a unidirectional expansion of
policing and social control into the civil sphere: given this entanglement, the relationship
of planning and policing is more complex than this, with planning retaining the capacity
to change and challenge social norms at a local level through the exercise of situated
discretion (Valverde, 2011).
In this paper we explore the intersections of planning and policing via the example of
the regulation of sexuality. There are two central rationales for this. The first is that there
is a tendency in much of the literature on the governance and regulation of sexuality to
focus on the role of policing and the deployment of the criminal law as it pertains to
sexual conduct (Colter et al., 1996). In this paper we emphasize that planning can con-
tribute to policing, take on a policing role, and augment policing powers as they pertain
to sexual conduct. Second, by analysing the regulation of brothels in New South Wales
(NSW), Australia, we provide a case study of spaces of sexual conduct that historically
were constructed and regulated as criminal, but have since become lawful. Noting the
different ways that these spaces have been regulated in two different municipalities (the
52 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 46(1)
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