The genesis of a ‘Romanian Roma Issue’ in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona: urban public spaces, neighbourhood conflicts and local politics (original) (raw)
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The'Roma Problem'in the EU: Nomadism,(in) visible architectures and violence
Borderlands, 2010
France, this article seeks to better understand their implications by looking at: a) the relationship between the Roma's sedentary vs. nomadic lifestyle; b) the Roma's use of space to secure both visibility and invisibility; and c) the state's problematic use of legal violence in order to control and police the Roma. The article strongly suggests that the Roma 'space problem' cannot be solved by attempts to either construct (settlement) or constrict (expulsion) Roma spaces by an outside authority, but rather through an acceptance of Roma's temporary presence-even if it involves a long-term temporality-in camps 'abroad' and continued support for Roma communities 'at home'. borderlands 9:2 2 but also continued policies of discrimination throughout the EU, are in fact targeting the Roma's right to settle, anywhere. If Romanians and Bulgarians were glad to see the Roma move abroad, their host countries are equally anxious to see them go 'home'.
Intersections, 2016
Based on findings from a comparative qualitative contextual inquiry carried out between 2012 and 2014, the article analyses the formation of two Roma settlements in the larger context of a small sized town in Romania. The article aims at understanding the constitution of these areas as reflected through people's narratives, while also accounting for the influence of economic and political developments on where and how they were and are placed on the social and geographic map of the city. Altogether, the article illustrates the similarities and differences between how the two settlements were founded under different political regimes and how are they nowadays subjected to ghettoization and reduction to bare life, understood as processes characteristic for contemporary global capitalism. At the same time, the analysis highlights the limits of the approaches informed by these conceptual frames and ends up by pinpointing the need to complete them with a perspective that links the politics of spatial marginalization to the understanding of how the latter is part of a political economy that exploits the spatially marginalized.
Roma within Obstructing and Transformative Spaces
Intersections
The aim of our article is to inquire into the interconnectedness of local social context, mobility processes and social transformations. We argue that migratory patterns of the local Roma population in ethnically mixed communities are shaped by the degree and modes of maintenance of social distance between the Roma and local majority. While social distance can shape the ways migrant networks develop, it also influences the way remittances are invested at home. The analysis focuses on the comparison of two rural communities from Transylvania where we carried out community studies and a household survey which also included attitude questions related to ethnic groups. Our study revealed that the most visible aspect of the local separation is the housing segregation. While this is present in both cases, in one of the villages Roma use their upward mobility to challenge social segregation and to reduce physical distance (i.e. moving inside the village). Here in spite of physical closenes...
Evictions and Voluntary Returns in Barcelona and Bucharest: Practices of Metropolitan Governance
This article is about techniques of exclusion by local governments against Romani people. Tackling the case of people of Romani ethnicity in Barcelona and Bucharest, I explore evictions and voluntary return as practices of segregation within and exclusion from the city. I reflect on the condition of being or becoming Roma in the process of spatial cleansing by interrogating the construction of Roma as an ethnicized mobile minority, a category that is submitted to social and territorial exclusion. Under the pretext of defending the social security and the urban development of cities, the local authorities produce moral panic around the presence of Roma. Portraying them first as vulnerable, then as having a mobile lifestyle , the authorities justify a range of interventions that eventually push out the Roma habitants and subsequently deny them the right to the city.
'Roma' migration in the EU: the case of Spain between 'new' and 'old' minorities
Migration Letters, 2016
The 2004 and 2007 EU Eastern enlargements facilitated the mobility of citizens from CEE countries, including European citizens of Roma ethnicity, which in turn contributed to the Europeanization of the 'Roma issue'. This article examines the politics of Roma ethnicity by giving a concise, yet we hope comprehensive, overview of how recent Roma migrations from EU Member States (particularly from Romania) to Spain can be understood and analysed in relation to both pre-existing policies for the Spanish Gitano communities and to wider European dynamics and structures.
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.
Of Other Spaces in Berlin: On Urban Transformation and Romanian Roma
Cities have been shaped throughout the history by policies and behaviours that have developed from the relation with the other: the migrant, the beggar, the poor, the one different through skin colour, language, religious beliefs or everyday practices. This article will investigate in what way urban spatial transformation is related to the presence of the other. It advances the hypothesis that the other spaces (heterotopias in the line of definition that Foucault established in 1967, and which De Cauter and Dehaene have sharpened in 2008) have an established even historical function in the city which is that of mediating habitual conflicts between oikos – the private and agora – the public. But when those with ambiguous status, the other others – such as the Romanian Roma migrating to Berlin – use them for the negotiation of their condition and claims, these urban sites cave in under the complexity of the contradictions. We are witnessing the emergence of new types of spaces that function as loopholes, fragmented borders, exposed enclosures. Apart from posing a serious intellectual and functional challenge to both planners and users of the city, these spaces are an important indicator: they are the urban spatial manifestation of various scales of socio-political and economical conflicts. They can become new instruments to enquire and articulate knowledge about the city, while their ambiguous and conflictual nature could be explored for potential urban renewal.
Journal of Gypsy Studies, 2021
The Roma issue is a complex, multifaced phenomenon. Existing research on Roma communities in Italy has examined the ways in which recent political debate and policy initiatives have succeeded in reframing the Roma issue exclusively in terms of emergency and public security (Maneri 2018, Piasere 2015, Solimene 2014, Tosi Cambini 2012). Few empirical studies, however, have analysed how the social construction of the Gypsy Problem in Italy is reflected in everyday life. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Cagliari from 2010 until today, this article analyses and discusses how a Xoraxané Romá community’s everyday life changed after the eviction from the nomad camp where they had lived for 30 years. Focusing on cultural processes, three main issues are explored: the “sense of place” and the spatially representation of their identity in the nomad c& the effects of housing policies promoted in Cagliari; the relation between antigypsism and Romá mobility.
'It's the best place for them': normalising Roma segregation in Madrid
I contribute to the debate about the persistence of Roma marginalisation in contemporary Europe by analysing the conflict that took place in 2008 in Madrid over the segregation of Gitano (Spanish Roma) children in state schools. Tracing the changing place of Gitanos in the city since the early 1980s, I demonstrate how current practices of educational segregation build on long-term processes of Gitano control and isolation in housing policy and its implementation. I reconstruct the layering of complementary actions and discourses of exclusion which together make the isolation of Gitano children appear commonsensical and necessary. I n t r o d u c t i o n We got word that we had to take our children out of their school so that other children could go there. We said that all the children should study together because the school had space enough for all. But we were ignorant. We didn't real-ise that the Education Department and the other parents would never even imagine putting all the children together in the same school. Because they fear that their children will get stained by the attitude of ours. (Gitana mother, 2010)
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.