The local regulation of prostitution in Germany is a contested area of urban politics. In this issue area, morality claims intersect with the material interests of home- and landowners and the security demands of ‘ordinary’ citizens. The Prostitution Law of 2001 has liberalized the legal framework: the legislation ‘normalized’ sex work, triggering the re-definition of urban strategies to regulate prostitution. This article analyses the conflict dynamics and the framing of conflicts over regulations in four German cities. It identifies the main actors, coalition-building processes and the framing of conflicts, and links these elements to the resulting policies. With regard to theory, it explores the relevance of classical explanatory approaches to local governance such as party politics, urban growth coalitions, political culture and bureaucratic politics to the value-laden issue of prostitution. It thereby contributes to the growing academic interest in the nature of morality policies and the question of the specific conditions under which prostitution is framed as a moral issue or as a ‘normal’ subject within urban politics.

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有争议的边界：德国城市卖淫的道德化和政治化

德国对卖淫的地方监管是城市政治的一个有争议的领域。在这个问题领域，道德要求与家庭和土地所有者的物质利益以及“普通”公民的安全需求相交。2001 年的卖淫法放宽了法律框架：立法“规范化”了性工作，引发了对城市卖淫管制策略的重新定义。本文分析了德国四个城市的冲突动态和法规冲突的框架。它确定了主要参与者、联盟建设过程和冲突的框架，并将这些要素与由此产生的政策联系起来。在理论方面，它探讨了经典解释方法与地方治理的相关性，例如政党政治、城市增长联盟、政治文化和官僚政治对卖淫的价值负载问题的影响。因此，它有助于学术界对道德政策的性质以及在特定条件下将卖淫作为道德问题或城市政治中的“正常”主题的问题的兴趣日益浓厚。