Andriopoulos Themis History , Quartiers. The pattern on which the «shirt» of the modern city is sewn each time is the result of the dialectic between order and disorder, rhythm and arrhythmia, regularity and exception, and most certainly the result of the dialectic between general laws and local protocols of space usage Stavridis, In the city of Athens and more specifically in its centre, there are lively streets, bright commercial avenues, noisy and ceremonial public spaces Pettas, , streets suitable for morning and evening strolls.
However, the spatiotemporal discontinuity of the modern city means that not every road is taken by every person. There are roads where a special and informal exclusion takes place: «strange» roads, more suspect, neglected and dirty, illuminated at night solely by small lamps above the entrance of some houses. In Athens, these are the roads where brothels cluster. Space cannot be defined as an urban feature prior to habitation. It is articulated via a system of discriminations and correlations.
Roads like these, especially during night-time, offer an alternative meaning and a non-mainstream social experience, which cannot be shared by everyone. Is this perhaps a case of an «informal prohibition» of a gendered -and not only- mediation of this experience, due to the multiple risks of these enclaves? It is certainly the case that in brothels streets, the majority cannot join the shadows that wonder day and night looking for «something of their taste» or for brothel-hopping.
Here, local protocols are of limited use. One of the most decisive factors for the clustering of prostitution in specific urban locations, were public health regulations Korasidou, It tried to do so by halting the spread of deadly sexually transmitted diseases, that were obviously connected to prostitution. Prostitution was recognised as a profession by the « Directive on public girls and brothels » of the Ministry of Interior in Korasidou, Permission for running brothels was granted by the police.
Since then, all regulatory directives and all relevant laws aimed to achieve control of prostitution not only in order to reduce sexually transmitted diseases, which was the official argument, but to eliminate the «moral offence» caused by the presence of prostitutes in neighbourhoods and streets, and mainly to control abnormality Korasidou: , Tzanaki: When it legalised prostitution and restricted prostitutes in specific areas and neighbourhoods in order to effectively control them, the Greek State did nothing more than follow the practices of other European countries, such as France.
