Abstract

This research aims to analyze the public governance of prostitution in the Municipality of Venice through the zoning mechanism and investigate all those processes and dynamics that led to the end of the related municipal and public service «City and Prostitution» in 2015. The main focus is on political and social issues that have characterized the implementation and subsequent de-legitimization of this project. A practical experiment that is based on the harm-reduction and the decrease of the urban conflict as the two key points of a new public governance of prostitution. The research illustrates the transformations that have occurred in the twenty years of the project’s life span, which are linked to the national and local emphasis on those repressive and security/safety instances that feature the increasingly appreciated policies of zero tolerance. The results presented are the outcomes of a study conducted in the Municipality of Venice between 2019 and 2020. The article itself is based on the archive material deposited at the Centro Donna Library in Mestre and on qualitative interviews with the various categories of subjects who participated in its creation and implementation: policy makers, law enforcement officials, peer educators, social operators, social workers, councillors of districts, counselling centre/free clinic operators, sex workers and citizens’ committees