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 ...