Roma Settlement Formation in a Small Romanian Town – Instances of Ghettoization and Reduction to Bare Life (original) (raw)
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Studia UBB Sociologia (Volume 58 (LVIII) 2013, December, Issue 2)
This issue presents the first set of results of the SPAREX research (www.sparex-ro.eu). This was not an inquiry on Roma, or on ghettos, or on urban structures, and nor even on poverty, but it was a multi-disciplinary contextual investigation on the processes of spatialization and racialization of social exclusion as manifestation of advanced urban marginality produced by neoliberal regimes. Viewed together with the preliminary conclusions of another ongoing investigation, "Faces and Causes of the Roma Marginalization in Local Settings. Contextual inquiry to the UNDP/World Bank/EC Regional Roma Survey 2011, focusing"on Hungary, Romania, Serbia (in Romania conducted in 25 localities) – whose some preliminary results are also presented in this issue of Studia UBB Sociologia – SPAREX demonstrates that the formation of “Gypsy ghettos” (as instances of Roma marginalization) happens at the crossroads of multi-level processes that create territorial disparities and uneven developments between and within regions, counties and localities.
2013
Introduction to the SPAREX research The articles of this issue 3 analyse the social and cultural formation of "Gypsy ghettos" in Romania as historically-rooted manifestations of the spatialization and racialization of social exclusion in contemporary Europe. Offering insights into processes of ghettoization, they deconstruct the term "Gypsy ghetto" as a discursive device that homogenizes and racializes the inhabitants of impoverished, ran-down slum areas regardless of their life stories and ethnic self-identifications, and reconstruct its multiple meanings from the points of view of those living inside or outside the physical and social barriers that configure these territories, and as well as from the perspective of broader socioeconomic , policy and political, and cultural processes, which create them. The SPAREX research was not an inquiry on Roma, or on ghettos, or on urban structures, and nor even on poverty, but it was a multidisciplinary contextual investigation on the processes of spatialization and racialization of social exclusion as manifestation of advanced urban marginality produced by neoliberal regimes (Wacquant, 2008). SPAREX is also a promising attempt to think further on various theoretical models on the overlap between class and ethnic divisions in order to understand the lasting social and spatial segregation of the Roma (Ladányi and Szelényi 1998, 2002, 2004), beyond the policy-wise misinterpretable (Stewart, 2002) model of "underclass" formation induced by capitalist structural processes (Wilson, 1970). As such, SPAREX underscores: in conditions of generalized poverty and social and territorial disparities produced by
The option of addressing the formation of marginal spaces in this volume in relation to the racialization of labour goes beyond the initial framing of our research based on a spatial approach, which proposed to analyse the social and cultural formation of “Tsigane ghettos” in Romania in a European context. In its early phase of planning, the paradigm of social exclusion informed our research, while we sought to address processes that lie behind the formation of precarious housing areas, such as spatialization and racialization of poverty. No surprise, these territories were predominantly inhabited by persons and groups (self-)identified as Roma and labelled as țigănie. As we moved forward with deciphering the structural processes behind these situations, it became necessary to expand our explicative frame from the spatial exclusion approach towards a more systemic understanding of ghettoization, which depicts how categories of racialized labourers are produced and confined within the marginalized spaces by the capitalist system. The sites of our empirical research consist of five Romanian cities, all of them administrative centres of their corresponding counties (Călărași, Cluj-Napoca, Miercurea-Ciuc, Ploiești, and Târgu-Mureș), with diverse histories of urbanization and economic development (as they have been affected differently by deindustrialization), but which share similar patterns of pushing towards the peripheries the impoverished, mostly Roma dwellers who cannot afford housing on the private market. The five cities differ in terms of their ethnic balances between Romanians, Hungarians, and Roma, and also in terms of the diversity of local Roma groups differentiated alongside diverse factors (traditional/spoitori, căldărari, or Gábor versus assimilated Roma, or Hungarian versus Romanian Roma and Turkish versus Romanian Roma) and relations among them. These cities have different economic and social histories, current revenues and wealth, and political agency (public authorities, local politics, and civil society). They are not regarded as a “representative sample” of Romanian cities but as loci of a set of representative processes of capitalist development in Romania that led to the precarization of the working class and the formation of marginal, severely impoverished residential spaces, with inadequate infrastructure and unclear legal status. The chapters rely on quantitative and qualitative data about the five selected cities, including the socio-demographic characteristics of populations living in the twenty urban areas that we have visited, as compared to the general populations of the cities. [...] ... we conducted interviews with NGO representatives, politicians, local authorities, officials from territorial agencies of national public institutions, social workers, and so on, and, most importantly, [with the persons living in these areas. Some of our interviewees did not hold positions directly focused on the urban poor or the Roma, but they played important roles in shaping the economic future of the cities. We also undertook content analyses of documents on social and housing policies and, separately, on the media representations of segregated housing areas and their inhabitants. For each of the five cities, our joint research revealed the existence of several deprived and marginalized areas, characterized by different scales of exclusion and poverty, and different degrees of their juxtaposition with ethnic enclaves and racialized stigmatization, respectively, by diverse grades of connectedness to the rest of the cities or even by various forms of resistance towards marginalization. [...] As space is a fundamental dimension of capital and labour accumulation, our methodology was, from the onset, devised to capture the ways in which localities are produced at the intersection of various forces and, simultaneously, to allow us to see different intersections depending on housing, urban development, social policies, and media discourses. However, our volume is not based on a comparative case methodology in the strict sense of the term. We neither intend to draw comparisons and classifications of locations subtracted from a representative sample of marginalized spaces inhabited by racialized labourers, nor to compare the capitalist development of five Romanian cities. Rather, we investigate processes running across the locations of our fieldwork, processes which display similarities and differences, and which carry the localized influence of more general global processes of unequal development, accumulation by dispossession, labour precarization, and spatial segregation based on class position and racial categorization. This does not mean that our five cities were randomly selected. On the contrary, we purposefully selected cities of comparable sizes that function as administrative centres for their corresponding counties from different historical regions of Romania, and which differ along the lines of those historical, political, economic, and social factors that have explanatory power for the emergence of marginalized and racialized areas at urban peripheries. We construct the micro–macro or local–global linkages through social theory, in a way similar with Burawoy’s (2009) approach of the extended case method. The “cases” that we refer to in our chapters are not geographically determined territories but issue-oriented cases, dimensions of analysis which highlight different aspects of the economically productive role of the interconnectedness between spatial marginality and racialization of labour for capitalist development. [...] The theory that transforms our empirical material into “the case of something” is constructed at the intersection of dependency theories, de-proletarization debates, postcolonial and decolonial studies, global anthropologies of labour, theories of postsocialism, and Romani studies. Following Burawoy’s reflexive ethnography, we aim to adapt our chosen theories to explain old issues (such as racialization of labour and spatial marginalization) in new contexts, situated at one of the semi-peripheries of global capitalism marked by the disentanglement of really existing socialism and EU integration. The different chapters of this book complement each other in offering a substantiation of our arguments on different levels that we touch upon. [...] Correspondingly, our book is divided into two larger parts: the first part deals with the creation of racialized labour and spaces of marginality, while the second part investigates how invisibility is produced. In the first part, individual chapters identify and describe various dimensions of the racialization of precarious labour and spatial marginalization. Norbert Petrovici analyses the spatiality of capital accumulation and of racialized labour produced by the capitalist political economy, rendered to reside in segregated and relatively homogeneous parts of the cities in terms of ethnicity, education, and occupational status. Enikő Vincze depicts several types of ghettoization or varying patterns of the formation of housing areas that are carved out physically and symbolically from the rest of the built urban environment and within which material destitution overlaps with ethnic seclusion. Cristina Rat explores the pressures to commodify work embedded in “activation” policies, increasingly salient after the neoliberal turn of welfare states and the deregulation of labour. In the second part, each chapter explores a different dimension on which the invisibilization of racialized labour and spaces of marginality occurs. Anca Simionca reveals the kind of imaginaries guiding the development of the city and the labour market, how these visions largely ignore the spatially and socially marginalized categories, and by that directly contribute to their formation and maintenance. Orsolya Vincze investigates to what degree the ideologies used for justifying inequalities are making appeal to the racialization of marginalized spaces and precarious labour, in other words how the moral problem of inequality is made invisible and “absolved” by portraying the disadvantaged as alien and inferior. Cătălin Berescu critically engages with the ways of making use of the typology of ghettoes by different decision-maker actors in order to naturalize their existence and thus conceal the political agency behind their constitution. Thus, each chapter analyses in detail particular instances and processualities (or “cases”) within the broader dynamics of labour racialization and spatial marginalization, and of making them invisible. We acknowledge that the processes we analyse are not country-specific, and most importantly, not locality-specific, but they are global processes of contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, in the concluding chapter, Giovanni Picker offers a zoom-out from Romania towards other territories across space and time, stretching from the Global North and to the South, and evolving from the colonial history of capitalism towards contemporary neoliberal governance. As such, it highlights similar and divergent patterns of the racialization of labour and the segregation of precarious workers at marginal spaces, and the invisibilization of their lives and labour.
SOCIO-SPATIAL MARGINALITY OF ROMA AS FORM OF INTERSECTIONAL INJUSTICE
This article addresses the spatialization and racialization of social exclusion in the post-socialist Romania incorporated into the neoliberal global regime of the 2000s, by analyzing the social and cultural formation of Pata-Rât from the city of Cluj as a case of advanced marginality (Wacquant, 2008) alongside with references to other instances of Roma marginalization identified by the means of the SPAREX research. Since I am addressing social exclusion as a form of injustice including material deprivation, cultural stigmatization and denial of social participation, the analyzed cases allow me to contribute on theorizing about how – in a post-socialist order, due to processes of neoliberalization and racialization – economic injustices (such as exploitation, marginalization, deprivation) interlink with cultural/recognition injustices like cultural domination, non-recognition, stigmatization and disrespect (Fraser, 2004), and how they are related to the political dimension of justice that is representation (Fraser, 2007), or to the way in which particular categories of people, like marginalized Roma are excluded from decision-making and from the political and social body of the city/country. In line with the general approach of the SPAREX research, my analysis is a contextual inquiry and instead of describing advanced marginality through "Roma characteristics" it addresses processes of ghettoization.
The paper provides a nuanced reading of the ways in which conditions of precarity arising from forced evictions are ‘made’ and ‘unmade’ in their unfolding, offering a way to appreciate their performative politics. Grounded in an activist ethnography of evictions against Roma people in Bucharest, Romania, the work provides a reading of urban precarity as not only an embodied product, but also a producer of the urban political. It advances an innovative methodology to investigate the politics of urban precarity, which focuses around four intersecting processes: the historical pre-makings of precarity; the discursive and material displacement of its in-making; embodied resistance as a form of un-making; and authoritarian responses as its re-making. Through its theoretical and methodological insights, the paper contributes to scholarship interested in a critical understanding of embodiment, politics, and urban precarity beyond the analysed case.
Adverse Incorporation of the Roma and the Formation of Capitalism in Romania
Intersections. EEJSP 1(4): 14-37. DOI: 10.17356/ieejsp.v1i4.88 http://intersections.tk.mta.hu Empirically rooted in the findings of a research conducted between 2012-2014 in localities of Romania under the umbrella of a larger contextual inquiry concerning faces and causes of marginalisation of the Roma, the approach of this article is informed by critical urban theory’s understanding of the political economy of space and development, and their role in the formation of capitalism. My study argues: the way how marginalised Roma are included into the mainstream society while pushed into and kept in its dispossessed spatial and social peripheries, is a manifestation of the adverse incorporation of a precariatised and racialised working class into the capitalist system. In Chapters 2 and 3 the article describes how, on the one hand, the politics of socio-spatial marginalisation and, on the other hand, the politics of entrepreneurial development creates the Roma as adversely incorporated (dispossessed and racialised) subject. Furthermore, Chapters 4 and 5 of the analysis conclude that nowadays capitalism (in Romania) is (also) formed through the politics of socio-spatial exclusion and racialisation of the working class (Roma), and as well as through the politics of entrepreneurial development conceived via neoliberal governance that exclude them from development resources. Therefore the article proposes to use the analysis of the adverse incorporation of the Roma as a critique of capitalism. Keywords: Adverse incorporation, socio-spatial marginalisation, entrepreneurial development, racialisation, formation of capitalism.
STUDIA UBB SOCIOLOGIA , 2023
The emergence of the ghetto as an urban social formation is regularly conveyed as a specific neoliberal capitalist product. Based on interviews with inhabitants and policymakers and archival data covering more than two decades, this article brings another dimension to the debates on ghetto formation. It traces the urban spatial politics of managing and containing Roma communities in the Romanian NW city of Baia Mare from the late 1970s until 1989. To this aim, it uncovers the debates and decisions regarding the last stages of socialist urban systematization focused on Hatvan, a Roma neighbourhood, and the subsequent relocation projects. Initially, the socialist administration aimed to assimilate the Roma population into the working class. However, a peculiar segregationist policy followed the failed experiment of expropriation and rehousing into low-quality apartments. In the early 1980s, authorities relocated most Roma in the newly built Vasile Alecsandri district to four new specifically designed apartment buildings nearby. The four blocks on Arieșului Street lacked central heating to prevent the accumulation of arrears-a materialization of the decade-long austerity policies. Other urban Roma were funnelled there as well, thus revealing the racialization policies assembled at the local level. Just before 1990, Arieșului was abandoned, and many people decided to relocate in what became Craica, a ghetto that is still in existence today.
Spatial consequences of urban policies forming a Roma ghetto
socio.hu, 2016
The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in a neighborhood situated at the edge of a small town inhabited by the local poor for decades. The neighbourhood that was once connected to the town through a set of institutions has become isolated over the years as personal relationships and institutions have ceased. I intend to present the institutional changes and social processes that transformed a socially and ethnically heterogeneous neighbourhood into a stigmatized ghetto. In this process, the role of different organizations that structure the life of the urban poor, and the governance structures in which those organizations are embedded are fundamental. Overall, the penalization of poverty and criminalization of ethnicity characterize the mechanisms that maintain invisibility. These are as follows: (1) limiting their right to access certain institutions through the creation of a second set of institutions, particularly in education; (2) operating a public work scheme along ethnic divisions; and (3) surveillance of space used by the local Roma minority government to organize, monitor and regulate this neighbourhood.
Walls may be tangible or intangible. They may be made of brick, concrete, or just a perceived line. Those segregating Roma ethnic minority in Central and Eastern European countries are increasingly solid and palpable. They are a visible illustration of much deeper and ongoing social processes in the cities and villages, where construction of a brick or concrete wall is just the peak of the iceberg. The question arises: What lies beneath the surface? The past 20 years have seen transformation, raising social inequalities, and growing unemployment, accompanied recently by austerity measures to keep our (?) new system running. As usual, the deteriorating macro level economic/social situation is reflected by impacts at the local level. Based on the examples of the walls that were recently constructed, we analyze and discuss the economic and social processes leading to their construction. Reflecting on the works of Loïc Wacquant (and his constituent elements of ghetto), we analyze the walls as yet another step in gradual exclusion. The economic and social transformation has had profound impacts on the local economies of cities and villages. We discuss how the Roma have gradually ceased to be of economic value to the dominant group and how these trends have led to their further segregation and encapsulation.