Challenger Cities EP67: Watching a World From Behind the Window with Füsun Aydın

Füsun Aydın has spent twelve years reading people from a window in Amsterdam. Cities would be better places if the people planning them had half her instinct.

Füsun is Turkish-born, a trans woman, a former sex worker, and now the madam of a bordello in Amsterdam's red light district. She came to the Netherlands as an asylum seeker at nineteen, having grown up in Istanbul where trans women have no legal discrimination protections and sex work on the street is both common and dangerous. The move wasn't idealism — it was survival arithmetic. In four years in Istanbul she knew fifteen women who were killed. In twelve years in Amsterdam, one. That is what regulation does.

In this conversation we get into what it actually means to work behind a window in a residential neighbourhood — who walks past, how you read them, what the difference is between a local and a tourist, and what the red light district looks like from the inside at ten on a Monday morning versus nine on a Friday night. We talk about sex work as informal social infrastructure, the overlap between care work and sex work, and why the women Füsun has worked with who came from healthcare backgrounds didn't leave because the instinct to care disappeared — they left because the pay wasn't enough. And we get into the fight that matters most to her right now: Amsterdam's proposal to relocate the red light district, what it would actually mean for safety, and what it reveals about who gets listened to when cities make decisions about the places that matter most to the people who live in them.

Füsun also writes about her life and work on Substack - https://substack.com/@fusunaydin, where she brings the same directness and warmth to the page that she brings to this conversation.