Racial Cities: Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe 9780367331528, 9781138808782

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Series Information......Page 3
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Dedication......Page 6
Table of Contents......Page 8
List of illustrations......Page 10
Foreword......Page 11
Notes......Page 13
Acknowledgments......Page 14
Introduction: Inside segregation......Page 18
Segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” (GUAs)......Page 19
Segregation as a dynamic process......Page 22
Race, colonialism and (European) cities......Page 24
Race, neoliberalism and urban governance......Page 30
Structure of the research and the book......Page 32
Note on names......Page 35
Notes......Page 36
Chapter 1 Nodes......Page 37
Colony: segregation rationales......Page 39
Rabat, 1913–1930......Page 41
New Delhi, 1911–1931......Page 43
Addis Ababa, 1936–1941......Page 44
Metropole: from sedentarization to segregation......Page 46
Late nineteenth century......Page 47
From the early twentieth century to 1945......Page 50
1945–1970s......Page 53
The 1970s and onward......Page 57
Conclusion: toward an ethnography of nodes......Page 60
Notes......Page 62
Chapter 2 Displacement......Page 65
Displacing the hygiene threat......Page 66
The making of an urban condom......Page 68
Racist order, racial icons......Page 73
Conclusion: evicted from diversity......Page 80
Notes......Page 83
Chapter 3 Omission......Page 85
Governing an “ethnic bomb”......Page 87
“Racism is not the problem”......Page 92
Conclusion: racism and neoliberal doxa......Page 98
Notes......Page 100
Chapter 4 Containment......Page 101
Colonial genesis......Page 103
Containing the outlandish......Page 104
Florence......Page 109
Montreuil......Page 113
Conclusion: a spatio-racial political technology......Page 118
Notes......Page 120
Chapter 5 Cohesion......Page 124
Background......Page 125
Segregating cohesion......Page 130
Conclusion: racially structured cohesion......Page 134
Notes......Page 138
Chapter 6 Correspondences......Page 141
Assembling nodes......Page 143
Colonial past, neoliberal present: depoliticization and racelessness......Page 151
Conclusion: defining racial cities......Page 156
Notes......Page 158
Chapter 7 Conclusion: Beyond segregation?......Page 159
For the European city yet to come......Page 163
Urban research and practice......Page 166
Archives......Page 170
Notes......Page 172
References......Page 173
Index......Page 187

Citation preview

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Racial Cities

Going beyond race-blind approaches to spatial segregation in Europe, Racial Cities argues that race is the logic through which stigmatized and segregated “Gypsy urban areas” have emerged and persisted after World War II. Building on nearly a decade of ethnographic and historical research in Romania, Italy, France and the UK, Giovanni Picker casts a series of case studies into the historical framework of circulations and borrowings between colony and metropole since the late nineteenth century. By focusing on socio-economic transformations and social dynamics in contemporary Cluj-Napoca, Pescara, Montreuil, Florence and Salford, Picker detects four local segregating mechanisms, and comparatively investigates resemblances between each of them and segregation in French Rabat, Italian Addis Ababa, and British New Delhi. These multiple global associations across space and time serve as an empirical basis for establishing a solid bridge between race critical theories and urban studies. Racial Cities is the first comprehensive analysis of the segregation of Romani people in Europe, providing a fine-tuned and in-depth explanation of this phenomenon. While inequalities increase globally and poverty is ever more concentrated, this book is a key contribution to debates and actions addressing social marginality, inequalities, racist exclusions, and governance. Thanks to its dense yet thoroughly accessible narration, the book will appeal to scholars, undergraduate and postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and equally to activists and policy makers, who are interested in areas including: Race and Racism, Urban Studies, Governance, Inequalities, Colonialism and Postcolonialism, and European Studies. Giovanni Picker is a Marie-​Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham School of Social Policy, UK.

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Routledge Advances in Sociology

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/​series/​SE0511 204 The Third Digital Divide A Weberian Approach to Digital Inequalities Massimo Ragnedda 205 Alevis in Europe Voices of Migration, Culture and Identity Edited by Tözün Issa 206 On the Frontlines of the Welfare State Barry Goetz 207 Work-​Family Dynamics Competing Logics of Regulation, Economy and Morals Edited by Berit Brandth, Sigtona Halrynjo and Elin Kvande 208 Class in the New Millennium Structure, Homologies and Experience in Contemporary Britain Will Atkinson 209 Racial Cities Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe Giovanni Picker 210 Bourdieusian Prospects Edited by Lisa Adkins, Caragh Brosnan and Steven Threadgold 211 Alienation and Affect Warren D. TenHouten

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Racial Cities

Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe

Giovanni Picker

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First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Giovanni Picker The right of Giovanni Picker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing i​n ​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​80878-​2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​75046-​0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Out of House Publishing Cover photo: “Doi Moldoveni” neighbourhood, Călărași, Romania. Photo by Catalin Berescu

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To Arn

To Piero

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Contents

List of illustrations Foreword by Éric Fassin Acknowledgments

ix x xiii



Introduction: Inside segregation Segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” (GUAs)  2 Segregation as a dynamic process  5 Race, colonialism and (European) cities  7 Race, neoliberalism and urban governance  13 Structure of the research and the book  15 Note on names  18

1

1

Nodes Colony: segregation rationales  22 Metropole: from sedentarization to segregation  29 Conclusion: toward an ethnography of nodes  43

20

2

Displacement Displacing the hygiene threat  49 The making of an urban condom  51 Racist order, racial icons  56 Conclusion: evicted from diversity  63

48

3

Omission Governing an “ethnic bomb”  70 “Racism is not the problem”  75 Conclusion: racism and neoliberal doxa  81

68

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viii Contents

4

Containment Colonial genesis  86 Containing the outlandish  87 Conclusion: a spatio-​racial political technology  101

84

5

Cohesion Background  108 Segregating cohesion  113 Conclusion: racially structured cohesion  117

107

6

Correspondences Assembling nodes  126 Colonial past, neoliberal present: depoliticization and racelessness  134 Conclusion: defining racial cities  139

124

7

Conclusion: Beyond segregation? For the European city yet to come  146 Urban research and practice  149 Archives  153

142

References Index

156 170

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List of illustrations

Figures 1.1 Maria and her adoptive parents 2.1 The actual construction of Colonia noua Pata Rât 2.2 The Colonia noua (small circle) and the landfill (big circle)

12 53 54

Tables 1.1 Colonial ideologies and segregation rationales 6.1 Colonial ideologies, segregation rationales and segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas”

29 133

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Foreword

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Eric Fassin1

In Europe, we are usually told that race belongs to the past. It supposedly disappeared after World War II, along with Nazism. This narrative is meant to suggest that race has no place in our democratic societies: we do not do race! Never mind Césaire’s scathing accusation, in the 1950 Discourse on Colonialism, that Hitler only “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa,” and never mind that these did not end in 1945 either. It is true that in postcolonial Europe, biology is not the dominant discourse any longer, although it is also true that culture may play a similar role. Of course, it is hard not to acknowledge the reality of everyday racism, and the rise of political xenophobia that feeds it: few would dare to argue today, as was common a few decades ago, that such bigotry is alien to our culture, as if the United States had a monopoly on the “Negro problem.” But many, in France and elsewhere, still refuse to use the concept of race for fear that this might reinforce racist discourse. Academic color-​blindness thus makes it very difficult to analyse the politics of race in Europe today. At the same time, the persistence of traditional anti-Gypsy feelings and the proliferation of a new political Romaphobia also make it well-​nigh impossible not to discuss race. Not only does this concern specific European countries; it has also become an issue for the European Union as such, at least since Romania and Bulgaria became members in 2007. Giovanni Picker’s important book on “racial cities” thus provides valuable tools for making sense of race in Europe today, starting from the political treatment of the Roma. However, this is not the study of a racial (or even racialized) group; nor is it really about racism in the usual sense of the term (bigotry). The argument focuses on race proper. These distinctions are important. The first one shifts the problem from the Romani people to what I prefer to call “the Roma question” –​which ensures that the academic analysis of race does not replicate the political gesture that racializes these populations. The second one implies that the focus is not on immemorial social prejudices but on current political practices –​racial policies and policing targeting the Roma –​understood in historical terms. This double move is a departure from approaches in terms

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Foreword xi

of “culture” (of the Roma on the one hand, of racists on the other): Picker’s object is political in a Foucauldian sense. Indeed, while empirically informed, Racial Cities is not founded on an empiricist approach to the “Roma question.” It relies on a twofold theoretical and methodological elaboration that has to do both with time and space. While the spatial dimension is apparent in the subtitle (“segregation in urban Europe”), the temporal one is developed in the first chapter of the book. “Gypsy urban areas” (GUA) are not only geographical, but also historical nodes. Analyzing Rabat under French domination, New Delhi at the time of the British Empire, and Addis Ababa subjected to Italian rule helps Picker set the stage for his study of the mechanics of race in urban settings that have equally defined the Gypsies from the end of the nineteenth century to this day. This chronological construct makes it possible to define or redefine racial segregation beyond the specificities of the “Roma question.” This book thus contributes to discussions about the multiple connections between colony and metropole and their legacies in a postcolonial world by opening new ground. The argument does not only concern today’s “non-​White” descendants of the colonized “natives” of yesterday; it actually addresses race in general –​not a race in particular: in a counterintuitive demonstration, the Roma are thus inscribed in a postcolonial logic. The spatial dimension of Picker’s approach is equally innovative. On the one hand, segregation is local (by definition) –​hence the various case studies conducted in Cluj, Romania, Pescara and Florence, Italy, Montreuil, France, and Salford in the UK. On the other hand, race operates at the European level –​ hence the research approach that emphasizes, along with specificities of the various local situations, the common logic underlying them. This has to do with a political paradox that we formulated in a collective book on the “Roma question”:2 race policies are municipal in the sense that they are conducted by local officials, whether elected or not (as representatives of the State). But this corresponds to a “municipalization” of the politics of race, that is, a delegation by the State of racial enforcement to local authorities –​at the same time as the European Union delegates race work to European States. This is why the multiple local stories all converge to tell a much broader story –​both at the national and at the European level. Segregation signifies race. In France, for example, Manuel Valls, Minister of the Interior after the 2012 election, explained his continuation of the persecution of the Roma by President François Hollande’s predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy in reference to their supposed cultural difference: according to him, they could not or would not integrate in French society. The Roma “camps” (in fact, slums) thus have to be expelled, which precludes any chance of integration, and only serves to validate culturalist clichés about their allegedly nomadic culture, which in turn justifies the persecution. However, once he became Prime Minister, the promoter of this vicious circle did not hesitate to denounce a French “apartheid” –​thus simultaneously acknowledging and

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xii Foreword

denying the role of the State, as if racial segregation were merely a social reality, not a political regime. On the contrary, what Picker’s book offers is an inventory of the technologies of race in four chapters devoted to displacement, omission, containment and cohesion. Indeed, race is about space. Two questions remain: why the Roma, and why today? While postcolonial race is primarily premised on the (so-​called) “immigration problem” (or today’s “refugee crisis”), and at a time when Islamophobia racializes religion, how come the Romani people, who are migrants from within, are still needed? One answer has to do with the neoliberal definition of the European Union that almost reached constitutional status in 2005. In this brave new world defined by value, or better, an increase in one’s own value that can be called (to borrow from philosopher Michel Feher3) “self-​appreciation,” the Roma embody the degree zero of human capital. The worthlessness they symbolize is thus the signifier of our own worth: their racialization is the condition as well as the mirror of our whiteness. This is their function in the European apparatus (dispositif ) of race: unlike refugees, they are not foreign to Europe, nor even supposed to be “of foreign origin” (like the Islamic religion or the children of migrants). The Romani people belong in the European Union –​ and at the same time, they (and we) are constantly reminded that they have no place in that space. Is not this contradictory logic the very definition of race?

Notes 1 Professor of Sociology, Department of Political Science and Department of Gender Studies, Paris-​8 University (Vincennes –​Saint-​Denis). Among his publications: co-​ author of Roms & riverains. Une politique municipale de la race (La Fabrique, Paris, 2014), and co-​editor of De la question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française (La Découverte, Paris, 2006). 2 Éric Fassin et al., Roms & riverains. Une politique municipale de la race (La Fabrique, Paris, 2014). 3 Michel Feher, “Self-​Appreciation, or: the Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture, 21:1, 2009 (21–​41).

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Acknowledgments

Over the years, while the content of this book was slowly taking shape, I have become increasingly grateful to the people with whom I have had the chance to discuss my work. Each for its own reasons, the moments and discussions we have shared have converged into these pages, which I hope will generate further discussions. With their generosity, time and knowledge the people I have been meeting during my fieldwork have primarily made this book possible –​it would take too much space to name each of them here, but my thankfulness is full and sincere. I was lucky enough to work on the first part of this research under the guidance of Enzo Mingione, whose continuous support and feedback have been indispensable. Tanja Sekulić has also been so supportive that I cannot thank her enough for all the strength and patience she has taught me. Jon Fox has provided me with clear feedback as well as the most unwavering encouragement, and Michael Stewart has been a thought-​provoking guide, combining smart criticism and caring mentorship. I hope to become as supportive and thought provoking with my students and colleagues, as my mentors have been with me –​ wish me luck. My highly itinerant life over the last few years has allowed me to meet several people to whom I owe my gratitude. Giovanna Zincone, Pietro Cingolani, Ferruccio Pastore and the whole FIERI crew in Turin generously engaged in conversations which helped me clarify many of my points. With their caring support and intellectual sharpness, Remus Gabriel Anghel and László Fosztó made my 2011 stay at ISPMN in Cluj an enjoyable and productive time, as did Zsuzsa Plainer and Árpád Czirják with their friendship and advice. My participation in the SPAREX project has strengthened my knowledge and awareness of Romanian contexts: my sincere gratitude to Eniko Vincze for giving me this opportunity and for her continuous encouragement. At the Higher School of Economics in Moscow I had the privilege to work closely with a group of exceptionally engaged social scientists including John Round, Elena Iarskaya-​Smirnova, Lili di Puppo, Sandy Ross and Chris Swader. A special

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xiv Acknowledgments

acknowledgment goes to Kwame Nimako, Stephen Small and the whole faculty of the Summer School on Black Europe for leading me to critically (un) learn some of the most important assumptions and thoughts about race and racism in Europe. I also am indebted to David Theo Goldberg for engaging in a very precious conversation, and for directing me toward very relevant sources. My classmates’ arguments and points have also been very important, and for this I want to thank in particular Camilla Hawthorne, Sam Tecle and Patricia Schor. The Central European University (CEU) has been my main intellectual home, and many people I met there have been inspiring me in view of this book. I am particularly indebted to Judit Bodnár, who has for several years encouraged me to continue my work, and in January 2014 invited me to present part of it in a public lecture, which directly led to Chapter 4. Éva Fodor and my other colleagues at the CEU Institute of Advanced Study invited me to reformulate my questions during a presentation entitled “Racial cities,” and generously provided the conditions for discussing my topic in a workshop with Éric Fassin. I want to thank in particular Fabio Giomi and Jelena Petrović for their kind support and clear feedback on some of my points. Since I have spent several years at CEU, it would be hard now to include everyone, but my gratitude goes particularly to Michael Miller, Prem Kumar Rajaram, John Clarke, András Kovács, Julia Szalai, Márton Rövid, Zsuzsa Vidra, Andrea Kirchknopf, Vlad Naumescu, Catalina Tesar, Marcelo Frediani, Florencia Ferrari, Cecilia Kovai, Kata Klara Horvath, Gergő Pulay, Petre Matei, Elisabeth Tauber, Paloma Gay y Blasco, Timea Junghaus, Huub Van Baar, Gerhard Baumgartner, Iulius Rostas and Marek Szilvasi. Various discussions over the last couple of years proved precious. I am particularly grateful to Michael Keith who invited me to present part of my book-​in-​progress at the COMPAS seminar series in Oxford, listened to me carefully and gave me thoughtful suggestions on the book project. Multiple conversations with Jan Grill have been and continue to be a smart and challenging amusement, from which I draw precious inspiration. Silvia Pasquetti’s generous proximity to my work and life has been a constant and powerful source of strength and lucidity, which further convinced me of the importance of collegiality –​grazie. Sonia Arbaci generously listened to me and gave me important advice, as did David Weberman. Yuri Kazepov encouraged me to engage more fully in the academic world of Urban Studies, and Nando Sigona caringly pushed me toward more sharpness in my reasoning. Gabrielle Varro, my cousin, friend and colleague, has been a close guide over these years, with her caring and critical eye which makes me see things from insightful perspectives. I also want to thank Tomotsune Tsutomu for inviting me to deliver a public lecture entitled “Racial Cities” at the Tokyo University of Foreign Affairs, and for introducing me to Japanese academia.

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Acknowledgments xv

I have been writing this book while researching and teaching at the European University Viadrina; there, I was lucky enough to share my time, ideas and work with such brilliant anthropologists as Michał Buchowski, Paweł Lewicki, Anika Keinz and Werner Schiffauer to whom I extend my sincere gratitude for their support and feedback. At Viadrina, Geny Piotti kindly made my adventures with paperwork much easier, and my students have been a precious source of inspiration and strength. I also want to thank Margaret Greenfields, Spyros Themelis, Silvia Pasquetti, Jan Grill, Lili di Puppo, Jon Fox, David Weberman, Irit Katz, Polly Gamon, Charles Gallagher and Will Guy for reading parts of the manuscript and giving me precious and timely feedback. While I am the only one responsible for my use of their feedback, my gratitude is full and sincere. Special thanks to Catalin Berescu for generously letting me chose among his many pictures – the cover photo is one of them. I do not know how many authors are as fortunate as I, to have worked with such remarkable editors as Elena Chiu and Emily Briggs, whose determination at Routledge has made this book much more solid and coherent than the original manuscript. Special thanks also to Emma August Welter for her caring reading. Both my Milan-​based and my St Petersburg-​based families have been understanding and supportive through all that my work has implied, including continuous displacement –​ thank you. Above all, I want to thank Daria Ukhova for her daily encouraging support and for critically going through parts of the manuscripts: without her cleverness and love I would have not been able to write this book. This book is dedicated to the memory of Arnold Ross and Piero Colacicchi, two friends who –​for not dissimilar reasons –​might have found the idea of racial cities spot on, but would have also criticized it as wisely, gently and straightforwardly as they used to do with other parts of my work. I miss them. Only very few Romani people appear in this long list of acknowledgments. One reason for this is the radical underrepresentation of Romanies in academia across the globe; another reason is that I, a non-​Romani, middle-​class man, have not sought their advice and feedback enough. I hope these two limitations will serve to better think through not only the contents of this book, but also knowledge production in general, as both a specific power system and the condition for questioning that system. Parts of this book have appeared elsewhere in varied forms. Chapter 2 was originally published in Civilisations. Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines, 62 (1): 51–​70, Fall 2013, under the title “Ţiganu-​i ţigan: Verbal Icons and Urban Marginality in a Post-​Socialist European City.” I wish to thank the journal editors for permission to reprint the article. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in a contribution to European Urban and Regional Studies, and portions of Chapter 4 in Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

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Introduction

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Inside segregation

[I]‌n order to understand the specificity of the national formation, we have to look outside it. (Catherine Hall 2002, 9)

December 17, 2010 is a day to be remembered. In an open public space of Tunis, Algeria, twenty-​six-​year-​old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, at the time unemployed, set himself on fire; he would die two weeks later. His gesture, in protest against the humiliations he had been suffering from the state, not least the confiscation of his wares, inspired revolts across much of the Arab world, leading to social changes with effects that continue to resonate. In what was soon to be called the “Arab Spring,” several cities across North Africa and the Middle East became the material and spatial hubs of concerns and social mobilizations against political and economic measures, which were predicated upon dominant ideologies of economic growth and social order. December 17, 2010 is thus remembered globally as the beginning of trans­ nationally interconnected urban revolts against equally interconnected ideologies of governance. About 2,000 kilometers northeast of Tunis, in the city of Cluj-​Napoca, Romania, December 17, 2010 is remembered for a partially similar reason. At 6 a.m. local time, municipal police officers arrived en masse in a street in the city center. Before even turning their car engines off, they had handed in a relocation notice to fifty-​six families, the vast majority of whom self-​identified as Roma. The eviction took about an hour –​just enough time to load the families onto municipal buses and take them about six kilometers away to Pata Rât, an area right next to the regional landfill. With temperatures well close to zero, people were relocated in prefabricated houses with no heating, no hot water and an average of four square meters per person. As a result, many adults lost their jobs, several children were forced to drop out of school, and health conditions among the group worsened considerably. The eviction was the result of dominant ideologies of governance and economic growth intersecting with local discourses of hygiene and civility. December 17, 2010

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2  Introduction: Inside segregation

appears as a transnational landmark disclosing local articulations of increasingly powerful global governance ideologies. In considering these interconnected global processes of political and economic restructuring, this book examines the genesis and persistence of the segregation of Romani people in contemporary Europe. The phenomenon has so far eschewed systematic and comprehensive analyses, partially due to its high variety and contextual variability within contemporary accelerated processes of urban restructuring and the concomitant spatial distribution of resources. In such a relative analytical vacuum, media chronicles have occupied the available discursive space of what is often named “Roma segregation,” providing chronicles yet not explanations. This book sets out to critically intervene in this discursive space by uncovering typically unnoticed mechanisms and dynamics of segregation through a field-​based research in and around a number of segregated areas. In the process, I will show that my concern is not only on the conditions of spatial segregation as such, but primarily on its multifarious genesis and constant making, both historically and geographically. Conceptually, the book title takes its clue from Goldberg’s (2002) The Racial State, where the author clarifies that “[T]‌here is no singular totalized phenomenon we can name the racial state; more precisely, there are racial states […].”1

Segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” (GUAs) Fakulteta in Sofia; Cañeda Real and Gallinero in Madrid; Luník IX in Košice; La Barbuta and Casilino 900 in Rome; Jozsefvaros in Budapest; Saint-​Jacques in Perpignan; and Ferentari in Bucharest –​these are just some of the most segregated and stigmatized urban areas of twenty-​first-​century Europe. Mainstream media and political elites largely associate these areas with danger, urban decay, social deviance and –​invariably –​“Gypsies.” At times existing as entire neighborhoods, but elsewhere as blocks of flats, improvised settlements, or camps, segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” (GUAs) are either partially or entirely populated by Romani households. They are regularly marked by higher rates of unemployment than the rest of the city, few or no public services, dilapidated housing, poor sanitary infrastructures and harsh stigmatization. All these elements signal the presence of a significant and rather consistent urban phenomenon across European national borders (and beyond). What are the distinctive features of this social phenomenon, how and when did it emerge, and under what conditions does it persist? Racial Cities answers these questions, and argues that the fundamental principle behind the genesis and persistence of GUAs is race, in its tight connections to contemporary urban processes of economic restructuring and governance. Being present all across the world without a designated territory, Romani people in Europe live mostly in Central and Eastern regions. Amounting to

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Introduction: Inside segregation  3

about twelve million across the whole continent, they are over seven times more likely than the European average to live in segregated households –​ 38 percent versus 5 percent, and 20 percent of them live in slums or ruined houses (FRA 2011); the number of those living in households with income below the poverty line has reached a striking 90 percent (FRA and UNDP 2012), approximately six times the European average (Inequality Watch 2012); neighborhood effect is prevalent –​regardless of self-identification, people living in GUAs have on average 30 percent lower employment rates than those living outside it; and yet, Romani people living in GUAs have 50 percent lower employment rates than non-​Romani living in the same GUA (FRA 2011, 27). These data are accompanied by numerous polls and reports accounting for the fact that Romani people are one of the least wanted and most stigmatized population in Europe. Research on the spatial arrangements, fragmentation and exclusion of Romani collectives has primarily focused on either Eastern or Western Europe.2 The only work connecting both regions is Bancroft’s (2005) study of British and Czech contexts, which draws historical and theoretical attention to the deep-​rooted power of race in establishing spatial hierarchies in which “Roma and Gypsy-​Travellers” are typically trapped in the lowest ranks. While convincingly tracing race and racial thinking back to the Enlightenment, however, the discussion ignores the colonial experiments of race–space intersections as among the first modern regulatory mechanisms of territorial rule. In adopting “a European perspective” (2005, 6), the work sides with standard Eurocentrism and overlooks colonial capitalist expansion as the cradle of race and racism; as a consequence, the wider context of contemporary political economy and class formation as constitutive of processes of racialization is nowhere to be found, in a study otherwise abundant in empirical data. Hence, Bancroft’s (2005) work, while empirically comprehensive, remains anchored to the contemporary relations between space, identity and race, without accounting for the ways in which racism and urban marginality, stigmatization and class formation variously intersect to keep spatial exclusion in place. Similar to other works on Romani people’s socio-​spatial conditions, the study sees segregation as a direct consequence of prejudice. In a European (and global) context of increasingly deregulated economy, precarious and desocialized wage labor, and skyrocketing inequalities, spatial segregation is changing ever more quickly, sometimes without following precise patterns (Tammaru et al. 2014, 363). Hence, its trajectories need to be studied in their dynamic and relational making, by keeping the multidimensionality of the phenomenon under scrutiny without limiting the discussion to only spatial, territorial, racial or ethnic units of analysis. Accordingly, a comprehensive and relational approach to segregation should probably include supranational, national and urban political economy as well as such social phenomena as the making and reproduction of urban marginality; forms of stigmatization; policies, practices and ideologies in governing segregated

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4  Introduction: Inside segregation

areas; everyday knowledge; media discourses; and representations circulating in municipal offices. In addition, since these phenomena do not necessarily play out together in relation to every city, an in-​depth and context-​sensitive analysis of the various local segregating mechanisms seems necessary in order to critically single out the most important factors influencing peculiar configurations of segregation and their precise local logic of functioning. Racial Cities does precisely this. By taking segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” as a unit of analysis, the book empirically analyzes four of what I have termed “local segregating mechanisms,” through which many GUAs have formed and persisted. These mechanisms are displacement (Chapter 2), omission (Chapter 3), containment (Chapter 4) and cohesion (Chapter 5). The continuous circulations and borrowings between colony and metropole establish the main historical and theoretical axis alongside which the analysis is organized. The overall historical standpoint maintains that the socio-​spatial segregation of groups defined as essentially “different” was first experimented in colonized cities as a way of keeping variously defined “threats” spatially isolated from the colonizer (Nightingale 2012). In light of this, Europe is a fundamental dimension of the entire analysis –​not only as a geographic unit where segregating mechanisms operate, but also, and perhaps primarily, as a global hegemonic social formation chiefly influencing them; the making of its economic power, rooted as it is in the history of colonial empires, plays a key role in understanding why and how, after about five centuries of colonial experimentation and domination, race and its immediate extension, racism, remain a pivotal and largely ignored social force regulating urban life in the “old continent.” In extending previous and ongoing inquiries on the role of race in shaping contemporary European societies (e.g. Goldberg 2006; Essed 1991; El-​Tayeb 2011; Hesse 2007; Lentin 2008), the following seven chapters will discuss the ways in which race, in its various socio-​spatial articulations and class-​based ramifications, appears as the main organizing principle of a number of post-​ 1945 European urban areas. The historical discussion (Chapter 1) and the closing analysis (Chapter 6) will show that, from a relatively open and proudly embraced principle of spatial rule in colonized cities, race has permuted into a largely silenced and subtle ideology of segregation in postcolonial Europe. The four case studies (Chapters 2–​6), approached from historical and ethnographic angles, provide evidence of the structural conditions under which –​ and the obvious and subtle ways in which –​race and its most immediate extension, racism, variously pervade and shape socio-​spatial configurations in one of the most affluent corners of the world. In doing so, Racial Cities aims to provide a threefold contribution: first, to the scholarship on cities, primarily on spatial segregation, by approaching the phenomenon from an everyday and historical perspective as a dynamic process, and by grasping its making at both the street and institutional level; second, by contributing to understanding social heterogeneity and its

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underpinning power relations in Europe through documenting the power and mechanisms of race and racism; and finally, by contributing empirical knowledge to anti-​racist and desegregation strategies at both grassroots and policy levels.

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Segregation as a dynamic process Segregation is defined here as a process of spatial concentration and separation of a homogeneously categorized group deemed “different” from the majority by the majority itself, be this difference framed as socio-​economic, cultural, religious, ethnic, or racial. As a process, segregation occurs in multiple ways, variously unfolding for days, months, years, decades and possibly centuries; it may mutate, stop partially or completely, and perhaps start again. Largely distant from this processual view, the English-​language scholarship primarily understands segregation as a condition to be assessed and explained from a macro and longitudinal perspective. One of the most commonly shared results of segregation research on Europe is that, in comparison to the United States, the levels of ethnic minority spatial segregation, although at times rising, remain relatively low (Weir 1993; van Kempen and Özüekrem 1998; Musterd and Ostendorf 1998; Musterd and Deurloo 2002; Musterd 2005; van Kempen and Murie 2009; Preteceille 2009; Iceland et al. 20113). Working primarily with statistical data and large-​scale surveys, these studies provide a key comparative understanding of segregation that has informed both academic and public debates, the latter too often void of reliable and rigorous data. Besides the lack of processual understanding of segregation, however, two additional limitations emerge from this scholarship. First, as noted by van Kempen and Murie (2009, 386–​387), among others, segregation research has largely overlooked a systematic understanding of Central and Eastern Europe, which, due to its non-​capitalist recent past, has often been considered incomparable with Western Europe and consequently left to “regional experts”; second, while relatively concerned with contextual specificities and the “embeddedness” of segregation in local histories and social structures (e.g., Arbaci 2008; Marcuse and van Kempen 2000; Maloutas 2012), the literature prioritizes “disembedded” research approaches, largely overlooking the street-​level dimension of segregation and the everyday economic, social and political dynamics underpinning it. What remains to be done, therefore, is to “widen segregation studies beyond their usual current boundaries” (Lloyd et al. 2015, 413) and to investigate ethnographically and historically the genesis and everyday conditions under which segregation is (or is not) perpetuated. The current increase in complexity and rapid change of certain patterns of socio-​spatial isolation and dispossession is an additional structural reason for looking at how spatial segregation emerges and unfolds at the local level beyond a limited focus on Western Europe and the United States. Throughout the

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subsequent seven chapters, I will show that, along with measuring its levels and longitudinal transformations, we need to see segregation as a dynamic process by looking at how it originates, evolves and persists at both the street and institutional level. In Racial Cities, hence, my effort is to detect local segregating mechanisms and systematically uncover their varied logics. In addition, as will become clear in the following paragraphs, my wider intention is to expand beyond West-​centric perspectives. With regard to the comparative lack of focus on Central and Eastern Europe, it is important to notice that research on segregation has foremost highlighted the difficulty of comparing cities across Western Europe only (Musterd 2005). The chief reason lies in the myriad heterogeneous variables across countries, regions and cities in terms of housing markets, broad political and economic structures and cultural frameworks. This point stems largely from a more or less implicit comparison with the United States, where, being a confederation characterized by relative political and linguistic homogeneity, “difference” between its cities, all in all, is comparatively lower than the difference between European cities. However, it should also be acknowledged that comparison is always, as such, an artificial device that inevitably reduces complexity for the sake of heuristic explanations (Mateos 2015); hence, the notion of “difference” between case studies is to a large extent relative. Following this observation, Central and Eastern European cities can and should be included in Europe-​wide studies, as for instance in Tammaru and colleagues’ (2014) recent work on socio-​economic segregation across twelve national capitals. The study shows that, while in the early 2000s Western European cities were far more segregated than their Eastern European counterparts, in the early 2010s this imbalance between East and West became much less prominent. Under these converging conditions and the overall increase of inequalities across much of the continent and beyond, the question remains to what extent the two European parts are still incomparable in terms of socio-​spatial arrangements. As for the second limitation –​that is, the relative lack of “embedded” research on segregation –​a number of field-​based studies have contributed to the knowledge on everyday dynamics. Phillips’ (2006, 2009) work on various experiences, desires and life trajectories of segregated individuals and households in Britain has suggested the importance of focusing on segregation’s subjective dimensions. In addition, Bolt and colleagues’ (Bolt et al. 2009) work on the relationship between segregation and social integration shows how in-​depth, field-​based research is able to critically challenge the public discourse that often falls into reductionist theses. Another seminal work excavating the complexity of socio-​spatial segregation is Wacquant’s (2006) comparative sociology of urban marginality focusing on the American black hyperghettos and the French banlieues. By putting the global, national, and urban political economy, the state, and neighborhood dynamics all under the same analytical gaze, the author shows how different the social structures of

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the two socio-​spatial configurations are, arguing that a comparative sociology of urban marginality should focus squarely on both material and symbolic structures, as well as urban histories and the action of different state agencies. Along similar lines, Mudu’s (2006, 423) exploration of complex “press discourses, political acts, and the diachronic evolution of the urban context” in the making of segregation in Rome reveals the importance of considering the multidimensionality and dynamism of the phenomenon. And Gruner’s (2009) study of white Germans’ racializing representations shows the pivotal role of stigmatization along racial lines in perpetuating spatial segregation. Extending this stream of research, Racial Cities uncovers local segregating mechanisms in their ordinary making.

Race, colonialism and (European) cities In combining and expanding these contributions to the scholarship on segregation –​by including Central and Eastern Europe, and by focusing on everyday dynamics  –​this book also proposes to consider the chief role of colonialism in the making of contemporary (urban) Europe. The current widespread silence, in education curricula and the public sphere, about the history and legacy of five centuries of European colonialism can also be found in the scholarship on urban Europe. Part of its reason may lie in the Orientalist stance of the literature’s main historical references. Weber’s (1958[1922]) work The City: Non-​legitimate Domination is among the most important of such references. The comparative historical sociology argues that medieval Central and Northern European cities were the first real examples of modern democratic citizenship, essentially due to the coeval emergence of guilds and other non-​kin groups that represented a rupture in previous kin-​based citizenry. The main condition for these autonomous groups to appear was the simultaneous presence of Christianity and capitalism, which suggests that, as Weber argues elsewhere, “only in the Occident does the city exist in the specific sense of the word” (quoted in Isin 2002, 119). The point here is that Weber’s historical analysis is not only constructed by opposing Occident and Orient, but is also predicated upon a supposed primacy of the former over the latter (Isin 2002, 2005). Weber’s rather deterministic conclusion –​that democracy and citizenship not only first appeared in the West, but could not have appeared anywhere else –​clearly sets up a symbolic hierarchy in which the Orient (defined as the non-​Occident and non-​Christian) remains at a lower stage than the Occident. While Orientalism was familiar to the scholarship of Weber’s time (Said 1979, 255–​259), uncovering it is of fundamental importance, as the constructed asymmetry between the Orient and the Occident was both a driver and a result of colonialism. Hence, Weber’s claim of Western superiority may have arguably contributed to downplaying the importance of thematizing colonialism in analyses of contemporary Europe, including those of its cities.

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By contrast to Eurocentrism, heeding Hall’s (2002) claim in her Civilizing Subjects that I quoted in the epigraph to this Introduction, Racial Cities contributes to “provincializing” European cities by squarely framing the analysis within the colony–​metropole nexus as one of the foundational processes of past and contemporary global inequalities. The most immediate reason for such a decentering perspective is not only that socio-​spatial segregation alongside “diversity lines” first appeared in colonized cities (Nightingale 2012); it is primarily that my very multi-​focal ethnographic inquiry of segregation discloses a set of dynamics, which can be linked to the ways in which segregation played out in colonized cities. In expanding the mainstream scholarship on segregation in European cities that typically relies on categories such as ethnicity, nationality, cultural difference/​specificity, and mobility/​migration, my fieldwork encounters and analyses will expose how race as a typical modern colonial product variously yet primarily sustains and regulates the segregation of Romani people. This is not to deny or downplay the importance of ethnicity, mobility, cultural difference and nationality/​nationalism in the ways segregation unfolds. As will emerge from the four empirical analyses, these phenomena are part of the picture, but the specificity and dominant role of race in its multifarious local declinations, power and authority, emerged inductively, rather than deductively; hence, race is the central motive of this book. The genesis of race –​its various elaborations and proliferation throughout imperial rule –​is a heuristic angle and a valid reason for detecting correspondences between contemporary segregating mechanisms and colonial segregation rationales, as I will do in Chapter 6. Due to the importance of race within this analysis as a whole, I would like to clarify its historical context and significance for this book. Having its roots in the colonial capitalist exploitation of mainly labor and land, race is a politically charged social force that regulates social arrangements. Functioning in relation to ethnicity, gender and class formations, race tends to connect nature to culture, namely the discourse of essential, innate human characteristics and the discourse of human behavior and morality, respectively. It does so by regulating perceptions, seeking to naturalize the world that perceptions construct. At the same time, race does not only work at the level of perceptions, or only within a subjective dimension, as ethnicity, for instance, tends to do. Due to its accent on lineage, heritage, and fixed, immutable characteristics, race claims objectivity –​it operates as an institutionalized social force, a self-​fulfilling prophecy-​maker, which makes existing unequal power relationships appear as a self-​evident and objective necessity –​shaping in this way racist configurations. In practice, racism’s dynamics and constant fluidity reside precisely in this continued oscillation between immutable (lineage, “natural”) and mutable (behavior, “cultural”) processes, differently structuring the two poles according to each social context. Such an oscillation organizes the objective social world as well as its perceptions in material and symbolic hierarchies –​race, therefore, other than as a social

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force, can also be viewed as an organizing logic and principle in the process of social transformation. Originated upon the rise of empires, since its birth, race has been conceived as a way of organizing exploitation, and more generally subjugation, of Jews, Muslims and other non-​whites in the forms of religious-​based stigmatization and exclusion; slavery, segregation and mass deportation. Race emerged as part of the colonial project not as an exogenous product, but within continuous circulations, borrowing and learning processes between external (colonial) and internal (within the metropole) strategies, observations, interpretations, beliefs and practices concerning personhood and morality. Colonies, in this process, largely functioned as laboratories for experimentation in social engineering in the metropole (Stoler 1997; Stoler and Cooper 1997). After about five centuries of colonial subjugation and exploitation, race remains pervasive and powerful –​mainly because it is predicated upon the discourse of morality, whereby the racially categorized and the immoral are juxtaposed. This juxtaposition sets the basis for a “set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” along a continuum between the poles of purity and pollution (Douglas 1984, 35). As a system legitimizing “the good,” purity, and by extension sameness and appropriateness, while discarding “the evil,” dirt, otherness and incongruity, race is a structuring social force rather than an ex-post rationalization of exclusion. The racial(ized) “other” is rendered not only inferior, but also a dangerous threat to a deemed non-​racial and non-​threatening economic, social and cultural order, which legitimizes that threat. And it is this fabricated state of menace that by symmetry produces and perpetuates the allegedly pure and neutral, self-​proclaimed “non-​racial” self. Accordingly, the surplus that the racial, non-​white other represents is at times “[made] live” while at other times “let die” (Foucault 2003, 241). Class formation is intimately part of racial hierarchies. The naturalization of class difference is deeply rooted in social organizations, material arrangements and social perceptions. In light of this, race is, as Stuart Hall (2002[1980], 62) maintained, “also the modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which it is appropriated and ‘fought through.’ ” Race and class, therefore, are mutually linked; their link is historically inscribed in the colonial encounter, which structured “native” societies around the naturalization of gendered class hierarchies, and in which the poor were infantilized and deemed “naturally” at a lower stage of civilization. This remains chiefly relevant today as a principle reproducing global inequality between the wealthier, largely white Global North, and the poorer, mostly non-​ white Global South (Winant 2004). Due to relational constitution of race, it becomes clear how racial dynamics happen in various and changing ways according to each social context, and unfold in sometimes totally unpredictable manners. Disclosing these processes, therefore, implies keeping categories of analysis open and malleable to the encountered realities.

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In contributing to structure the cultural, economic and political order, race plays out differently in each context. Moreover, its multidimensional and relational nature renders it a flexible and highly adaptable social force. Therefore, in order to uncover the very urban conditions of possibility for race to emerge, operate and powerfully organize the social, it is necessary to focus in depth on its local mechanisms. This is yet another reason why segregation should better be approached as a dynamic and mutable process alongside –​yet not rather than –​a slowly changing and macro phenomenon. It may be argued that every social force, including class, gender and ethnicity, plays out differently in different contexts. However, in the case of race, especially in Europe, scrutinizing local ways and mechanisms of functioning appears somehow more demanding. The main reason for this, as I will unpack in Chapter 6, is twofold. On the one hand, at least since the UNESCO (1950) “Statement on race,” race as a category of analysis for understanding the world has largely been abandoned and replaced by the less politically implicated “ethnicity.” On the other hand, race essentially functions by obfuscating and dissimulating itself, in the sense that its chief raison d’être has become the shaping of forms of domination that would not be identified as “racial” or “racist.” As a consequence, racial hierarchies and dynamics of subjugation and exclusion are among the least acknowledged and recognizable social phenomena. Due to both its variety and variability, as well as its self-​dissimulating constitution, race requires social scientists to reflexively and critically scrutinize its configurations, documenting and putting into historical perspective its differently located and configured mechanisms and ways of functioning. This is Racial Cities’ main task. Ideologies of racial purity and miscegenation may well structure socio-​ spatial arrangements, the chief focus of this book. While indisputably heterogenetic and contextual, race can be said to be invariably constructed by moving the outside of social life to a state of domesticated inside. One of the ways in which this shift is made possible is spatial segregation: relating to the outside, while striving for ordering and disciplining it. This point may be useful for illustrating the movement from the United States’ plantation slavery to the contemporary (hyper)ghetto (Wacquant 2002); similarly, yet including numerous differences, it also contributes to explaining some of the aftermaths of decolonization in Europe: as Goldberg (2002, 174) maintains, upon decolonization “the focus shifted, slowly and imperceptibly at first, but by the 1930s quite evidently, from measuring bodies and heads to the racial mappings, sociologically and psychologically, of urban spaces, of ‘the city beautiful’ ” (see also Chapter 1); and “[t]‌he principle of racialized urban segregation accordingly insinuated itself into the definition of postcolonial city space in the West, just as it continued to inform post-​independence urban planning in Africa” (Goldberg 1993a, 191).4 As such, in their spatial articulations, racial ascriptions may not necessarily refer to bodily features, but to a similarly naturalized “urban body” or “cities as organisms” in which space, along with housing –​and, by proxy, its population –​is racially connoted.

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One of the logical extensions of these considerations is that looking at colonized cities of European empires allows access to some of the ways in which race has been experimented as a tool for “solidifying fluid social categories through urban space structures” (Legg 2007, 49). It is exactly race’s appeal to “nature” by reference to appearance and lineage that allows the fixity of the urban space to become a perfect medium for racism: “[I]‌n such racial characteristics as color, ethnic origins, geographical position, etc.,” writes Stuart Hall (2002[1980], 63), “racism discovers what other ideologies have to construct: an apparently ‘natural’ and universal basis in nature.” Low (1996, 165) vividly articulates this point by discussing British Indian cities, where the “Other […] always threatens to spill over the geometric division of the civilized body, oozing its contaminated bodily wastes, disgusting ubiquitous body of the native which is forever invaliding hallowed ground.” In this way, “natives” were largely deemed a potential menace to the colonial order, that is, the hierarchical order imposed and maintained for the sake of labor exploitation and social, cultural and political experimentation. And while colonized cities engaged in racially segregating “natives,” at the end of the nineteenth century, the cities of the metropole displayed similar spatial exclusions and enclosures of another perceived threat –​the so-​called “dangerous classes.” In this regard, Romani people’s urban social conditions in Europe reveal these fast-​changing, relational and contingent processes, due to a long history of racial stigmatization, experimentation and eventually extermination, but also and equally due to their diffuse material and symbolic deprivation. Today, racial principles of division and domination vis-​à-​vis Romani people work in various ways, at times making global headlines. Take, for instance, the case of supposedly abducted Maria. When media consumers across the globe got to know her face, they also saw the faces of the two adults who were taking care of her: the most widely shared photo portraying the little girl, also featured them (Figure 1.1). The case made worldwide news in October 2013, when Maria, a six-​year-​old blond girl with white skin, was found in a so-​called “Roma camp” in Farsala, central Greece. Media reactions were unanimously scandalized –​Maria was visibly not the daughter of the two adults with whom she was living. In the twenty-​first century, non-​biological parenthood is neither unusual nor perceived negatively. In the case of Maria, however, not only was the public reaction that of a big scandal, but the two adults were immediately accused of abduction. The hysteria was so racially connoted that the two adults’ names and ages were not reported by any media source, and Maria’s name was variously (mis)spelled as the Latin “Maria,” the Bulgarian “Maryia,” and the Greek “Μαρία”: what counted, one was led to think, was skin color and physical appearance. In the photo, moreover, the two anonymized adults look deeply stressed (and perhaps shocked by the fuss happening around them), an emotion that does not fit the dominant standard of “good parenthood.” Coupling darker

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Figure 1.1  Maria and her adoptive parents. Source: Athena Picture Agency.

skin color with inept parenthood, as the picture did, clearly established a racist combination that ultimately became the main subtext of the whole media story. The photo and the media frenzy around it, therefore, are racist products. They are not so in the sense that those who circulated the photo may have had racist assumptions; rather, they are racist primarily in the sense that the very relationships they (the photo and the entire media case) establish between the perceived natural (appearance) and the apparent social (behavior) are inscribed in the continuum alongside which human relationships are supposed to work –​ darker-​ skinned (ineptness) versus whiter-​ skinned (innocence). Hence, the main condition for that photo to be globally shared, contributing to the media business, and for the lack of virtually any reaction against anti-​black and anti-​ Romani racism, is that race and racism fundamentally constitute and organize the social world and our perceptions of it. If someone would have raised a voice against that racist discourse, who would have listened, let alone understood? Who –​especially in Europe, where the case resonated more vividly –​ would have admitted that a bluntly racist message was replicating centuries of white supremacy? These questions are of fundamental importance, and a number of answers will emerge in Chapters 6 and 7. Over the last ten years, the story of Maria’s alleged abduction has been just one instance of what can be named a (social) media racial pornography: performing racial exclusion, exposed without mediation and mass-​mediatized,

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generating profit.5 Accounting for this phenomenon is fundamental, I suggest, in order to understand contemporary segregating mechanisms. Indeed, alongside the changing social meanings of race and its varied and contingent articulations, racist expressions addressing Romani people on a daily basis display a certain degree of homogeneity. While the mythical stories of the past –​those of “free spirits,” “exotic dancers,” palm reading, storytelling, etc. –​account for a prevalently “historicist” form of racism, beginning in the early 2000s a clear shift can be registered toward a “naturalist” anti-​Romani racialist conception.6 This shift has brought with it straightforward verbal humiliation and denigration, in the forms of racist slurs in media and political discourse, and racially motivated physical violence, taking the life of tens of Romani people and injuring hundreds across Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the Czech Republic (ERRC 2012). In the spring of 2015, during a primetime TV show, Italian MEP Gianluca Buonanno described Romani people as “the scum of society”;7 about a year earlier, I witnessed several racist comments such as “they should be turned into soap bars” and “they are parasites” in a Facebook thread commenting on an anti-​racist letter which I and other scholars had addressed to the Italian web magazine Linkiesta.8 Since the mid-​ 2000s, moreover, racist slurs have repeatedly pervaded the French media and political discourse, especially during and after the 2009–​2010 mass expulsion of over 18,000 Romani people back to Romania and Bulgaria (Fassin et al. 2014, 21–​63). And the Hungarian mainstream media has steadily turned anti-​ Roma racism into an acceptable civic expression (Vidra and Fox 2014). This list could go on and on, but these sets of racist expressions should be understood as neither individual opinions nor single discourses. Similar to the case of Maria and her carers, the very conditions under which racist idioms circulate, and remain largely unchallenged, fully reinforce the structural –​and material –​dynamics of oppression experienced by Romani people across Europe. They account for those systemic relations between: (a) racist notions, (b) practices with racist implications, and (c) their effects of reinforcing underlying ethnic and racial relations that Essed (1991) has aptly defined as “everyday racism.”

Race, neoliberalism and urban governance Racial Cities directly engages with neoliberalism and its connections with colonialism, race and urban governance. The root causes of liberalism can be traced back to the beginnings of colonial capitalist exploitation of labor and natural resources (Hall 2011; Venn 2009). As such, neoliberalism does not only refer to economic maximization. Rather –​a point I will unpack in Chapters 1 and 6 –​it can more comprehensively be viewed as an extension of that logic: a set of ideologies with “pervasive effects of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-​sense way many of us interpret, live in and understand the world” (Harvey 2005, 3). Hence,

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contrary to what is sometimes understood, neoliberalism requires a firmly intrusive state: only through the legitimate monopoly of violence, engineering what Foucault (2004) called “biopolitics,” can neoliberal doctrines really influence common sense. One recent example of neoliberal statecraft is the post-​2008 transformations of global financial (im)balances and transnational ideologies of growth and population governance. The most widespread state response to the 2008 global financial crisis has been a series of cutbacks in public spending, particularly for social care services, resulting in an increase in already burgeoning socio-​economic inequalities, social insecurity and precariousness, especially toward the bottom of the class structure (Sassen 2014). The impact of this process has largely resulted in impoverishment, indebtedness and shrinking access to social rights. These trends took a peculiar shape in European cities, expressed primarily in increased poverty concentration and socio-​economic spatial segregation across the continent (Madanipour and Weck 2015; Tammaru et al. 2014). Until the 1980s, the proliferation of marginalized households and their urban territories was typically governed by pouring public money into welfare-​state programs. Since then, public actors have increasingly been collaborating with private ones, and their agenda has shifted, gradually yet obviously, toward containing social exclusion rather than curing it. Today, the goal of governance seems largely to be “offering relief not to the poor but from the poor by forcibly ‘disappearing’ the most disruptive of them, from the shrinking welfare rolls on the one hand and into the swelling dungeons of the carceral castle on the other” (Wacquant 2010, 204; quoted in Uitermark 2013, 2). In the European context, this process has occurred in various ways, but ultimately with less prominent use of incarceration than in the US, while since 9/​11, the penal apparatus for governing the poor has steadily become ever more prominent (Lacey 2013). For instance, a common phenomenon within Belgium, the UK and the Netherlands is the invariable presence of ideologies and practices of control in programs aimed at social integration (Uitermark 2013). In this context, the governance of the urban poor, increasingly beyond the realms of solidarity and inclusion which has been typical of post-​WWII welfare states, needs to find new terms of reference, new modalities of action and new rhetorical instruments of self-​legitimization. Where does one look for these modalities and terms? How did the governance of the poor prior to WWII occur? These questions lie at the core of contemporary doctrines of social integration, inclusion, cohesion, and control. One answer comes from understanding the dominant meanings and values of poverty –​and by extension of its possible remedies –​in both the metropole and the colonies between the end of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. It was Lydia Morris (1996) who, in a seminal debate on Urban Poverty and the Underclass (Mingione 1996), recalled the importance of understanding the genealogy of the modern idea of “the urban poor.” The sociologist illuminated that in its original understanding, poverty was a highly moralized

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concept, imbued with nineteenth-​century social Darwinist conceptions of competition and success. She then recounted that the post-​Fordist idea of poverty still today carries this moralized value, as the “common assumption is that state provision has created a culture of dependency which has undermined the work ethic, and has been damaging to the stability of the nuclear family” (Morris 1996, 161–​162). Here lies one of the main drivers of neoliberal statecraft, and by extension neoliberal urban governance, that vividly resonates with Thatcher’s (1981) famous idea: “Economics are the method: the object is to change the heart and soul.” Hence, the nineteenth-​century framing of poverty seems to reappear in a different and largely disguised shape in post-​1970s Europe.9 Against this background, then, the question becomes why has the debate on poverty in Europe largely ignored the hypothesis of systemic and pervasive post-​1970s racial thinking and structures? Since race as a “scientific” doctrine emerged in nineteenth-​century Europe in strict relation to urban poverty, fear of overcrowding, and related hygiene hazards, why is race assumed to be absent in today’s governance doctrines and practices across Europe? One may argue that this is because the scientific basis of race has been disproved. Yet has race always been exclusively so? Ever since the beginning of colonialism, the idea and practice of classifying humans in hierarchies of moral worth according to perceived lineage has been politically charged and mobilized. Why, then, is the political mobilization of race assumed to be absent from contemporary doctrines and practices vis-​à-​vis the urban poor in Europe? As I will show at length in Chapter 1, indeed, the continuous borrowings and circulations between colony and metropole since the late nineteenth century appear as a fundamental background against which to understand contemporary forms and mechanisms of segregation. An analysis of segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” shows how powerfully tight the connections are between nineteenth-​century racial doctrines and contemporary segregation.​ Racial Cities strives to cast a sharp analytical gaze on these often-​ ignored circulations and connections.

Structure of the research and the book This book is the result of a multi-​focal research across European GUAs that I have been conducting intermittently from 2006 to 2015. Data sources have been numerous and varied. I first drew on several secondary sources including previous segregation research, urban history books, media accounts, including documentaries and online material, and socio-​economic statistical data whenever available. My fieldwork was organized in various ways, always aiming at understanding the local mechanisms through which segregation and stigmatization first appeared and could persist. I spent more time in certain cities than others, mainly due to the history of the local GUA(s): for instance, I spent more time in Florence, where two local “Gypsy camps” had been persisting for over

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20 years, than in Montreuil, where the local camp was only six years old. For the same reason, I have regularly gone back to all cities except Montreuil. All in all, I have conducted over 120 semi-​structured interviews with policymakers at both regional and municipal levels, NGO activists, and families living in and around GUAs. Renting accommodation in or around GUAs has always been a priority for me, in order to become familiar with everyday life. I have spent several hours and days with police officers, Romani and non-​Romani leaders, social workers, municipal employees, GUA inhabitants and neighbors, always speaking the local language and trying to gear my approach to the very local context and dynamics I was continually coming across. My informal dialogues, interviews, participant observations and all other encounters aimed at understanding the various roles different people and groups had, within local segregating mechanisms. Alongside personal encounters, I have also accessed local libraries and archives, including state, media and NGO archives, where I could access useful material for tracing the history of local dynamics, which shaped past and current segregating conditions. Data analysis was organized by triangulating these three main types of sources: secondary data, personal encounters and observations, and archive material. Part of my analysis has already appeared in journal articles and book chapters, but for this comprehensive book I have felt the need to delve deeper into the study of colonialism, race and their multiple urban connections with both metropole and contemporary Europe. The reason for this need I hope to clarify throughout the seven chapters into which this book is organized. Chapter 1 outlines the historical framework, which in turn informs the main theoretical references I have discussed in this Introduction. The chapter is centered on the various and variable circulations and borrowings linking colony, metropole and contemporary Europe. These dynamics shape contemporary “Gypsy urban areas,” which I consider as geographical nodes, connecting different European cities, and historical nodes, linking colony and metropole. The chapter is divided into two main parts. The first part –​ Colony: segregation rationales –​sketches a threefold scheme of rationalities of colonial urban ruling, based on three colonized cities: Rabat under French rule, New Delhi under British rule, and Addis Ababa under Italian rule. This threefold scheme is a key reference for analyzing the four local segregating mechanisms in the following four chapters. The second part –​Metropole: from sedentarization to segregation –​is a historical overview of the formation of stigmatized and segregated GUAs from the late nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth century. This section is concerned with presenting the main lines of connection between dominant representations of the urban poor, the nomad, and “the Gypsy.” From nineteenth-​century racialist theories, to Nazi and Fascist genocidal policy, through post-​1945 divergent trajectories of state sedentarization of “nomads” in the socialist East and the capitalist West, this section underlines the main conditions under which the first GUAs appeared in European cities after 1945.

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Chapter 2 discusses the first local segregating mechanism: displacement. By focusing on the 2010 eviction in Cluj-​Napoca, which I mentioned at the beginning of the Introduction, the ethnographic analysis shows how economic conditions, everyday representations and public policies shaped the formation and perpetuation of a highly segregated GUA right next to one of the largest garbage dumps in Central Europe. Displacement is scrutinized in both its constitutive dynamics and social effects in terms of the radical worsening of Romani families’ socio-​economic conditions after the eviction. As I will discuss, the chief racial logic through which displacement unfolds in Cluj has to do with lack of hygiene, which Romani people are deemed to embody. Chapter 3 empirically turns west, focusing on Pescara, Italy, in an analysis of the second local segregating mechanism: omission. The stigmatized and segregated “Gypsy urban area” in Pescara is Rancitelli, a semi-​periphery neighborhood in which the majority of Pescarian (Italian) Romani families live. The ethnography scrutinizes multiple historical and contemporary dimensions and dynamics, including urban policies in the neighborhood, media discourse, local politicians’ representations, police enforcement and everyday racial stigma. Against the background of a general lack of political engagement in dealing with Rancitelli’s material and symbolic marginality, along with a constant local media criminalization of “Gypsies,” political omission seems to be the most effective strategy for perpetuating segregation of Romani people in the neighborhood. Ultimately, the racial connotations of various discourses and social dynamics in the neighborhood render political omission a racist endeavor. Chapter 4 presents the case of urban camps, which are case studies of the third local segregating mechanisms: containment. The twofold empirical focus is on Florence, Italy, and Montreuil, France, and the discussion shows that containing a racially deemed and articulated threat, that is, Eastern European Romani people, seems to be the main interest of governance actors in view of ensuring social order. First experimented in colonized territories by the French and Spanish empires, camps for civilians have occupied a central role in post-​1945 European urban societies. Today, they are still considered preferred solutions for the social integration and cohesion of Romani subjects, who are largely deemed socially deviant. Chapter 5 discusses the fourth and last local segregating mechanism: cohesion. The empirical focus is on Salford, England, specifically its local “Gypsy camp.” Rather than resulting in containment, however, the analysis shows that camps for Romani and Traveller people across the UK are legitimated by the underpinning and pervasive discourse of social and community cohesion. The various legislative texts dealing with spatial control in the UK are the main background against which the empirical analysis unfolds, disclosing the racial imprint of the discourse of cohesion. Originally articulated in terms of a hygiene threat, later of public order, and more recently of the benevolent

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provision of “sites,” this discourse is determinant in perpetuating a condition of racial segregation. Chapter 6 takes stock of the four local segregating mechanisms by linking them to the threefold scheme of colonial segregation rationales I offer in Chapter 1. The socio-​historical discussion builds on Carlo Ginzburg’s (1989) concept of “clues,” sketching a number of correspondences between each local segregating mechanism and at least one colonial segregation rationale. I argue that this type of analysis helps to decenter one’s own perspective in understanding the rootedness and longevity of race as a colonial product that informs socio-​spatial organization in both colonized and contemporary European cities. This view also sheds light on the local dynamics of suppression, removal and the oblivion of race in contemporary Europe. Racelessness, alongside depoliticization, as I show in the chapter, is thus one of the most crucial conditions under which race can silently drive segregation and maintain it largely undisturbed. Chapter  7 continues the discussion on racelessness and, building on the various colony-​(former) metropole correspondences, sketches the contours of possible European postcolonial urbanisms as lenses through which to detect the multiple correspondences linking today’s European cities with colonized cities. These various “urbanisms” are sites in which one can not only detect the workings of race(lessness) in assembling European cities, but also the privileged conditions for manufacturing archives –​intended to be repositories of stories that account for the contemporary European postcolonial condition. Racial Cities, ultimately, is one such archive.

Note on names Following Ian Hancock (2002, xxi), a Romani author and professor of linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, in this book I use the expressions Romani people and Romanies (and the derivate Romani families etc.) to include all persons variably and contextually identifying with groups acknowledging Romani descent. “Rom,” in Romani language, originally meant “ ‘married Romani male,’ but […] [F]‌or some it kept this interpretation but restricted it so that it applied to themselves and no one else, while for others, it came to mean only ‘husband’ ” (Hancock 2002, xix). Recently, the word “Roma” has widely been used especially within public policy circles; its popularity has largely turned it into a bureaucratic construction indexing the technicalities of social inclusion measures carried out both by European institutions and national governments. Among Romanies, there are people and groups self-​identifying as “Gypsies” (and variations in other languages such as zingari, cigani, gitanos, etc); again following Hancock (2002), I refrain from using this term, because it has originated outside Romani production and has supported, and continues to support, oppression and humiliation. For this reason, and for emphasizing the power of stigma, I use “Gypsy urban areas”

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(and “Gypsy camp,” etc.) within inverted commas, while writing GUA(s) without inverted commas for the sake of readability. I have replaced all names of persons that appear in my ethnographic accounts with pseudonyms.

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Notes 1 Along similar lines, in The Urban Racial State, Cazenave (2011) has documented the fundamental conditions under which urbanity, class and race intersect in the United States, leading to racist partitionings. 2 See, among others, Ladányi and Szelényi (2006); Vitale and Claps (2010); Mionel and Neguţ (2011); Szalai and Zentai (2014); Filcak and Steger (2014); and Vincze (2015). 3 This study introduces an interesting complexity, showing that the lower segregation levels in the UK than in the US relate only to people of African descent; the reverse is true in the case of people of Asian descent. 4 For a more comprehensive analysis of the various shifts from colony to metropole upon decolonization, see Comaroff (1998). An interesting framework for comparatively studying socio-​spatial segregation as the heritage of empires, for example in Northern Ireland, the Middle East and the Balkans, has been developed by Anderson (2008). 5 I take the idea of “pornography” from Wacquant (2009). 6 The difference between naturalist and historicist racial rule and conceptions is developed at length by Goldberg (2002, esp. chapter 4). See Lentin (2008) for a reflection on this issue in the European context. 7 An Italian court later condemned Gianluca Buonanno to pay 12,000 euros to the two associations that had sued him. 8 In the letter we expose how one story about “Gypsy camps” in Rome reproduced criminalization also by adopting a performative noir-​like writing style for describing the dilapidated housing conditions in which a number of Romani families were living. This kind of performative style speaks to the media pornography I  introduced above. The letter has been published on the magazine website under the title “Quando scrivete di rom siete razzisti.” 9 Interestingly, Dorling (2015, 384) has noted that Growing class segregation means a return to Victorian inequalities where murder is relatively common in what were called slum areas, but hardly known among the gentry. […] [Today] murder rates have returned to what they were then.

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Contemporary urban hierarchies and patterns of urbanisation have largely resulted from colonial rule. (Anthony David King 1989, 1)

While the (social) media racial pornography I outlined in the Introduction is a necessary premise for understanding the contemporary segregation of Romani people in urban Europe, a historical perspective is no less fundamental. In this chapter I offer such a perspective, by situating the genesis of post-​WWII stigmatized and segregated “Gypsy urban areas” (GUAs) within the circulation, between colony and metropole, of spatial rationalities of ruling homogeneously classified populations. I will show that GUAs are both geographical nodes of a web linking dispersed cities across Europe, and historical nodes of a web connecting metropole and colony across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter type of nodes, which is the topic of this chapter, has formed through circulations and borrowings between colony and metropole. The triangular imperial trade of enslaved African people is probably the most explicit example of these circulations. The historical nodes I will discuss in the chapter pertain more generally to direct and indirect exchanges of governmental knowledge and doctrines, representations and dispositions, techniques and practices, all relating to the juxtaposition of homogeneously classified populations with specific portions of the urban space. By tracing these connections and circulations, this chapter provides more than a historical perspective on the four local segregating mechanisms that I will discuss in the next four chapters. Inspired by King’s claim I quoted as epigraph to this chapter, I will show that the material and ideological conditions of possibility for GUAs to emerge and remain in place are rooted in European history to such an extent that today these areas appear not only largely normal, but even at times necessary portions of European urban societies. Thus, this historical overview not only provides a ground to the objective

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presence of GUAs and the multiple mechanisms behind their establishment and persistence, but it also contributes to explaining the pervasive subjective dimension within which GUAs are largely perceived as natural, normal elements of European urban landscapes in the early twenty-​first century. The history I want to sketch begins in the late nineteenth century, when, with the rise of industrialism and massive urbanization in Europe, racialist theories of social deviance and fears of miscegenation became a prominent lens through which to look at the increasingly devastating socio-​economic and sanitary conditions of the urban poor.1 Metropole and colony were the key sites for experimenting attempts to curb what large sections of the bourgeoisie defined as hygiene, sexual and political threats –​that is, “natives” in the colonies and the urban poor in metropole’s industrial urban areas. These mutual connections and intersections are fundamental in order to understand the key dynamics of segregation in contemporary Europe. Not only because urban segregation is a colonial invention (Nightingale 2012), but also, more comprehensively, because colonies largely functioned as laboratories of governance, namely as sites for experimenting with ruling strategies and techniques, with a view to improving the art of governing in the metropole (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff 1997; Rabinow 1989; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Stoler 1997, 1989; Comaroff 1998; Wright 1991; Magubane 2004). It should importantly be noted, at the same time, that different colonial projects unfolded differently, and that “the quality and intensity of racism vary enormously in different colonial contexts and at different historical moments in any particular colonial encounter” (Stoler 1989, 137–​138; see also Steinmetz 2008, 590). In order to shed light on the complex and diversified circulations between colony and metropole, I organize the chapter in two distinct moments. In the first moment, entitled Colony: segregation rationales, I will systematically focus on spatial segregation rationales in Rabat under French rule (1913–​1930), New Delhi under British rule (1911–​1931), and Addis Ababa under Italian rule (1936–​1941). With this historical overview I aim to analytically single out some of the most distinct features of colonial spatial rationalities behind the classifications of populations and the mechanisms of spatial distribution, including planning, zoning and partitioning, as well as ways of maintaining the urban socio-​spatial order. This will result in a scheme of segregation rationales that I will refer to in Chapter 6, for analyzing key correspondences between colonial urban rule and contemporary GUAs. In the second moment, entitled Metropole: from sedentarization to segregation, I will focus on the most important processes behind the formation of post-​WWII GUAs. After discussing the late nineteenth-​century dominant discourses on the vagrants, the idle and the nomads, and their legacy in Fascist and Nazi genocidal apparatus of policy and knowledge, I will move on to post-​WWII state measures and authoritative discourses on Romani

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people, whose physical mobility in the 1960s prominently reappeared as a problem for the state. In both capitalist and socialist Europe, “nomadism,” variously and always meticulously theorized, became viewed as both a threat to public order and an obstacle on the path toward social integration. As a consequence, the state implemented sedentarization programs, which in various ways contributed to the formation of GUAs. In tracing the contours of this historical and geographical system of “nodes,” I do not mean to suggest that ideological forces alone are behind the formation of GUAs. While indeed the state and the land and housing markets played a significant role in the formation and perpetuation of GUAs, Romani and non-​Romani collectives have played a role by eliciting, adjusting to and welcoming the making of GUAs, and a number of these cases will emerge from the four empirical chapters. At the same time, as I hope to show in this chapter, since the mid-​nineteenth century various political economic apparatuses have occupied most of the available space in the process of the formation of GUAs.

Colony: segregation rationales In the late 1980s Anthony David King maintained that “The most significant gap in our knowledge is the impact of colonialism on urbanism and urbanization in the metropoles” (1989, 11). This gap is arguably still with us. King was not the first to underline the importance of economic, technological and cultural aspects of colonized cities in order to understand urbanism worldwide.2 Twenty years earlier, Manuel Castells (1968) had already pointed out the importance of imperialist political economy for understanding urban formations. As colonial projects were largely motivated by, and aimed at, open-​ ended exploitation of labor and extraction of natural resources, colonized cities were built for two major functions: administration of these economic arrangements, and celebration of the powers which made those arrangements possible (Nightingale 2012; King 1990). The colonial exploitation project was largely administered by a white Western bourgeois elite whose discourse of power was crafted in empires’ capitals. After the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), many of these capitals saw the rapid construction of palaces, cathedrals, monuments and other architectural artifacts celebrating the national and local ruling elites (King 1990). During the early nineteenth century, widespread knowledge and activity that sought to turn colonized cities into administrative and celebratory sites of colonial domination emerged. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, these activities and forms of knowledge converged to form one dominant planning theory, which rapidly became a self-​evident assumption: in order for cities to fulfill their twofold aim of administration and political celebration, they had to be organized in such a way that there would be a clear and possibly complete separation between the colonizer and the colonized (Nightingale 2012). As a consequence, native quarters –​that is,

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segregated neighborhoods exclusively for “native” populations –​emerged as the crystallization of administrators’ and planners’ ideas about how to best organize and rule the colonized city.3 During the same period, facing the highly unsanitary conditions of the urban poor in Europe and the United States, a number of architects, including Patrick Geddes, Paul Otlet and Albert Thomas, became concerned with social suffering. Their reformist efforts contributed to establishing a series of urban planning movements, including the City Beautiful and Garden City movements, which viewed cities as organisms wherein all elements should be harmonically combined. Many of these reformists, as Worpole (2000, 32) discusses at length, “had one foot in the planning camp and the other in the more dubious camp of social hygiene” –​indeed, many of them shared the increasingly prominent fear of both physical and moral “degeneration.”4 As Batty and Marshall (2009, 551) have convincingly argued, “Despite their popularity, organic analogies have often remained implicit and unexploited in our theories of cities and city planning, and their consequences have not been fully worked through.”5 Looking at these consequences, it may be concluded, is one of the major venues through which to answer King’s (1989, 11) implicit call for more analyses of colonial urbanism’s impact in today’s former metropole. The main ordering principle for the separation, isolation, or confinement of “native” populations in European colonies was race (Nightingale 2012).6 Although already discussed in the Introduction, it is a point so crucial that a reminder feels necessary. Racial segregation is not the mere spatial separation of groups that are racially deemed; rather, it is the imposition of a partitioned spatial order unequally –​the distribution of resources disfavors the racially deemed. Therefore, while social class is as significant as physical appearance and lineage in determining who should be racially segregated, it is also shaped by racially segregated conditions and dynamics. As Steinmetz (2008, 591) put it, “Class structures were as much the result of colonial state policy as they were its determinants.” Race and class mutually articulate and influence each other through the mediation of spatial positions and arrangements. It is also important to note that in practice, segregation processes unfolded both unstably and differently in different contexts. With reference to British Jamaica, for example, Hall (2002) shows that the boundaries between rulers and ruled were necessarily unstable. Mixed-​ race children were particularly problematic, for how was the in-​between to be categorised? The impossibility of fixing lines, keeping people in separate places, stopping slippage, was constantly at issue in Jamaica. (2002, 10) Similarly, with reference to early nineteenth-​century Perth (British Australia), Jacobs (1996) shows how Aborigines could never fully be segregated –​a fact

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that “gave way to more disorderly and permeable spatial arrangements” (1996, 108). The variety of racially segregated spatial formations, their mechanisms and the multiplicity of rationales and ideologies behind them, therefore, call for a close-​up look at specific cases of racial segregation. In order to account for such a variety, I am going to narrow my discussion to focus on the cities of French Rabat (Morocco), British New Delhi (India), and Italian Addis Ababa (Ethiopia).7 In briefly reviewing each of these three urban histories, I seek to construct an analytical tool, to which I will extensively refer in Chapter 6, in order to shed light on the relations between colony and metropole underpinning the making of GUAs in post-​WWII Europe. Due to this limited scope, I will limit the discussion to the main rationales and the conditions under which segregation occurred in the three cities.8 Rabat, 1913–​1930 Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912.9 The leading ideology behind invasion and domination was one of the most distinctive features of French colonial fantasy, that is, a combination of cultural preservation and political, technological and economic “development,” otherwise called “modernism” (Rabinow 1989). Such a mission civilisatrice (French for “civilizing mission”), in line with republican universalism, aimed to bring about enlightenment-​driven development. The accent on development implied that local and national customs and knowledge be preserved as necessary pre-​existing conditions for “natives” to become “more civilized.” In 1913, the French administrator of Morocco, General Lyautey, expressed this notion unambiguously: “The problem we envisage is to let modern civilization, with all its progress and economic exploitation, penetrate [into Morocco], while preserving what exists here that is of the greatest interest” (quoted in Wright 1991, 86). This point is fundamental for understanding French colonizers’ views of Moroccans. Lyautey viewed Moroccans as “barbarians” who, once convinced of the glorious mission the French were about to carry out in their country, would elevate themselves to become more civilized subjects. This view largely informed the dominant spatial rationalities of French colonial urban ruling to the extent that Lyautey could claim “to have been one of the precursors of Le Corbusier” (ibid., 88). In 1913, Lyautey moved the capital of Morocco from Fez to Rabat, as he feared the presence of Moroccan resistance in Fez. The general wanted a place that could be easily ruled and, most importantly, one that could become the aesthetic and topographic epitome of French preservation of Muslim culture  –​very much unlike Algiers, which less than a century earlier the French had built on the ruins of local culture. Casablanca was also a rather turbulent place, due to the significant presence of European merchants’ interests. In addition to its peaceful social environment, Rabat

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offered a perfect location, as unlike Fez, it was a port city and thus closely connected to France by sea. The same year, Lyautey called upon Paris-​based architect Henri Prost to design Rabat. Prost’s plan became one of the most elaborate experiments of racial segregation in the history of city splitting (Abu-​Lughod 1980; Nightingale 2012, 213–​215).10 Inspired by urban planning developments in Germany and Switzerland, Prost was a prominent young architect belonging to the French Beaux Arts movement constituted by radical innovators and critics. The movement advocated an organicist view of cities, seeking to combine functionality and aesthetic sensibility in modern industrial urban space and urban life. However, the combination of cultural preservation and development remained the main ideological ground on which Prost imagined the new partitioning of Rabat, and he later publicly praised Lyautey’s views on “civilisation” at the 1931 International Conference on Colonial Urbanism. The plan for Rabat was finally implemented in 1924 and completed in 1930. The two most distinguished urban forms that Prost introduced in Rabat, as in the other eight Moroccan cities he planned, were the Ville Nouvelle and the cordon sanitaire. The Ville Nouvelle was the portion of the urban space reserved to Europeans, with elegant streets and buildings fusing North African and French styles. Rabat’s Ville was planned between the Sultan Palace and the historic center known as the Medina, which was inhabited by Arabs and needed to be preserved. Between the Medina and the Ville, the 250-​meter-​wide cordon sanitaire was planned: an empty area isolating the Moroccan sector of Rabat from the European sector. According to Prost, “complete separation of European and indigenous agglomeration” was an “essential condition” of colonial urban planning (quoted in Nightingale 2012, 213). The main reasons for separating colonized and colonizers was the preservation of sites and artifacts, aesthetic expressions of local culture that were mostly concentrated in the Medina. Additional reasons were sanitary and economic. The fear of epidemic –​and, more generally, of diseases –​was high, due mainly to Morocco’s sanitation system, which could not effectively prevent the spread of illnesses. Also, commercial activities could not have been kept inside the Medina, as it was too crowded a space to contain the necessary infrastructures for trade and commerce. Hence, the cordon sanitaire also functioned as an area of commercial traffic. One fundamental detail for understanding how racial segregation functioned in Rabat is that, although segregation was imposed by sophisticated planning laws, no law explicitly referred to racial or ethnic background or declared that Moroccans and Europeans were to live separately. Lyautey was a firm critic of mainstream planning laws: he explicitly criticized the racism underpinning them, and abhorred the harsh treatment that his colleagues reserved to Algerians. However, he imported a series of legal tools from metropolitan Europe about homeownership that ultimately sanctioned racial

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segregation through class by making it impossible for most Moroccans to afford property titles in the Ville Nouvelle; at the same time, some European-​ educated Moroccans could afford living in the Ville. This testifies to the mutual interconnections between class and race  –​physical appearance and lineage are not the only markers leading to segregation, but class position also plays a fundamental role. Due to the inclusion of higher-​class Moroccans in the Ville, during the 1931 International Conference on Colonial Planning this planning legislation was vigorously praised by French urbanistes (planners) as non-​racist –​it was viewed as a harmless tool used simply to create class-​ related urban partitioning, much like in metropolitan Europe, without racial components (Nightingale 2012, 224). New Delhi, 1911–​1931 Like Prost, the architect Edwin Lutyens, the mind behind New Delhi, conceived cities comprehensively as organisms. According to Nightingale (2012, 194 et passim) the two architects’ ideals and styles had more similarities than dissimilarities  –​as a result, Rabat and Delhi display striking resemblances, one of which is the presence of the Ville Nouvelle and the cordon sanitaire. In New Delhi, the New City was just south of Shahjahanabad, which became known as Old Delhi. These morphological similarities notwithstanding, the ideologies and practices of planning and governing the two cities differed substantially. Constructed between 1911 and 1931, New Delhi was conceived, like Rabat, as the new capital. As had been the case with Fez, Calcutta, the historical capital, was too troublesome; it was also particularly unhealthy due to the presence of slums and the impossibility of developing a quiet area far enough away from decaying neighborhoods. The key measure that ruled New Delhi’s spatial structure was the cantonment, an administrative unit that hosted British troops with the aim of keeping them healthy and efficient (King 1976, 117–​118). Health and hygiene were both the main concern and the main organizing principles of British Delhi’s imposition of racial segregation, which made it possible, as in Rabat, to create a “clean” New City isolated from the old, “polluted” one. From the beginning of the planning process, health and hygiene were the main reasons for building the cordon sanitaire, which separated the new city from the old.11 However, the existence of the cordon sanitaire hardly curbed British officials’ concerns. Less than a decade after the construction of New Delhi began, factories and commerce opportunities were expanding and encroaching on the New City. Basic infrastructures such as pipe water and sewerage systems did not keep up with this development, and consequently the New City became even more crowded and unsanitary. By the 1920s, tuberculosis had become a serious problem, but since it affected only the poorer and “native” classes, it received little attention by the governors (Legg 2007, 156–​158). By the early 1930s, the situation had

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reached its peak: in 1934, an article in The Times of India entitled “Delhi the death-​trap” pictured the city as “a hot bed of preventable disease … so great is the overcrowding in some parts of the city that the houses are nothing short of death traps” (quoted in Hosagrahar 2007, 221). Congestion, hygiene and mobility were the main factors leading to racial segregation, which in turn –​very much as in Rabat –​was discursively articulated as class differences. It fixed the (“native”) urban poor within Old Delhi’s borders with its polluted and unsanitary conditions, while the urban (“European”) wealthy elite could enjoy New Delhi, where the elegant Beaux Arts avenues and buildings remained pristine and uncontaminated. Within this context, British colonizers in India viewed urban “natives” simultaneously as a threat to (racial) order and purity and as a necessary labor force for the wealth of the Empire. They were deemed “masses” of workers, a view which resembled the dominant perception of industrial slum-​dwellers in late nineteenth-​century London or Manchester. Unlike French colonial domination in Morocco, British officials in India did not make the preservation of local customs and traditions their chief goal. As proven by the long tradition of Orientalist scholarship in India, these customs were preserved, but only because British officials decided to cooperate with Indian rulers in maintaining the Empire’s splendor and development. Utilitarianism, along with economic liberalism and ethical evangelicalism, was the main ideology behind the British colonial project in the Orient (Low 1996, 104–​110; Said 1978). Addis Ababa, 1936–​1941 Italian Fascist troops occupied Addis Ababa in 1936 and remained in Ethiopia as rulers until 1941. During these five years, the city became the capital of the Italian Empire and was reshaped according to the dominant emerging paradigm of urban planning, which was squarely embedded within the comprehensive Fascist ideology of power. Therefore, in comparison to France and Britain, Italian (Fascist) colonial ideologies and rationalities of urban rule are relatively easier to detect, because they directly originated from Mussolini’s systematic and rudimentary social view of racial hierarchy. According to this view, key to the Italian colonial project in East Africa was the preoccupation of demographic domination: East Africa needed a repopulation of white folks in order to alleviate the growing unemployment in Italy, as well as to regain order and peace as a white space (Reitani 1986, 221; Ben-​Ghiat 2001, 128). In line with Mussolini’s view, Ignazio Guidi and Cesare Valle, the two Italian architects who planned Addis Ababa, described the city as “the true negro city, that is, the unhappy result of the incapacity of blacks on the whole, and Ethiopians in particular, of progress” (Valle 1937, quoted in Boralevi 1986, 236, my translation, emphasis added). The architects then explained

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that “the fundamental principle on which the urban planning is based is the strict separation between the indigenous quarter and the Italians” (ibid., 40, my translation). This directly referred to one of the key national principles of urban planning, which were approved during the First Italian National Congress of Urban Planning (Primo Congresso Nazionale di Urbanistica) that was held in Rome in 1937: “Starting from the very first planning norms in each city, the absolute separation between Italian and indigenous quarters should be guaranteed” (quoted in Boralevi 1986, 247). More generally, in Addis Ababa, Tripoli, and all other Italian-​dominated urban centers in East Africa, racial segregation was imagined and enacted based on the assumption that “inferior races,” such as black people, were “barbarians” lacking a proper history and, thus, lacking civilization (see also Fuller 1996, 413). In light of this, unlike the French in Rabat, Italian colonizers proudly resorted to the discourse of race and white supremacy. Conversely to Lyautey’s aesthetic taste for local cultures and his will to preserve them, moreover, Italian colonizers considered “natives” as barely human, largely without a history or culture of their own.12 Perhaps nowhere else was this more obvious than in the treatment of populations deemed dangerous in neighboring Libya. While “dangerous natives” were interned in camps throughout all the colonized territory of East Africa, in the late 1920s Cyrenaican nomads suffered from confinement on an unprecedented scale. According to Libya’s Fascist governor, Badoglio, the goal was to prevent local populations from providing “support to rebel groups,” secluding them “into a restricted space, far from their own land, so that there is a space between them and the rebels” (quoted in Labanca 2005, 31). Until 1933, when the last camp was shut down, Italians interned about 100,000 Jabal nomads; about 40,000 of them died in camps, while a further 30,000 became refugees (Labanca 2005). Among the three cities under scrutiny in this chapter, Addis Ababa, as an emanation of Fascist urban planning in East Africa, represents perhaps the most direct way of imposing racial segregation. In contrast to Delhi, where racial threats were articulated through the prism of hygiene and pollution, in Addis Ababa the blunt Fascist idiom of race prevailed: blackness was deemed a social threat in itself, codified within the comprehensive Fascist ideology, which was systematized in 1938, three years after the invasion of Ethiopia, with both the issue of the racial laws and the first issue of the “scientific” journal The Defense of the Race (La difesa della razza).13 Addis Ababa’s racist planning, therefore, was a spatial crystallization not of single architects’, critics’ and reformers’ convictions, as in the cases of Rabat and New Delhi, but more generally of Italian Fascist theorizations of racial purity, white supremacy and mythological beliefs of the Roman Empire’s superiority. Although it lasted only a few years, the separation between “natives” and Italians in Addis Ababa was supposed to lay “the foundations of the future” (Fuller 1996, 413).

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Table 1.1  Colonial ideologies and segregation rationales Colonized city

Major colonial ideology

Major segregation rationale

French Rabat

Protection of local culture

Cultural preservation

British New Delhi

Wealth: commerce and industry; Overseas hegemony

Hygiene and sanitary conditions

Italian Addis Ababa

Demographic colonialism; Re-​imposing white supremacy in East Africa

Enforcing social order

Colonial segregation rationales The discussion of these three colonized cities –​Rabat, New Delhi and Addis Ababa –​can now be brought to a conclusive synthesis. I dissect two main issues within each urban history: colonial ideology, namely the main ideological references and motivations behind each national colonial project, and segregation rationale, namely the principles that the ruling elite (i.e. architects, governors, etc.) followed, whereby spatial segregation of “natives” was imposed. Table 1.1 is a brief distillation of the main themes that will be key in discussing the four empirical analyses in Chapter 6. As explained in the analysis of the three cities, these ideologies and rationales are not mutually exclusive. Table 1.1, therefore, accounts for and emphasizes key differences by singling out dominant factors underpinning racial segregation. While French rule was primarily predicated upon cultural protection, British rule was driven instead by economic and hygiene concerns, and the Italian colonial imperative was fully imbued within Fascist doctrines of race. However, it is important to note that the idea of “city” within the three colonial regimes is largely similar, and it is predicated upon a conception “organism” in need of growing (a notion originated in the metropole) –​that is, simultaneously cultivating its positive aspects and repressing its negative ones. This shows that between the metropole and the colony there has been an intensive circulation of expert knowledge and ideologies of spatial organization of human difference. In addition, many other connections were at work: in the case of New Delhi, for instance, the dominant representations of natives mirrored representations of the urban poor in metropolitan cities like London and Manchester. With this threefold analytical scheme firmly in the background, I am now moving on, to examine the social conditions behind the genesis of stigmatized and segregated “Gypsy urban areas.”

Metropole: from sedentarization to segregation So far, I have showed how race was the key driver of segregation in three colonized cities and proposed an analytical scheme of segregation rationales

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in each of these cities. Enacting racial segregation in these three cities, as we have seen, stemmed largely from the metropole-​crafted view of cities as living organisms. Once colonial cities were planned, this transfer of knowledge, views and approaches happened in reverse, giving architects and planners in the metropole a chance to consistently anchor their designs, imagination and theories in real cases. One instance of such a transfer occurred when Henri Prost returned to Paris in the early 1920s: he was assigned the task of creating order in the suburbs, which, due to recent housing and land speculation, had become a major social and health issue. He accomplished his task by referring to the concept of “morphological homogeneity,” which he first brought forward for the plan of Casablanca. His idea was that rather than satellite spaces, Parisian suburbs had to become part of the same “organism” as the more central districts of Paris (Haffner 2013, 49–​50). This is a clear example of circular relationships between the metropole and the colony, supporting the idea that rather than prioritizing “colonial legacies,” it would be more solidly grounded to speak about a mutual circulation between colony and metropole (Cooper and Stoler 1997, 33; Karakayali 2012). Since the late nineteenth ​ century, circulations and mutual borrowings between metropole and colony have become even more explicit in the case of the discourses and practices around “nomadism,” within which Romani people were repeatedly mentioned. These discourses seem to resonate with twenty-​first-​century social dynamics –​as Belton (2005, 142) succinctly put it, “The social position of Gypsies in contemporary [UK] society can be seen to have a striking resemblance to that of the colonized people.” The following discussion expands and historicizes Belton’s claim by focusing on some of the borrowings and refractions between colony and metropole with reference to European cities and their spatial arrangements. I will organize the discussion into four chronological segments: (a) the late nineteenth century; (b) from the early twentieth century to 1945; (c) from 1945 to the 1970s; and (d) the 1970s and onward. I will show that the colony–​metropole nexus can be detected in each of these four time periods. Late nineteenth century In Britain, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the exponential urban growth and the consequent concentration of working-​class households in restricted spaces near factories created trouble for the bourgeoisie: From 1880 to 1900, perhaps 1914, middle-​class society  –​the decision-​ makers, the leader-​writers, the pamphleteers, the activists –​was running scared. […] In this sense industrialization and urbanization […] did create a new set of social relationships and a new set of social perceptions. (Hall 2014, 47)

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A growing segment of the urban population was falling into unemployment, which gave rise to what was named “surplus population.” Morris (1994) extensively discusses how the urban poor were largely seen through a dichotomous moral prism of worthiness versus unworthiness. In line with the Malthusian paradigm of poverty explanation, at that time highly popular, the ultimate cause of poverty was largely identified and defined as moral failure; consequently, the remedy was moral education. As Ross (2011, 386) has lucidly shown, this moralization of poverty was related to issues of vagrancy and idleness: “The existence, in the cities and their environs, of ‘masterless men’ (vagabonds or vagrants who were dispossessed of property, rights, or bonds to their social superiors) was a clear threat to the kind of social stability desired by elites.” Hacking (2004) extends this point about vagrancy and idleness by discussing the pervasive medicalization of deviance in late nineteenth-​century and early twentieth-​century Europe. Considering “[a]‌mbulatory automatism –​by whatever name, dromomanie, poriomenie, Wandertrieb, determinismo ambulatorio” (2004, 125) as an instance of madness, the philosopher explains that: After 1870, vagrancy  –​vagabondage  –​began to be recognized, and by 1885 it was deemed a major social problem. To exaggerate, it became the universal of mental pathology, the prism through which all the categories of madness and abnormality could be distributed. Vagrancy was thus medicalized straightaway. Vagrants were degenerates, sure enough. And many must have suffered from automatisme ambulatoire. Jean-​Claude Beaune has gone so far as to describe the medicalization, and medical incarceration, of tramps and hobos as a species of “genocide.” The population was not literally killed, but it was extinguished in asylums and jails. (Hacking 2004, 132) The formation of these repressive practices and discursive regimes of stigma and criminalization were unfolding in strict relation to what was happening in the colonized territories of the British Empire. Focusing on nineteenth-​ century interchanges between Britain and South Africa, Magubane discusses, among other issues, “the colonial origins of the nomad stereotype” (2004, 51), which has circulated in England since the mid-​1830s. The 1834 Cape Vagrancy Ordinance, which criminalized the mobility of Khoikhoi servants and enslaved people, resulted in significantly limiting their livelihoods. Representations of vagrants and idles as instinctively deviant subjects were circulating in South African newspapers at the time of the Cape Vagrancy Ordinance. The sociologist highlights the dissemination between Britain and South Africa of criminalizing representations of idleness and vagrancy, which typically compared the urban poor in the metropole to the nomads in the colony. Hence, since its origin, the discourse of nomadism was coupled with the one of moralizing poverty and embedded within

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mutually reinforcing relationships and circulations between the colony and the metropole. This point is fundamental. It shows that the dominant (authoritative) discourse of nomadism was chiefly crafted by “Western” expert knowledge primarily due to the tight interaction of three factors: the discourse of labor, the discourse of morality, and the discourse and treatment of colonized “natives.” How could these three factors remain tightly connected? The answer to this question lies in a fourth and decisive element, which provided the powerful allure of authority to the previous three: racial thinking and racial theorizing. Closely connected to the deprecation of poverty, idleness and vagrancy as signs of moral inferiority, racial(ist) theories proliferated across metropolitan Europe, proposing ideas that included measuring skulls and other body parts to determine one’s propensity for committing crimes. Within these theories, nomadism occupied a specific role, which was epitomized by the figure of “the Gypsy.” Some of the most influential racial theorists were the Italian Cesare Lombroso (1835–​1909) and the French Arthur de Gobineau (1816–​ 1882), preceded by the influential German statistician Heinrich Grellman (1753–​ 1804). Despite their divergent beliefs in types of racial determinism, criminalization and risks of miscegenation, these three popular intellectuals considered Romani people to be a “race” invariably inferior to the “European” race.14 Racial thinking on the one hand, which was put at work first in the colonies, and poverty frames on the other, which acquired their urban dimension in the metropole, converged in understanding poor workers and the racially deemed “other” as capitalism’s very physical conditions of possibility: “Imperialism,” as Baranowski (2011, 190) noted, “linked the two bourgeois phobias of socialism and racial mixing, in which workers were imagined much like ‘natives,’ unclean, insubordinate and dark.” Their exploitation, hence, was perfectly legitimized. Under this racial gaze, during the second half of the nineteenth century the racially deemed “nomad G ​ ypsy” became both highly visible and institutionally criminalized. In England, “Gypsy encampments” started to appear on the outskirts of large cities, increasing the already strong fears about the “surplus” working classes. A unique racial phobia concerning Romani people was that, on the one hand, in a promiscuous context such as the crowded and unsanitary urban peripheries “pure” Romanies may interbreed with the non-​Romani working classes (a typical fear of the Gypsy Lore Society), and on the other hand, that the working classes would embrace vagrancy and idleness (Smith and Greenfields 2013, 56). These phobias and fears were so popular across Western European national bureaucracies that in 1864 the French Public Safety Agency of the Ministry of the Interior extended police surveillance to all those “known as Bohemians” by forcing them to settle down (About 2012, 101–​102). In 1899, moreover, the German Security Police established the “Information Service on Gypsies” at the Imperial Police Headquarters in Munich, whose main task was to control

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and possibly put an end to the vagrancy of all Romani people on German soil regardless of their citizenship status, as well as to collect biometric data from them. In Central and Eastern Europe, the expert construction of deviance did not follow exactly the same lines. Divisions and classifications generating hierarchies of moral worth rested on clear principles of civilization and “Kultur” that included Romani populations in the lowest ranks. It is within this context that, in 1893, Hungarian ethnologist Antal Herrmann declared that sedentarizing Romani people was “a political as well as a humanitarian duty” and that sedentarization was “the foundation of cultural development” (quoted in Pogány 2004, 31). This kind of view had its roots in the programs initiated around the mid-​eighteenth century by the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa and her successor Joseph II, which involved forcibly sedentarizing and socially assimilating Romani populations (Plésiat 2010; Stewart 1997). Driven by both objectives of centralized state territorial control and religious desires to turn Romanies into “good Christians,” the Habsburg sedentarization policy was the longest lasting of this kind. Clearly, these measures, occurring in the “heart” of Europe, bear a perfect resemblance to the stigmatization of the “nomad” and the “idle” in South African British colonies discussed by Magubane (2004). This is a key point for our discussion: the proliferation of racialist expert knowledge and repressive state measures addressing vagrancy seem to design a triangular connection between Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and colonized territories. The treatment of Romani people across Europe, therefore, allows one to grasp the main connections, borrowings and more generally social forces along this triangular network. From the early twentieth century to 1945 With the beginning of the twentieth century, expert knowledge and state policy addressing Romani people across Western and Eastern Europe intensified. One of the most influential academic sources on nomadism was the then-​President of the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations, Charles B. Davenport, an American geneticist who had earned his PhD in zoology from Harvard in 1892 and subsequently moved to Chicago as an assistant professor. In his 1915 essay The Feebly Inhibited. Nomadism, or the Wandering Impulse, with Special Reference to Heredity, Davenport details his theory of nomadism, which later served as a source of inspiration for Nazi mass eugenic experiments on Romani people. Davenport’s essay is based on analyses of 100 “family histories of nomads” and seeks to explain the common traits of nomadism. His argument is that, while the impulse or instinct of wandering is present in all human beings, “culture” or “civilization” inhibits this urge in most people, and those who lack this inhibiting force thus belong to the “nomadic race”: “Nomads, of all kinds, have a special racial

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trait –​are, in a proper sense, members of the nomadic race. This trait is the absence of the germinal determiner that makes for sedentariness, stability, domesticity” (Davenport 1915, 25). Davenport divided nomads into two categories. The first includes those whose inhibitors are periodically and gradually paralyzed, so that the individual feels a sudden and incontinent impulse to wander around; the second category includes people whose inhibitors are so weak that the nomadic impulse does not have to wait for these inhibitors to become paralyzed, and “to this class belongs many typical rolling-​stones or ne’er-​do-​wells, some tramps, the gypsies, and other nomadic tribes” (ibid., my italics). In order to define the nomadism of the “Gypsies,” Davenport quoted the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910 edition): Their [Gypsies’] inborn tendency to roaming made them the terror of the peasantry and the despair of every legislator who tried to settle them on land […] They have no ethical principles […] There is extreme moral laxity in the relations of the two sexes and, on the whole, they take life easily and are complete fatalists, at the same time they are great cowards. (ibid., 11) Significantly, as Zygmunt Bauman (1991, 32–​33) discussed, the geneticist contributed to shaping the rationale of the Nazi eugenic programs: “It was [Davenport], who gave the public accolade and blessing to the top German expert-​breeder of human animals, Professor Eugen Fischer, by nominating him his successor as President of the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations.”15 The figure and the work of Professor Eugen Fischer (1874–​1967), physician, anthropologist and (eu)geneticist, uncover another fundamental networked connection between colony and metropole.16 He began his career in German Southwest Africa, today’s Namibia, where, in 1908, he conducted his first research on racial purity, which directly led to the 1912 German law prohibiting intermarriage in the colonies. Becoming in 1927 the director of the Berlin-​based Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics (today Institute for Political Sciences), he conducted sterilization programs directed at children with African ancestry and eugenic experimentations on Romani people. Fischer’s knowledge production, legacy and strong influence on racial thinking and politics, which extended as far as 1942, when he left his position, calls for more research on the specific connections between colony and metropole and how these connections have shaped forms of control and knowledge in each of the two contexts. What can be inferred so far is that Nazi and Fascist experimentation, persecution and subsequent extermination of Romani people are squarely inscribed in a chain of measures, events and ideas which, rather than only in Europe, unfolded across the Global North–South divide, in a constant circulation

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of goods, money, doctrines, representations, experiences and people –​both colonized and colonizers. Equally important for capturing the tight nexus between colony and metropole across the two centuries, is the 1912 French law introducing a control device for Romani people, which was first experimented with in the colonies. As already mentioned, in France and other European countries during the second half of the nineteenth century, nomadism came to be seen as a problem of public order and criminality. In 1912, a law was passed entitled “The exercise of itinerant professions and nomads”; the text distinguished between three categories of people according to residence and domicile. First, those having residence in France and an itinerant job had to declare their presence to the prefecture. Second, those having neither residence nor domicile in France, but having a profession of “commerciant ou industriel forain” had to have an identity notebook with a photo. Finally, those without domicile and residence in France –​deemed “nomads” –​were ordered by the 1912 law to carry a special notebook called a carnet d’identité anthropometrique (anthropometric identity notebook), which included two pictures of the individual’s face, front and profile, a description of family genealogy, and fingerprints; 100 blank pages followed, in which the individual was required to have an official stamp recording any entrance and exit to and from villages, towns and cities. The carnet was introduced by French colonial administrators to control servants and sex workers (About 2009, 5), and at the new year of 1912 was directly transplanted into the metropolitan territory for controlling the mobility of “nomad” Gypsies.17 The circulation of these racist forms of knowledge and state devices of control across metropole and colony, as well as across Europe, not only converged in the mid-​1930s making of genocide, but extended beyond 1945. Porrajmos, meaning “devouring” in the Romani language, refers to European Romani people’s experiences of re-​education, eugenic experimentations and extermination programs under the Nazi and Fascist rules.18 Happening alongside the Shoah, and being part of the same apparatus of racist policy sustained by the myth of eugenetically constructing the pure and superior “Arian race,” the Porrajmos, like the Shoah, has its origins in colonial rule (Arendt 1966, ­chapter 7; Baranowski 2011, 191). Besides the already discussed process of manufacturing racialist knowledge and social deviance that had happened across colony and metropole since the late nineteenth century, the very notion of the camp as a governing tool for concentrating civilians has its origins in the colonial practice of preventing possible “native” uprising (Césaire 1955; Rahola 2003). In the Porrajmos, around half a million Roma and Sinti were exterminated.19 Racial stigma and criminalization, and more broadly notions of Romani people as morally degenerated and less worthy, largely endured after 1945 as a pivotal driver of sedentarization policy (e.g. Bravi 2009; Sibley 1998). How was this possible –​how could the assumptions and forms of knowledge driving the Porrajmos remain in place?

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1945–​1970s One part of the answer can be found in state politics after the Porrajmos. Fully ignored during the Nuremberg trials, and not recognized until the 1980s, the Porrajmos has largely been viewed as an extreme measure to a problem that is nonetheless “real,” that is, Romani people’s allegedly deviant tendencies. Neither Germany nor Italy, not to mention France, have to date recognized the racial logic of Fascist and Nazi genocidal policies addressing Romani people. Eugenic experiments and other state programs, supported by abundant mainstream academic knowledge, have not been part of an organic Europe-​wide politics of memory about the grounds where these state programs took place.20 This neglect has arguably contributed to exclude a firmly anti-​racist politics with regard to Romani people. Another part of the answer may lie in the post-​Holocaust essentially unanimous dismissal of both colonial history and race as a specific topic of academic analysis and public debate. The mainstream, state-​sponsored expert knowledge that supported forced sedentarization policy addressing Romani people in both Eastern and Western Europe during the 1960s and 1970s was in line with the concurrent decision, first authoritatively imposed in 1950 by the UNESCO statement on race, to get rid of any reference to race in Europe. The less explicit institutional desire to minimize colonial history in school curricula and public debates in the “West” happened alongside this silencing of race. Far from removing racial inequalities and multiple forms of segregation, though, this process of obfuscating historical and cultural data arguably reduced the possibility to detect various and often-​subtle forms of race-​based social injustice (Chapter 6; Fassin and Fassin 2006; Lentin 2008). While late nineteenth-​century political reactions against “Wanderlust” and “automatisme ambulatoire” were habitually driven by racialist theories, whether criminological, psychological, geneticist, or a combination of them and others, after the Nazi and Fascist politics, state sedentarization measures were legitimized by only partially different forms of knowledge. Scholarly analyses of “Gypsy-​nomad children’s” psychology examinations in 1960s Italy, for example, show how racial thinking, without explicit reference to race (razza), clearly structured academic knowledge on Romani people (Bravi 2009). From the mid-​1980s to the mid-​1990s, this kind of expert knowledge consistently provided regional policymakers with an authoritative understanding of “nomad culture” and “lifestyle.” On the basis of this understanding, twelve regional councils voted favorably to as many laws ordering the construction of camps only for Romani people, typically in the urban periphery, in order to protect nomadism while ensuring sedentarization (Chapter 4).21 Similarly, the Socialist urge not to consider any hierarchy among humans in terms of essential characteristics was rather ineffective when it came to state-​ coined expressions such as “Roma’s ‘backwardness’ ” (Alamgir 2013, 74). The need to dissimulate racial references seems to have informed the 1958 Slovak

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sedentarization law, which indirectly addressed Romani people by referring to “nomads” and “half-​nomads.” Although only dissimulation can be detected in that policy, a later policy displays a rather clear eugenic intention. The 1972 Sterilization Law appeared within a highly vocal discourse by demographers, who sought to curb the growth of Romani families in an attempt to increase the “qualitative makeup” of the national population (Sokolova 2005, 83). As a result, from 1972 to 1990 a disproportionately high number of Romani women were sterilized. Since the mid-​1970s across much of Western Europe, a peculiar spatial formation emerged, as part of the (urban) mass-​sedentarization process: the “Gypsy camp.”22 This policy-​driven tool for eliciting a process of sedentarization while concomitantly ensuring the control of “nomads” was first introduced in Britain by the 1968 Caravan Sites Act (Chapter 5); one year later, the Council of Europe Recommendation 563 (1969) urged the construction by the authorities concerned [i.e. Member State governments and local authorities], for Gypsies and other travellers, of caravan sites which should be provided with sanitary installations, electricity, telephones, community buildings, and fire precautions, as well as working areas, and should be situated near to schools and villages or towns. The recommendation, entitled Situation of Gypsies and other travellers in Europe, is the first European document addressing Romani people.23 In the text, the main rationale for ordering member states to begin construction of “caravan sites” was the supposed “lack of integration in modern European society” of “Gypsies and other travellers.” Poor schooling, in particular, was considered to be “resulting mainly from the Gypsies’ and other travellers’ nomadic way of life.” The chief remedy for this, Council of Europe authorities maintained, was the construction of “caravan sites” where “Gypsy children” could receive allegedly proper education. This shows that the recommendation did not distance itself from the late nineteenth-​century conception of “the nomad” insofar as “nomadism” was still deemed a problem. While framed differently from the previous century’s racially informed medicalizing discourse on the nomad-​deviant, the nomad problem re-​emerged at the dawn of the postcolonial era as a quintessential state concern. The global socio-​economic and political transformations that began in the late 1960s were the structural conditions under which constructing “caravan sites” became a necessity for both the state and the Council of Europe. Soon after, along with the gradual emergence of neoliberal doctrines of population governance, the increase in demand for low-​skill and service labor created the necessary conditions for an increase in national and international mobility, further elicited by the weakening of international trade regulations (Sassen 1998). In this context of growing inequality in the distribution of global wealth, the Western European state’s main priorities gradually shifted from

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providing welfare for all to ensuring security and social order. The “Gypsy camp,” variously called “caravan site,” “nomad camp,” and other names, precisely served these renewed state priorities. From the state’s perspective, control, urban security and a gradual increase of moralizing discourses on poverty and (in)civility were the main interests for establishing and promoting the “Gypsy camp.” From a Romani perspective, as evictions largely increased in number and violence, and the shortage of itinerant jobs became barely sustainable, camps could be seen, by some, as a least worse alternative. These perceptions and assessments, importantly, varied across countries, cities and family groups (see Chapters 4 and 5). The key point about the “Gypsy camp” is that it was the only comprehensive state policy targeting Romani populations in Europe in the twentieth century, besides the Nazi and Fascist various projects of annihilation. This point about exclusivity and ad hoc policy is fundamental; this is not because one can trace an unproblematic connection between the Nazi and Fascist racial projects, including its camp system, and the 1960s emergence of “Gypsy camps,” but rather because it signals the state’s relative uneasiness in detecting cultural commonalities among Romani populations. The Third Reich’s and the Mussolini regime’s employment of racial theories of categorization was just one attempt in overcoming this difficulty;24 the 1969 Council of Europe category “Gypsies and other travellers” may be viewed as another such attempt, albeit clearly different in rationale, scope and effects from the former. Both attempts show the quintessential ambivalence which Romani people bear in the eyes of the majority. The very idea of state attempts at lumping “Gypsies and travellers” together deserves serious scrutiny; this happened in many cities in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s and continues to circulate in numerous municipal, regional and national offices today.25 Many Eastern European Romani workers and families arriving in Western Europe, for example, are immediately labeled “nomads” or “Gypsies” by the state. At the very core of “ethnic” classifications lies the fundamental assumption that individuals can be ordered on the basis of fixed or ascribed categories of ancestral belonging, independently from the individuals’ own stance on these categories.26 This way of conceiving group distinctiveness and related social relationships was first practiced by colonizers whenever they needed to make sense of, and create order within, the unknown “indigenous” individuals, groups, and societies. In one of the first scenes in Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1992[1899]) provides an example of the colonized’s indistinctness in the eye of the colonial settler. The protagonist, Marlow, is recounting his own experiences at the station of the ivory-​trading company for which he works. After describing Africa’s infrastructures as dysfunctional, Marlow/​Conrad voices his ideas about black workers who are left to die near the station: “Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain,

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abandonment, and despair” (18, my italics). Reference to abstract, inanimate entities such as “shapes” is by no means atypical among colonial views of “natives.” Fanon, in Toward the African Revolution (1967), lucidly synthesizes the purpose and implication of this approach: The object of lumping all Negroes together under the designation of “Negro people” is to deprive them of any possibility of individual expression. What is thus attempted is to put them under the obligation of matching the idea one has of them […] The truth is that there is nothing a priori to warrant the assumption that such a thing as a Negro people exists. (17, 18, my italics) So far, I have discussed how the racial subtext of post-​1945 state practices and policies vis-​à-​vis Romani people showed continuities with the late nineteenth century’s criminalization of vagrancy, poverty and nomadism. In different ways this racial subtext concerned also cities in both Eastern and Western Europe, within the sharp divergence between Socialist and Capitalist philosophies of government and development. Socialist cities variously articulated the achievements of the 1917 revolution in terms of state monopoly ownership of the means of production, wealth and land. The centralized urban planning guaranteed close control over urban space and life, and it was necessary to provide all newly created social classes of workers through public housing, a massive pillar of Socialist urban development (Smith 1996). Hence, the Socialist city was a territorial crystallization of a systematized social philosophy of progress, on the one hand, and living together, on the other, and was instrumental in the socio-​ scientific making of the yet-​to-​come Communist society. By contrast, Western European cities embodied the character of a less systematized yet equally imposing social philosophy, namely the interference of the market in state and public affairs. Occurring within different national contexts and time periods, from 1945 to 1989 Western European urban elites were mainly preoccupied with combining economic development and social cohesion (Kazepov 2005). Conversely, Socialist urban elites were not overly concerned about social cohesion, as the Socialist ideology provided all necessary guidelines to establish a tightly cohesive society of workers committed to collective social and economic development. Against this diverging background, the sedentarization of Romani people marks a definite convergence between socialist and capitalist Europe, and by historical extension, between post-​1945 urban Europe and European colonial rule. While since the late 1960s sedentarization had become a matter of halting sites and control in the capitalist West, in the various formations of state socialism of the East sedentarization was orchestrated as forced assimilation in the urban working classes. Various state programs of sedentarization of “nomads” had started since the 1950s and targeted mostly Romani people travelling across the countryside and nearby cities. Following different methods in different countries, extended families were forcibly pushed from

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shanties in rural areas into large blocks of flats typically nearby factories at the peripheries of mid-​sized and big cities, and adults were employed in those factories as cleaners or in other similarly low-​skilled occupations: [During the Socialist period] State authorities had destroyed thousands of shanties across the region, although thousands still remained at the end of the communist period. […] In general, the Gypsies received apartments in the cramped and shoddily constructed urban housing projects. Many local officials assigned the flats with fewer comforts […] than those allocated to gadje [non-​Romani people], knowing that the Roma would not dare to complain and expecting them to destroy the available amenities in any case. (Barany 2002, 130, 131) One exception to this trend was Yugoslavia, were Romani people could organize in associations which were relatively well regarded in the different republics, so that political, social and cultural participation emerged. It should be pointed out that neither in the East nor in the West were all Romani people sedentarized and not all were sedentarized in cities. After 1989, the urban areas where, after 1945, the state had forcibly sedentarized Romani collectives in both Eastern and Western Europe, typically became segregated and stigmatized. These two developments –​sedentarization and segregation, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 6, are the two essential dynamics of the same policy process, and they bear various correspondences to key rationalities of colonial urban rule. Hence, the genesis of today’s segregation of Romani populations in European cities can be identified both in segregation rationales first experimented in the colonies, and in socially dominant perceptions of nomadism as a stigmatized pathology that was crafted both in the colony and the metropole;27 these two interrelated processes unfolded through the mediation of Socialist and capitalist philosophies of national and urban development. At the same time, as in the case of segregation in colonized cities, GUAs emerged and evolved in different periods and in various ways according to national, urban and neighborhood context. Additionally, not all the areas where Romani people were sedentarized have become segregated and stigmatized; equally, not all contemporary GUAs are the result of former sedentarization areas. Hence, it seems improper to try to detect a precise point in time when GUAs emerged. What seems more necessary, rather, are in-​depth examinations of single urban contexts and various local mechanisms of segregation –​in the following four chapters I will propose such examinations. The 1970s and onward Before engaging with the empirical analysis of the four local segregating mechanisms, it is necessary to go on with the history of the post-​1945

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emergence of GUAs. Past the 1973 “oil crisis” and the concomitant breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, several Western governments took the decision to prioritize the free market over state guarantees of equality for all; this shift radically impacted social policy and the government of poverty. Thatcher’s (UK) and Reagan’s (US) terms in office, started in 1979 and 1980 respectively, were some of the most visible examples of this change, as each inaugurated a new paradigm in state policy and action that was first sketched in theory about three decades earlier: neoliberalism.28 While often used in an evocative rather than an analytically rigorous fashion, the concept is a useful reference for understanding how the government of populations has been evolving over the last approximately forty years. However, an analytical specification is needed. Here, by “neoliberalism” I refer to particular political and economic projects that prioritize not only the primacy of the free market over state action, but, equally, a comprehensive determination toward social and cultural change. As Harvey (2005, 3) has put it, “neoliberalism […] has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-​sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.” This is best described by Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim, during an interview she gave two years after her first election:29 It isn’t that I  set out on economic policies; it’s that I  set out really to change the approach, and changing the economics is the means to changing that approach. If you change the approach you really are after the heart and soul of the nation. Economics are the method, but the object is to change the heart and soul. Commenting on Thatcher’s words, Hilgers (2012, 82) underlines that “Neoliberalism is a political project. The necessity of making people adapt to a world of generalized competition supposes a radical reform that transforms the way in which they perceive their destiny.” Hence, neoliberalism can be seen as a socio-​economic and political engineering project that addresses not only social structures, but also cultural norms. Its main constitutive values can be identified not only in the primacy of the free market and competition over the welfare state and social solidarity, but also in the individualization of responsibility for one’s own socio-​economic conditions. This may recall the late nineteenth-​century moralizing and medicalizing views on the working classes that established a strict distinction between the worthy and the unworthy (urban) poor; relatedly, it recalls colonial endeavor of civilization and re-​education. As evidence of the connection between neoliberalism and colonialism I want to offer the following example. Driven by the mission civilisatrice ideology that I discussed in the first section of this chapter, in the early 1930s Morocco’s architect Joseph Marrast (1881–​1971) maintained that “[…] suggesting France’s respect for Islamic culture […] might help quell the Moroccan’s hostility

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toward European domination,” and gradually, by doing so, “we conquer the hearts of the natives and win their affection, as is our duty as colonizers” (quoted in Wright 1991, 1).30 I here identify a correspondence between ideologies of (French) colonial domination and Thatcher’s distinctive politics of “changing the heart and soul [of the nation].” Yet affinities between neoliberalism and colonialism do not seem limited to general intentions. In one of their many interventions on the logic of colonial rules, Comaroff and Comaroff (1997) have documented how British domination in Southern Tswana was a “methodical effort to reform the life [and to] recast African personhood and production, African habits and homes, African notions of value and virtue” (1997: xvi). Colonial projects were variously carried out on the ground by intimating intimate change, centering the imposition and perpetuation of a racist order on the prevalent idea of a “malleable” and disposable “native” subject who were deemed to belong to a lower degree of humanhood.31 Since the very origins of neoliberalism are to be found in neoclassical economics and liberal political theory (Foucault 2004, 135–​155),32 a continuity can be traced between liberalism-​driven colonial expansions and contemporary neoliberal doctrines. Crucially, in this regard, Hall (2011) recalls the colonial origins of liberalism. His analysis of the “ ‘splitting’ Liberalism practised” exposes the ambivalence that makes neoliberalism so appealing, that is: progress, but simultaneously the need to contain any ‘threat from below’; tolerance, reform, moderation […] colonial governmentality, discipline, violence and authority for recalcitrant ‘other’ native peoples abroad; emancipation and subjugation. (2011, 710, my emphasis).33 It is within the framework of this ambivalence that neoliberalism can acquire a wide consensus (see also Evans 2004: 3 et passim). While first “practiced” in the early 1980s by conservative governments, its popularity and domination in policy and economic circles surged exponentially due to post-​1989 hyperfinancialization and the gradual but steady retreat of state supply. One example of neoliberalism’s success is the unprecedented power of global economic organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, both of which often dictate financial policy to national government (Sassen 2014). Against the background of the “end of ideology” whereby geopolitical conflicts are perceived no longer as economy-​and politics-​based but rather as culture-​and religion-​based (e.g. Huntington 2000), it is no surprise that an ambivalent ideology such as neoliberalism –​an ideology which is self-​proclaimed a-​ideological, as it could be deemed –​has become hegemonic and embraced, although differently, by both centre-​Left and centre-​Right coalitions and parties. A concept similar to Hall’s (2011) “splitting Liberalism practised,” “actually existing neoliberalism” (Brenner and Theodore 2002) denotes various and

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variable expressions of neoliberalism taking place primarily in cities (see also Peck et al. 2009; Brenner et al. 2010; Hilgers 2012; Wacquant 1999, 2006). I maintain that the post-​1970s spatial segregation of Romani people in Europe can be understood as a cross-​national, and at times translocal instance of “actually existing neoliberalism,” variously configured. The mass sedentarization programs which began in the late 1960s in both capitalist and socialist Europe, ended up producing urban areas which rapidly became stigmatized and largely more deprived than the rest of the city. The changing global economic and financial balances and the concomitant shifting state agendas in the 1980s (from providing social care to containing social deviance) are the general context in which segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” emerged. These processes only partially differ in Eastern and Western Europe. Indeed, the transformations from State Socialism to the market economy in the early 1990s had a devastating impact on the lives of Eastern European urban poor, including many Romani people (Ladányi and Szelényi 2006). In Western Europe, steadily growing unemployment rates from 1970 to the late 1990s (IMF 1999) have been the main macro-​structural phenomenon leading to worsening living conditions in those areas, and to ever-​increasing isolation and stigmatization of urban peripheries at large (Mingione 1996). Under these political–​economic circumstances, within a hegemonic neoliberal framework, socio-​spatial borders have often become effective tools in governing poor and homogenized populations and groups; race, in this context, has provided a handy reference for both engineering and making sense of impoverished and stigmatized territories at the margins of towns and cities.

Conclusion: toward an ethnography of nodes This chapter has outlined historical and geographical connections and refractions between colony and metropole in establishing the conditions under which GUAs have emerged in post-​1945 Europe. I first constructed, through a dissection of three colonized cities’ segregation rationales, an analytical scheme that I will employ for a comprehensive analysis of the four local segregating mechanisms in Chapter 6. I then traced a genealogy of the formation of GUAs in post-​WWII Europe. As I have shown, the politics of keeping a homogeneously classified group of people within the boundaries of one portion of the urban space has its origins in ideologies, and dispositions, according to which certain groups occupy such a low position in the social symbolic hierarchy that they have to remain constrained, both socio-​ economically and spatially; they are deemed disposable, their very livelihood remains largely ignored, and their behavior and spatial position are contained and disciplined. The origins of these processes, as I discussed, reside in the varied colony–​ metropole circulations of goods, people, forms of knowledge, and technologies of governance of populations, especially during the mid-​to late nineteenth century, particularly with reference to vagrancy and

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nomadism and their attributed deviant (racial) traits. Post-WWII, while in Eastern Europe sedentarization largely occurred within the wider Socialist engineering project of fabricating the working class, in the capitalist West sedentarization policies were largely framed within the discourse of deviance and public order that intensified in the late 1970s alongside the rise in popularity of neoliberal doctrines of governing urban marginality. In all these periods, from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s and beyond, correspondences between colonial practices and forms of knowledge about “natives” and representations and policy vis-​à-​vis Romani people can be detected. Upon the slow evaporation of colonial domination that began at the end of the nineteenth century, urban planners in the metropole gradually faced similar questions to those circulating among colonial elites: how can social heterogeneity be governed spatially? The notion of defending the city-asorganism from diseases and threats –​be they hygiene, economic, political or legal –​took root in the bourgeois culture of empires’ elites and contributed to shaping urban morphology and governance. It is important to consider, as I have shown, that these processes, while widely spreading across colonized countries and cities, occurred differently in various contexts and had by no means the same consequences. Precisely for doing justice to this variety of cases, I proposed the analytical scheme of segregation rationales (Table 1.1), whose relevance will become clear as the empirical discussion unfolds in the following four chapters, especially in Chapter 6. Interested in empirically examining “actually existing” instances of segregation, rather than limiting this book to a general analysis of GUAs, in the next four chapters I will ethnographically discuss four contemporary local segregating mechanisms by looking at five European cities: Cluj-​Napoca, Romania, in Chapter 2; Pescara, Italy, in Chapter 3; Florence, Italy, and Montreuil, France, in Chapter 4; and Salford, UK, in Chapter 5. The importance of phenomenologically focusing on precise local settings has been at the core of my ethnographic practice since my research began. Contextualization from an ethnographic and historical perspective has not only meant taking into account the political, social and economic conditions of segregation, but also –​and, indeed, primarily –​the historical trajectories of these conditions. This translated into approaching segregation as a process –​one of the three contributions of this book (see Introduction). For this reason, I will look at the different GUAs’ very emergence and at the conditions under which they have been persisting. The “web” in which GUAs are nodes, as I hope I have shown in this chapter, is more than the mere sum of its parts. It is a systemic phenomenon constituted by different elements, including representations of “natives” and Romani people, governance doctrines, dispositions and practices circulating across colony and (former) metropole. I leave to Chapter 6 the task of connecting the historical, theoretical and empirical discussions through the prism of the analytical scheme of colonial segregation rationales, and I will trace the contours of what I name racial cities.

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Notes 1 During the last quarter of the nineteenth century slavery was abolished in most European colonies. We can say that the abolition of slavery is one of the conditions under which the natives became more dangerous in the eyes of the colonizer. The popularity of camps as governance devices for civilian populations in the late nineteenth century (see this chapter) may have been prompted not only by the recently invented barbed wire (1864) but also by the recently ​extended freedom of “natives.” 2 The late 1970s and early 1980s saw a proliferation of seminal studies on the importance of looking at colonial processes in order to understand contemporary ones. See, for example, Todorov (1992) and Wolf (1982). While it is a powerful source for understanding the sociology and social anthropology of contemporary Europe, this body of knowledge seems to remain influential largely only among historians. 3 Racial segregation in the colonies goes back to the beginning of colonization. What I suggest here refers to the ways in which cities and the urban space came to be theorized systematically. 4 Ken Worpole (2000) discusses at length the prominence of notions of sexual and moral “degeneration” in theories and public discourses on the urban poor in England. 5 For a discussion on these movements, see Nightingale (2012, 194 et passim); Hall (2014[1988], esp. ­chapters 4 and 6). 6 I am here referring only to Western European empires. I omit others, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Chinese Empire, otherwise the discussion of colonial urbanism would require far more space than two sections of one chapter. For the various differences between British, French and Ottoman empires, see Loomba (1998). 7 The choice of the three cities aimed to include the two most influential colonial conceptions of urbanism –​British and French (Nightingale 2012) –​and a European “outlier,” namely a non-​mainstream and relatively new colonial project, i.e. Italy and its Fascist ideology (see Njoh 2008; Mioni 1986). 8 This is partly also due to lack of space within the confines of this text. For in-​ depth discussions of the issues I sketch on the three cities, see the works I quote throughout the threefold analysis. 9 To provide a simple sense of the breadth of French urbanism’s global influence, it is enough to mention that to Latin America –​not a French colonized territory –​ it exported not only architectural and urbanist conceptions of power and social arrangement, but also social Darwinism and other racial ideologies of human hierarchies; Rio and Buenos Aires, for instance, were planned and built largely following these racial ideologies (Nightingale 2012, 205). 10 Unlike Nightingale (2012) and Abu-​Lughod (1980), Rabinow (1989) does not consider Rabat to be a quintessentially segregated city and refrains from assessing the conditions of segregation of the urban Moroccan populations. 11 As Legg (2007) demonstrates at length, the two cities were far from being isolated from one another: a number of streets connected them (more than in the case of Rabat) and ruling activities, including policing, very much occurred in both areas. 12 It should be mentioned here that unlike Addis Ababa, Tripoli was to a large extent planned following the French style of colonial urbanism –​i.e., with a brand new città nuova (new city) and a proper cordonne sanitaire, which was not called as such due to Fascism’s obsession with exclusively using the Italian language (see Reitani 1986).

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46 Nodes 13 The Racial Laws were only addressed to Jews, while the journal La difesa della razza published a large number of essays outlining the racial inferiority of African people, and a number of essays on “Gypsies” (zingari) as being an inferior race. 14 For a detailed history of expert knowledge on Romani people before the late nineteenth century, see Shahar (2007). 15 Ernst Rüdin, not Fischer, was then appointed as president of the International Federation. 16 This whole discussion is centered on the colony–​metropole nexus. Indeed, the production of “scientific knowledge” concerning “Gypsies” across Europe in the early twentieth century is larger than what I cover here. For an overview, see Hancock (2002, ­chapter 4). 17 Ginzburg (1989) has shown that the use of biometric systems, such as fingerprints, for personal identification originated in colonized Bengal. Looking at Bengalese who were regularly pressing blackened fingertips on letters and documents, Herschel, the British administrator of one of Bengal’s districts, decided to use this method to identify “natives [who were seen as] illiterate, quarrelsome, cunning, deceitful and […] indistinguishable” (1989, 122). 18 Since my primary focus in this book is on cities, it is not my intention to provide a discussion of Porrajmos’ main rationales, experiences and programs; for an overview, see Bravi (2009), Hancock (2002), Van Baar (2011) and Willems (1997). 19 Hancock (2002) speaks of one and a half million victims. 20 Awareness is currently emerging, thanks to academic works including, for example, Lewy (2000) for Germany, Achim (2004) for Romania, Asséo (1994) for France, and Bravi (2009) for Italy, as well as documentaries such as Hidden Sorrows, directed by Michelle Kelso (in 2005), and especially A People Uncounted, directed by Aaron Yeger (in 2014). 21 For a discussion of Italian regional policies and examples of their underpinning racial thinking, see Chapter 4. 22 Elsewhere (Picker et al. 2015) I, Greenfields and Smith have discussed the notion of the “Gypsy camp,” and conceptualized it as a “spatio-​racial political technology.” See also Chapter 4. 23 This data emerges from the collection of international institutions’ documents concerning Romani people: Textes des institutions internationals concernant les Tsiganes, Centre de recherches tsiganes. Documents réunis par Marielle Danbakli (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001). 24 I am not suggesting that overcoming the difficulty of categorization was the driver of extermination. Rather, the Reich politics vis-​à-​vis Zigeuner (the racially loaded term used by the Reich to describe any person identified as Rom) stemmed from the assumption that Romani people were not only racially alien, inferior and degenerate, but also considered as a peculiar “racial mixture,” hence their categorization was subject to debate: the discussions about “part-​Gypsies” being worse than “pure Gypsies” is just one case in point. See Kenrick and Puxon (2009, esp. ­chapter 2). 25 As I briefly discuss in Chapters 4 and 5, in Western Europe the local governance apparatus including primarily social services, NGOs and the police, tends to lump Eastern European Romani people with local Romani groups such as Sinti (Italy and Germany), Gypsies and Travellers (UK) and Tsiganes or gens du voyage (France). This means that social workers dealing with local Romanies are largely considered “experts” when it comes to “immigrant Roma,” and consequently take action vis-​à-​vis both groups. 26 While today’s censuses allow for self-​declaration of one’s own ethnic belonging, the categories are still provided by the state and unchangeable. This means that

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Nodes 47 lumping people together is still a system of classifying individuals, as their identification poses a potential risk for the homogeneity of national organizations and institutions. “Society must be defended,” in the words of Foucault (2003), from that intolerable thing which is otherness, configured diversely in different contexts and maintaining the well-​known and equally troubling characteristic of contextual mutability. 27 As discussed above, nothing was crafted exclusively in either the metropole or the colonies. Rather, continuous circulations and borrowings occurred. 28 The rise of neoliberal theories dates back to the late 1940s (Harvey 2005; Foucault 2004; see also Chapter 6). 29 Interview with The Sunday Times, May 3, 1981. 30 “Dans quelle mesure faut-​il faire appel aux arts indigenes dans la construction des edifices?” L’úrbanism aux colonies et dans les pays tropicaux, ed. Jean Royer, 2 vols (La-​Charite-​sur-​Loire: Delayance, 1932–​1935), 2, 224. 31 Fanon (2008[1952]; 2004[1963]) has provided countless vivid descriptions of these perceptions and processes. 32 Foucault suggests that neoliberalism inverts the terms of liberalism. Without a (liberal) market economy, it would be hard to imagine the rise of neoliberalism: Qu’est-​ce donc que ce néolibéralisme? […] pur le néolibéralisme, le problème n’était pas du tout de savoir, comme dans le libéralisme de type Adam Smith, le libéralisme du XVIII siècle, comment, à l’interieure d’une société politique toute donnée, on pouvait découper, ménager un espace libre qui serait celui du marché. Le problème du néolibéralisme, c’est, au contraire, de savoir comment on peut régler l’exercice global du pouvoir politique sur les principes d’une économie du marché. Il s’agit donc non pas de libérer une place vide, mais de rapporter, de referrer, de projeter sur un art general de gouverner les principes formels d’une économie de marché. (Foucault 2004, 137) 33 The continuity between neoliberalism and liberalism’s main principles also emerges in Evans (2004).

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Displacement

The colonist’s sector is a white folks’ sector, a sector of foreigners. The colonized’s sector, or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is […] a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. (Franz Fanon 1961, 4)

In Chapter 1, I analyzed the multilayered historical references and connections that I consider fundamental for understanding the emergence and persistence of GUAs in contemporary Europe. Tracing them back to the second half of the nineteenth century, I suggested that these references and connections allow GUAs to be viewed as geographical and historical nodes of a web linking European cities, as well as colony and metropole. With this historical perspective firmly established, in this chapter I discuss the first of the local segregating mechanisms: displacement. I view displacement as the consequence of forced evictions, which typically produce situations of spatial segregation. In the event that state authorities provide housing alternatives after evictions take place, accommodation is often inadequate and located in segregated urban or rural areas, far from municipal services and access to urban resources (UN-​HABITAT 2014). Furthermore, when authorities do not provide any alternative housing solutions, this leads systematically to worse housing conditions that are often alleviated only by the evicted’s chances of hiding from the police and their neighbors (UN-​HABITAT 2011). Displacement is on the rise globally (du Plessis 2005), and increasingly so after the 2008 downturn of Western financial capitalism, followed by a restructuring policy that embraced austerity as its chief doctrine (Sassen 2014).1 While primarily a material phenomenon, displacement may occur on a symbolic level, too. Evicting and eventually relocating Romani people in degraded periphery areas speaks to their “eviction” and (re)location beyond the ethno-​moral boundaries of the nation, and at times –​as I will show –​ beyond the realm of humanity. Accordingly, I will consider displacement as both a material and a symbolic dynamic: the two as strictly related to one

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another. Both dimensions of displacement are essential in order to understand the local conditions under which socio-​spatial displacement not only occurs, but continues to occur –​in other words, how socio-​spatial displacement gets perpetuated. As I will show toward the end of the chapter, sociospatial displacement remains one of the preferred policy options vis-​à-​vis Romani people in contemporary European cities. The interplay between the material and the symbolic is therefore a window into the continuous perpetuation of racial domination and hierarchies, largely sustained and reinforced by a shared perception of certain (racialized) subjects’ moral worth and predicated upon allegedly unchangeable cultural traits. In sum, to recall the discussion in Chapter 1, racism plays out not only at the (macro) level of state policy and politico-​economic arrangements, but also, and simultaneously, at the (micro) level of shared assumptions, normative conceptions and forms of knowledge. In this chapter I will discuss one instance of the relations between structures and agencies in the making of racial segregation. I will focus on a municipality-​ led eviction and relocation of fifty-​six Romani households that took place in December 2010 in Cluj-​Napoca, Transylvania’s main city, located in northern Romania. I will show how the entire displacement operation served to worsen the social conditions of the evicted, as well as to reinforce stigma and deprivation. In the first section of the chapter, after an overview of Romania’s socio-​ economic situation since 1989, I will narrow down the discussion to Cluj and its context before and after the 2010 eviction.2 In the second section, I will describe in detail how the displacement operation took place, by examining forms of representation of Romani people that underpinned municipal decisions. In the subsequent section, I will bring the issue of representations a step further by illustrating the ways in which two everyday expressions referring to Romani people, which I will call “icons,” played a role in the displacement operation. In the final section, I will enlarge the ethnographic analysis to include instances of displacement of Romani people in other European cities.

Displacing the hygiene threat Like all former Socialist countries, Romania has undergone a continuous process of substantial socio-​economic restructuring since 1989, including the privatization of previously state-​owned land, housing and means of production. Formerly the guarantor of socio-​economic equality and fraternity, the state gradually assumed the role of producer of social inequality, criminalization of poverty and urban marginality, generating pervasive gender and ethnic disparities (Emigh et al. 2000).3 These transformations continue to affect the majority of Romani people more harshly than the national majorities. Since the 1989 revolution, most Romani people have increasingly suffered from “lack of education, lack of hygienic education, lack of income, poor health [conditions], etc.” (Tarnovschi 2001, 18).4

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These conditions have continued to worsen since the mid-​2000s decline in social housing supply. In 2012, social rental housing construction comprised only 2.2 percent of the housing stock (Amann et al. 2013). When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the average income declined rapidly for the first time since the early 2000s and steadily continued to plummet. In 2012, only 60 percent of Romani people held legal housing contracts (Berescu et al. 2013, 102). In 2007, Romania became a member of the European Union, and the flow of EU structural funds for accession ceased. At that point, in the context of mounting inequality and poverty –​especially prevalent among Romani people –​a renewed state approach to poor urban Romani people emerged, shifting from either tolerance or neglect to eviction and relocation at the very urban outskirts. Berescu (2011) comprehensively discussed this emerging state approach, showing how several local and regional authorities decided to deal with Romani people’s conditions of extreme poverty and urban marginality by evicting and relocating them to urban peripheries under even more socially precarious conditions. Vincze and Rat (2013) have taken this discussion a step further by identifying a structural tendency by the Romanian state in producing conditions of racialized urban marginality among large segments of the Romani minority. It is against this structural background that the December 2010 displacement of fifty-​six Romani families in Cluj should be thoroughly analyzed. Romania is often portrayed as a dysfunctional and backward country (Ciorojanu 2002). “Backwardness” is typically articulated in culturalist terms, coupled with a perception of urban infrastructures’ decay that is deemed incompatible with “Western” standards of housing and public space. Complaints about this differential of “development,” of East and West, also discursively articulated as “civilization” (Melegh 2006), can regularly be heard in the streets of Cluj, one of today’s richest hubs of Central and Eastern Europe, with a population of 320,000. As the city attracts foreign investments en masse, due in part to a growing middle class, Clujean socio-​economic urban life has drastically changed since 2004. Economic development boomed after the twelve-​year term of office (1992–​2004) of mayor Gheorghe Funar, who promoted a strong economic protectionism predicated upon Romanian nationalism. After his term as mayor, urbanization increased, the urban economy boomed and the local housing market experienced a surge in demand. This rapid economic growth was guided by neoliberal policy, familiar to virtually any other European city, leading to gentrification and the removal of large portions of the working class from the city center (Petrovici 2011). In addition, the local council drastically cut the yearly budget of the social services department while simultaneously pouring money into the police department, which in 2004 opened two new branches: community police (poliţia comunitară) and local police (poliţia locală). I first arrived in Cluj in the summer of 2007.5 Upon my arrival, it seemed that socio-​economic, political and politico-​economic factors alone were unable to

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explain the conditions of segregation under which several Romani households were living. My impression was that a certain local knowledge widespread among the majority was equally pivotal and pertained to the place that Romani people occupied and “should” occupy in Romanian society. Allowing myself to be guided by Clujean acquaintances and friends, I could not help noticing how vividly this particular knowledge manifested itself in everyday life. Articulated in different ways while almost homogeneously deemed as a problem for the national majority, the “imagined Romanies” seemed to be no less real than the dilapidated housing structures in the postindustrial periphery neighborhood of Batik, that is, the overwhelmingly stigmatized “Gypsy urban area.” When I returned for my second visit in the spring of 2008, I soon came across the two main issues that Clujeni Romani people were facing. The first issue was Pata Rât, that is, the regional garbage dump not far from the airport, out of which about one thousand Romani adults and children were making a living. Pata Rât, as I soon understood, bore the strong territorial stigma of being a GUA where material and symbolic marginalization conflated in an exceptionally brutal way, constraining the people living there into socio-​economically miserable conditions. “An OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe] delegation just visited the garbage dump, declaring the necessity of applying for international grants in order to provide the Romani people who live there with ID cards,” Marius, a Clujean man acknowledging his Romani descent, explained to me. The lack of ID cards, and the consequent impossibility of using public services, was one of several problems affecting Pata Rât’s social fabric, along with extremely poor hygiene conditions and a lack of primary education for children. The second main issue Clujeni Romanies faced was everyday discrimination in the workplace. As Marius once told me, “While talking to me, my colleagues often take care not to use the usual vocabulary to address Romani people [i.e., using “Țigani” –​“Gypsies”], and this is only a small example of how pervasive everyday stigmatization is.” In early 2011, when I arrived for my third visit, these two main issues had not only remained persistent, but were exacerbated. The municipality, Marius informed me, had just evicted fifty-​six Romani families living in the city center and relocated them to the Pata Rât area, providing them with just-​built and ad hoc modular housing.

The making of an urban condom The Pata Rât area is home to two long-​established Romani collectives: Dallas, an informal, shack-​built and radically deprived settlement right at the border of the garbage dump, and Cantonului, an authorized settlement located further from the dump, whose housing conditions are barely better than those in Dallas. Most of the approximately eight hundred

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inhabitants of both settlements make their living by consuming and recycling garbage. One of the problems about Pata Rât, and one that most local authorities mentioned to me, is that a large number of people living there do not possess ID cards. Several authorities claim that these people came from other municipalities and therefore have no right to stay in Cluj, but it is of course impossible to prove this. The issue of lacking ID cards is perceived to be key, and it emphasizes the threat that Romani people symbolically represent. Lacking an ID card is not primarily perceived as lacking citizenship rights; instead, the issue is largely framed as a threat because one’s own movement inside national territory cannot be properly tracked, and this perception oftentimes becomes coupled with the “nomad stigma” (see Chapter 1). Lacking an ID card makes one’s kin essentially untraceable. Although materially the lack of an ID card prevents access to any form of welfare service or provision, symbolically many civil servants codify this condition as a danger to territorial and public-​health security. As the director of the Municipal Registry Office made clear to me, “With Roma we have many problems that start at birth because Roma do not care about registering their children. Consequently, children are not registered in the system of health protection, and hence they do not receive the compulsory vaccination.” In this context, the December 2010 eviction is an interesting example of the ways in which GUAs’ material and symbolic conditions of segregation can safely be kept in place. The eviction took place in the very early morning of December 17, 2010, when fifty-​six Romani families living on Coastei Street in a non-​segregated and “mixed” area of Cluj city centre were evicted from their homes and relocated to Pata Rât. The police arrived en masse and loaded all 270 people, the majority of whom held regular housing contracts on Coastei Street, onto municipal service buses while their houses were being demolished. The bus caravan travelled for over six kilometres in the direction of the airport, unloading everyone in front of a just-​built settlement of white modular housing that was baptized Colonia noua Pata Rât (“Pata Rât New Settlement”). The municipality had just finished constructing the housing units and intended them exclusively to be social housing for the evicted families of Coastei Street. Three days before the eviction, municipal officials asked each household to urgently hand in an application for one social housing flat without providing them with any alternatives. The applications were immediately approved and the eviction planned. Although the initial project, which began in July 2010, consisted of twenty modules (Actual Constructii 2010), the final construction included only half of them (Figure 2.1). Each module consisted of two living spaces and one five-​square-​meter bathroom equipped with two toilets, two basins and two showers. The initial project was intended for two families per module, but the total number of modules was cut by half in the final plan; as a consequence, each module ended up hosting four families. A total of 201 people were given

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Figure 2.1 The actual construction of Colonia noua Pata Rât. Source: Google Maps.

ten modules, each measuring ninety-​seven square meters, while the remaining sixty-​nine people were given pieces of cardboard with which to build improvised shacks near the settlement (Figure 2.2). After the relocation, the general living conditions in Colonia noua quickly became deplorable.6 Without hot water, and with constant moist air due to the lack of ventilation and the radically small size of the living spaces, the number of those affected by illness increased by 14 percent on average; school attendance dropped considerably due to both increased distance from the school and the stigma attached to Pata Rât; and about one-​third of the adults who were working before the eviction lost their jobs (ERRC 2012). As one of the Colonia noua residents explained: Can you imagine, eighteen square meters and twelve people. How can those men even sleep there? With their children? And in that room we cook, we wash, we bathe; we do everything in the same room, because the restroom they gave us, that’s nothing. You’re merely using the water closet. You cannot take a bath, there is only cold water running (quoted in Dohotaru 2013, 204).7 In the year following the eviction, several local, national and international NGOs, including Amnesty International (2011), condemned the municipal operation, claiming it was not only clearly damaging for those who had been displaced, but also racist, as it targeted only Romani people.8 The municipal employees who planned, ordered and directed the operation, however, rejected the accusations, arguing that first of all, the hygiene conditions of the previous housing were worse than those in Pata Rât, and second, the municipality had no intention to target Romani people only –​it had

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Figure 2.2 The Colonia noua (small circle) and the landfill (big circle). Source: Google Maps.

merely acted in full compliance with the law. However, as over half of the residents had held regular legal contracts prior to their eviction, illegality would have been only a secondary reason for evicting them. The official and overwhelmingly voiced reason was the unhygienic living conditions, as well as neighbors’ protests (see municipal directive 127/​2010). In May 2011, the then-​mayor reformulated the official reason in a more comprehensive way when the land where the families had lived in Coastei Street was given to Babes Bolyai University’s faculty of theology. At this time, he publicly identified the reason for the displacement operation as “the fact that the tenants’ way of life had sparked many controversies in the area, including the children among them, and concerning the very meaning that our city has in Romania and abroad.”9 However, the 2009–​2010 municipal police record, which I accessed in spring 2011, showed that only twelve complaints about Romani families in Coastei Street had been filed, all of which were regarding smoke from burned tires. This was understood as an intolerable toxic threat that needed to be eradicated. Several municipal police officers in charge of Coastei Street repeated what one of them had told me about the neighbors’ complaints: “Neighbors complained about the unhealthy location (partea insalubra); that they were making all that smoke…” According to the same police officer, the hygiene danger also centered on the possibility of infection: The housing in Coastei street was unhealthy, and not appropriate for a decent life in the Cluj municipality, but, hey, we are talking about general rules of hygiene and public health that should be assured in each housing property … There was a potential for a breeding ground of infections, a threat to people’s health.

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The municipal officer in charge of technical arrangements, and therefore also of the modular housing in Pata Rât, articulated the link between hygiene and civilization in a particularly clear way: There, in Coastei Street [in the city center] there was a breeding ground of infections. Now they have much better housing … Every year we go to Cantonului [one of the three Pata Rât Roma settlements] to hygienize […]. This is called “civilizing” [civilizare]. The hygienization process is coordinated by our office [the Municipal Technical Office] in partnership with the Branter company. In Coastei Street, we have done hygienization with disinfection, along with deratization, only after the relocation, because it would have made no sense to do it before. We try to carry out a civilizing action, but we cannot succeed! The hygiene–​civilization nexus sheds some light on the assumptions behind a decision that obviously lacked full legal legitimacy. Relocating evicted families to Pata Rât shows how urban policy in Cluj was predicated upon the perception of an intrinsic threat that had to do with a certain “way of life” perceived as innate and deemed dangerous for the bodies of the majority. These implicit bodily references –​established correspondences between a certain “way of life” and toxic pollution –​are ultimately the racist extensions of the racial subtexts that make racial segregation both possible and largely acceptable. In addition, for one of the civil servants responsible for the eviction, the main reason behind these health issues was twofold. It did not only concern burned tires and similar toxic “threats,” but also pertained to the overpopulated conditions in which the fifty-​six Romani families were living. “This is how they live,” she explained to me: They have certain customs [cutuma], certain habits, certain traditions that from the point of view of the notion of family are rather weird … In the city center, we had the following situation: father, wife, son, daughter-​in-​ law, children, and concubine with children, all in one household! The issue of overpopulation as the cause of both material and symbolic toxic pollution can be seen as a refraction of the late nineteenth-​century obsession with overcrowding in Europe’s urban centers. At that time, as I discussed in Chapter 1, massive urban growth led to the deterioration of industrial workers’ housing conditions, which were seen as health and hygiene threats. Parallel to these developments, tramps and vagrants became deemed “surplus populations,” and the colonies of the so-​called “New World” functioned as a “propitious location for absorbing peoples designated as surplus” (Ross 2011, 386). These kinds of historical refractions highlight the importance of keeping a perspectival understanding of the segregation of Romani people, one that takes stock of the fluctuating and irregular lines of normative thinking

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between colony and metropole. I will return to a discussion of such refractions toward the end of the chapter.

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Racist order, racial icons So far, I have shown that the December 2010 displacement operation occurred within the dominant discourse of hygiene and public health linked to Romani people’s alleged “customs” and “way of life.” In this section, I want to discuss the various ways in which more deeply shared everyday representations of Romani people have had a role in shaping that displacement operation. I will analyze the social uses of two “racial icons” –​that is, popular expressions indexing peculiar alleged characteristics of Romani people, such as laziness and an underdeveloped work ethic.10 The two phrases are mentalitate, literally “mentality” or “mindset,” and Țiganu-​i ţigan!, literally “Gypsies will be Gypsies!” These icons work effectively to symbolically displace a varied group in two ways: first, by policing the physical boundaries of the separation and isolation of Romani people in the city and consequently guaranteeing urban socio-​spatial hierarchy, and second, by reproducing the symbolic ethno-​moral boundaries of the nation, from which Romani people are largely excluded. I will discuss the ways in which mentalitate worked as one of the rationales of the December 2010 displacement operation, and –​at less length –​how Țiganu-​i ţigan functions as the established background against which Romani people are kept in subaltern socio-​symbolic positions.11 After having gone through the tortuous bureaucratic procedures for getting a certificate in order to make an official request to have a meeting with public employees, I was finally able to shake hands with Andrei, a communitarian police officer in his early forties. As soon as we met, Andrei told me about Pata Rât, offering me a car ride to the garbage dump. When we approached the dump and started climbing to the top, the landscape appeared to me a world apart. I didn’t just see a mountain of waste, but a huge plateau of garbage. Trucks arrived periodically to discharge tons of all kinds of material that groups from five to ten people of all ages sorted out and picked up, either to bring home or to consume on the spot. At the perimeter of the dump, down the hill, I could see a group of little houses placed in three parallel rows, each row made of about ten houses. They looked like improvised shanties that had been recently covered by concrete. The houses that I could see on the garbage hill, on the contrary, were not organized in groups, but dispersed at a distance of about fifty meters from each other. They were improvised shanties, made of cardboard, wood and metal sheets without any sign of refurbishment. The enchanting green valley in the background recalled bucolic scenarios and made the scene in the foreground appear rather surreal. On one of the pathways on the plateau, Andrei waved his arm to a man in his thirties and stopped the car. They had

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a short conversation, from which I was able to sense familiarity between them. Andrei told me that there were now more than four hundred people living on the dump or at its perimeter and that they had been there for forty years. Many of them were from Cluj –​a very important detail. In Romania, property and social rights are locally structured so that one can enjoy them only inside the municipality where he or she resides. On our way back to the city, we headed just outside the perimeter of the dump toward a nearby group of modular houses in Cantonului Street, located by the railway. Before arriving at the spot, Andrei told me that only Romani families lived there; a few years ago, they had been resettled there from the city center by the city council. They were living in houses that did not belong to them, and although it was illegal to live so close to the railway, the municipality did not know where else to resettle them. “At the time of the resettlement there were twenty-​three families, but today there are 130,” Andrei told me. When we arrived, he shook hands with many of the adults, who welcomed us into their houses. The site was equipped with small containers, the kind that are used to host earthquake survivors; they were geometrically arranged, some of them surrounded by improvised shelters or shanties, as well as by piles of different kinds of scrap material. The site was evidently overcrowded, and the dimensions of the houses encouraged –​or rather obliged –​the occupants to socialize in the public space. Some of the inhabitants showed us around, explaining what their major problems were. They told us that the heating was insufficient and that they didn’t know what would happen to them were they to remain there another winter. However, what they seemed more concerned about was their future housing location –​they kept asking us, “What is going to happen to us?” Andrei explained to me that the construction of a new orbital road was planned that would cut through the exact piece of land occupied by these families –​they knew they would have to move again at some point. This was the end of our visit to the dump area, and we proceeded by car to the city center. On our way, we saw a man in front of us riding in a small horse-​drawn wagon. An old washing machine was inside the wagon; it seemed inconceivable that it still worked. Andrei looked at me and said, You see? Ţigani! Probably he found that washing machine in a bin, and he’s going now to sell its components at the market. This is their job. The fact is, they complain about not having jobs; we help them find one, but after a time they lose it and become unemployed again. Of course a job requires a strict timetable and a certain self-​discipline. And of course it’s easier to pick up scrap metal, sell it on, and eventually beg. Andrei’s ideas about Romani people gave us an opportunity to talk more in detail about the Romani families living in the modular housing we had

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just visited. I  asked if the fact that there were Romani families living in unsafe conditions close to a garbage dump was a problem for him. He replied affirmatively, offering two possible solutions to the issue. “The first,” he explained, is that authorities don’t have enough realistic sanctions in order to treat Ţigani in the same way as they would any other citizen. For example, if I exceed the speed limit on the highway, I receive a penalty. If I don’t pay the penalty, someone would come to my house and confiscate my possessions. This is a law for everyone. The problem is, they don’t have houses, they don’t have a bathroom, and they don’t have anything. And so, even if you give them a penalty, you cannot make them pay it. Moreover, the rich Ţigani don’t have to work. They’ve got this mentality. I was talking to them, and they told me: ‘What? Work? You work, not me!’ The second solution, according to Andrei, overlaps with the first one, as it is about giving them [Romani people] the resources for living decently. But even if you give them the conditions, they are not capable of using them. […] We gave them these modular small houses, and they asked for wood, so we gave them wood, and when we arrived there, we said, ‘Okay, the wood is here. Please help us unload the truck –​it’s cold out here!’ They replied, ‘Unload? Us?’ “Do you understand?” he asked me. “Their mentality is to have it unloaded.” An alleged “Romani mentality” as the main explanation for Romani people’s urban marginality seems, from my encounter with Andrei, an essential and fixed attribute that all Romanies allegedly possess. In 2011 “mentality” still seemed to be the main explanation for Romani people’s social marginality. Once I arrived in town, I became interested in learning more about the 2010 eviction and relocation, so I fixed a meeting with Irina, one of the civil servants who coordinated the entire operation. After telling her that I had seen the unsafe hygiene and material conditions in which people were living both in and around the garbage dump, I asked her whether she thought that the recent resettlement had a positive impact on the everyday life of those Romani families: You should also see the people who are targeted by this policy. I wonder, what is their mentality? That’s because a public policy can be very good, but if it’s not applicable, meaning that the people for whom it is designed to be implemented see reality in a completely different way … then everything becomes complicated,

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she replied. As our conversation continued, I asked her, as I had Andrei, what she thought a sustainable solution for social integration could look like. She replied, The way I see the integration of Roma? Well, they should stop having this mentality of an oppressed minority. They should begin to compete with other citizens; they should begin to ask for rights, to go to school and behave like the other children, to go and look for jobs with the others, and to integrate in their social surroundings. Irina’s perception of Romani mentality stresses an ultimate difference between Romanies and the majority: “… [Romani people] […] see reality in a completely different way.” Florin, one of Irina’s colleagues, had a similar idea of this ultimate difference that served to inform his consideration of mentality in relation to Romani people. As the head of another municipal department, Florin did not have any role in the resettlement. Nevertheless, in his job, he dealt with a number of Romani Clujeni on a daily basis. In 2011, he explained to me: Romani people have some traditions, or mentality, due to which it’s hard for them to change […] What is the problem in Romania? As you know, we do not carry out policies that discriminate between ethnic groups. That is done in order to avoid negative discrimination. Now, in the census many Romanies do not declare themselves as such, but it’s evident that they are Romani. It’s evident by looking at their behavior, at their customs … but they do not declare themselves as Romani. How can I tell you? In the case of Romani people, the man walks in front of the woman, who walks about two steps behind him. You see? Romani people’s mentality and style of behavior is different [from that of the majority]. It’s rare to see a [Romani] man and woman walking hand in hand. When we began to discuss how integration might be possible, he stated again what he had told me three years before, namely that positive change could be achieved only with education:  “Integration means education, which means qualifications and getting a job. Without this, it is not possible to be integrated. And education brings with itself qualifications and a change in mentality.” “And what does a change in mentality mean?” I asked. “This means, ‘Since I  am Ţigan, I  am allowed to do this and that!’ ” he responded. “And in order to change this [attitude], it might also be that we need to change our mentality. Probably change should come from both sides, that is, us and them.” Here, Florin reiterated Andrei and Irina’s ideas of mentality while also suggesting a change in the mentality of the majority (“it might also be that we need to change our mentality”). This implies a change in perspective, as “mentality” is here also used to refer to the (Romanian) majority.

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According to anthropologist Heintz (2002), “mentality” in the Romanian space has two main meanings. One, resembling Lévi-​Bruhl’s (1910) account, is connected with the classic conception of ethnopsychology, according to which “mentality is the structure of thought proper to an ethnic group” (Heintz 2002, 3). In this view, mentality is synonymous with the fixed concept of “nationality” and refers to ideas of an unchangeable essence that a group allegedly bears, drawing historically on the most popular philosophical tradition of ethno-​nationalist elite construction. Conversely, the second meaning is synonymous with the more fluid concept of “culture,” and therefore it is related to change. In both meanings, mentality is the ethnic essence shared by all Romanians, but only in the first meaning is it predicated upon unchangeable ethno-​nationalist feelings and values. According to Heintz (2002), the expression “Romanian mentality” in Romanian everyday life is mostly associated with the second meaning; it is widely used in order to explain historical macroeconomic failures, such as entering NATO in 1997. However, as my encounters with Andrei, Irina and Florin suggest, the meaning of the expression mentalitate in relation to Romani people in Cluj is more often of the first kind rather than of the second: it is an unchangeable essence, consisting of laziness and backwardness, that ultimately ratifies, through everyday banal interactions, the exclusion of Romani people from the imagined ethno-​national space. Besides a few abstract normative views, such as Irina’s opinion that Romani people need to compete and ask for rights, I did not encounter the belief that Romani people are actually able to emerge from their alleged position of inferiority. Instead, what I almost always came across was a prevalent accent on a defective work ethic expressed in a general laziness and backwardness due to alleged Romani cultural traits. Therefore, mentalitate, when referring to Romani people, can be seen as a fixed, immutable and hereditary cultural trait. The immutability of the stigma that the expression carries is part of a historically rooted system of state-​led discriminations and exclusions. From the end of the fourteenth century, when the first documents attesting to the presence of “Gypsies” in Romania are dated, Romani people were enslaved until the mid-​nineteenth century. Europe’s post-​WWII collective oblivion of colonialism, and its capillary system of labor exploitation and enslavement, also includes Romania’s slave history. The enslaved Rom, called Țigan, sclav or rob, did not have the same status as servants –​enslaved Rom lacked any kind of legal subjectivity (Gheorghe 1997). According to historian Woodcock (2007), The Țigan as inferior other used to work the land was a vital identity against which the peasants could articulate themselves as of the land –​a differentiation that served not only the esteem of the peasant classes, but also their supervising land owners, who benefited from the Țigani as the group that all Romanian classes could police to the periphery together. (2007, 29)

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The almost five-​hundred-​year history of slavery seems an inevitable historical background against which to understand the twenty-​first-​century use of the expression mentalitate. Andrei, Irina and Florin all attributed the ultimate cause of marginalization to Romani people themselves –​hence, they used “mentality” to make sense of urban marginality in a way that left structural conditions, such as the state and the market, out of the picture. This racializing view assumes the existence of an allegedly fixed and unchangeable trait of all Romani people. The allegedly inherited trait of “mentality,” although not articulated with explicit reference to anything that could be understood as biological, does rest on the fantasy that certain innate behavioral tendencies of Romani people fix them in a marginal and segregated social position that is at once material and symbolic. The physical place in which their very bodies are located is marked by the same racial stigma informing their “lack of civilization,” as is implied in the icon mentalitate. Blaming the poor for their own conditions of exclusion is consistent with the larger context I discussed in the first section of this ­chapter –​the post-​ 2006 state and municipal praxis of forcibly displacing poor urbanized Romani households and relocating them to the urban outskirts. This also speaks to the discussion on neoliberal urban governance that I proposed in Chapter 1. However, while the neoliberal project assumes “changing the heart and soul” of people as its pivotal value,12 Romani people’s alleged “mentality,” by contrast, is generally considered to be hardly changeable, as I have shown. In this way, civil servants seem to legitimize, by reference to an allegedly fixed, natural and innate (in this sense, racial) characteristic, the widespread policy of keeping Romani people far away from the urban fabric, isolating and segregating them in unsanitary conditions. Hence, the 2010 displacement operation shows how the twofold register of hygiene threat (on a macro level) and mentalitate (on a micro level) has sustained and made possible this specific instance of twenty-​first-​century state-​enforced segregation. Ultimately, the displacement operation signals a peculiar social configuration in which class and race intermingle to produce socio-​spatial exclusion and isolation at the edge of one of Central Europe’s fastest-​growing urban centers. Mentalitate is not the only Romani-​related icon that circulates in Cluj, and the history of enslaved Romani people plays a role in more than just the case of this icon. The word Țigan, which during slavery was synonymous with “enslaved person,” has been crystallized in the everyday verbal icon Țiganu-​i ţigan –​literally, “Gypsies will be Gypsies,” but actually meaning, “Once a Gypsy, always a Gypsy!” (see also Stewart 2010, 2). As such, the expression articulates an idea of predetermination, suggesting that “Gypsies” will never change –​similar, in this sense, to the concept of mentalitate. At the same time, the icon is used in less articulated and reflexive situations than mentalitate, and this can be illustrated by one brief but significant encounter. In early 2011, I was at the Romtelecom headquarters, queuing to pay my bills. Once my number appeared on the big screen, a

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woman suddenly jumped the queue and rushed to the cashier. I had just enough time to think, “Never mind, I can wait a couple more minutes,” before the hands of a man in his forties grasped the woman’s left shoulder and quickly turned her around. Visibly intimidated by the man’s vehemence, the woman returned to the end of the queue. Taken by surprise, I hesitated when the man ordered me to proceed to the cashier. After paying my bill, I moved toward the exit door. The man approached me, looked cynically into my eyes, and said “Ţiganu-​i ţigan.” It was in Batik that I first heard the phrase Ţiganu-​i ţigan. Batik is one of the most evident urban signs of the rapid post-​1989 capitalist restructuring of the Romanian economy. A typical industrial neighborhood, it is currently a so-​called cartier dezvoltare (developing neighborhood). One of the most outstanding signs of such development is the 2007 construction of a shopping mall where a brick factory once stood. Since the 1960s, when the first Romani people were forcibly settled in Batik near industrial plants, the area has borne the stigma of being a “Gypsy neighborhood” (cartier ţigan). Every taxi driver across town had problems in taking me to Batik and would steadfastly warn me to pay attention to my wallet, adding slightly patronizing remarks about how precious my personal safety was. During my visits to Masuri, the pub in Batik where I regularly met male workers after their shifts, I continuously encountered several descriptions of Romani individuals, groups and subgroups in different guises and shapes. “They don’t work,” Sorin, one of the workers, said. “They take our money and don’t work, because they don’t want to, they are not Romanians […] We are Romanians, they are Ţigani. Ţiganu-​i ţigan, as we usually say.” The director of a shop inside the newly constructed shopping mall introduced a slightly different categorization of Romani people, as well as one attribute, neoamini, which deserves closer scrutiny. According to him, Batik’s social life was dominated by Ţigani, “who are the cause of the current urban decay. This is because Ţigani are neoameni –​they do not work and they are dirty. This is the major problem in Batik –​Ţiganu-​i ţigan.” The social use of the word neoamini illustrates the extent to which race organizes everyday representations and dispositions in Cluj. The literal translation of the word is “sub-​humans”13 and can directly refer to the history of enslaved Romani people. Slavery is by definition the lack of personhood, supported by the idea that certain homogeneously racially categorized humans are actually not human in the complete sense –​they are more similar to beasts, which are bought and sold and whose labor is exploited. Hence, neoamini holds perhaps the most solid ground on which both icons –​mentalitate and Țiganu-​i ţigan –​conflate into each other and where each of them becomes fully intelligible. The racial dimension in which both icons function, while evidently succeeding in obscuring any understanding of racial domination and racist exclusions, speaks of the ways in which race works subtly but effectively in preventing the questioning of spatial segregation. While mentalitate,

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as it is also used by civil servants, may work more prominently to ensure the self-​evident acceptance of the spatial segregation of Romani people, Țiganu-​i ţigan, not so much used as a way of describing but rather of blaming Romani people, seems less powerful in keeping segregation uncontested. However, I would suggest that the racist assumption behind both icons, rooted in the history of slavery, provides each with the authority of enacting and maintaining displacement, both physically (outside the city) and symbolically (outside ethno-​moral boundaries and, at times, outside humanity). As has become clear, both icons –​mentalitate and Țiganu-​i tigan –​work by means of allusion. This means that they do not explicitly attach negative attributions to Romani people, and hence they do not sound harshly exclusionary or even derogatory. Unlike neoamini, which has one direct meaning denying personhood, the two icons appear to be harmless, familiar and therefore even pleasant expressions that organize a discourse about Romani people around widely shared perceptions, or “what everyone knows.” Upon closer scrutiny, however, their racial –​and racist –​power becomes evident; it is even intensified by the two icons’ ability to defy it. In sum, the two icons account for the deep-​rootedness of racism in everyday Cluj, as well as for the more or less conscious acceptance of the racial underpinning of everyday knowledge about Romani people.

Conclusion: evicted from diversity In this chapter, I have shown how in capitalist Romania, about twenty years after the collapse of state socialism and in the wake of a deeply destructive global financial crisis, the hygiene–​civilization discursive nexus constituted the dominant frame within which the 2010 displacement operation took place. The notion that Romani people should remain in both a lower socio-​symbolic and a segregated socio-​spatial position, and the extent to which this is deeply rooted in everyday life, is demonstrated by the widely circulating racial icons of mentalitate and Ţiganu-​i ţigan. Both icons are ultimately rooted in the five-​ century-​long national history of enslaved Romani people, hence suggesting a continuity of racial logic behind understandings of human difference and moral worth that has assigned the Țigan (“slave” in old Romanian) a preferred place at the bottom of the social ladder. If socio-​spatial segregation can be produced, defended and legitimated by the state in such a blunt way, as the 2010 eviction and relocation to Pata Rât shows, then the segregation of Romani people is a widely accepted phenomenon, chiefly perceived as natural and even desirable. The two everyday icons circulating in Cluj function differently, as I have shown, but their exclusionary effects are similar. The 2010 forced displacement to Pata Rât is not an isolated example in Romania. Several other cities, some of which are brilliantly reviewed in Vincze and Rat (2013), have adopted policies of displacement and, consequently, of segregation. However, the displacement policy in Cluj is distinctive in that it

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took place in what is possibly the most “culturally diverse” Romanian city. Not only do 16 percent of Clujean citizens belong to the Hungarian minority, but Cluj is home to the largest university in Romania, which is one of the most popular higher education institutions in Europe. With over forty thousand students and courses offered in four languages, the university is one of Central Europe’s most vibrant multicultural hubs. Against this background, the racist component of the state policy of forced displacement appears even more noteworthy, and it is certainly unique among similar examples in other cities. Moreover, if examined from a historical perspective inspired by the ­colony–metropole tensions and circulations I discussed in Chapter 1, the entire racial ideology underpinning the displacement operation becomes even more apparent. The dominant discourse centered on the paired dimensions of hygiene and civilization positions the eviction –​and in general the whole state and everyday way of thinking and acting vis-​à-​vis Romani people discussed in this c­ hapter –​as a partial refraction of colonial urban ruling, in which hygiene constitutes one of the pivotal criteria for engineering the isolation, in degrading conditions, of those deemed uncivilized. The 2010 displacement in Cluj, therefore, bears similarities to the ways in which spatial segregation was engineered and maintained in British New Delhi, where, as I outlined in Chapter 1, there was a predominant discourse of hygiene. This approximation, which only suggests similarities, will inform the discussion in Chapter 6, where I will propose a comprehensive analysis of the various similarities linking up the four segregating mechanisms with colonial segregation rationales. In what follows, I would like to provide a bird’s-​eye view of displacement, pointing at cases similar to the 2010 eviction and relocation in Cluj. Forced evictions and eventual relocation are no prerogative of Central and Eastern European cities. Many of the highly multicultural urban areas in Western Europe constantly carry out forced evictions of Romani people. In Italy’s second largest metropolis, Milan, there were 214 evictions of Romani collectives in 2010 alone, during which a total of 2,593 shacks were demolished. Since 2001, largely following a popular post-​9/​11 security agenda, the politics of eviction in Milan has been the dominant means of dealing with marginalized urban Romani collectives. This has been accounted for in a number of analyses, including Vitale’s (2008) argument, according to which evictions could largely be seen as predicated on the racialist ideology of eugenics. This interpretation is the result of analyses of Milan’s center-​right government, which had ruled the city for over twenty years until 2011. However, the center-​left mayorship that followed has continued to increase the number of yearly evictions of Romani families.14 In nearby French cities, the phenomenon has been even greater. According to the European Roma Rights Centre (ERRC 2015), in France, 3,947 Romani people were evicted in the first half of 2015 alone; of the thirty-​seven forced

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evictions carried out, evicted families were offered alternative accommodation in only thirteen cases. These numbers account for only one instance of the over ten-​year-​long politics of eviction of Romani people living in French bidonvilles (shanty towns).15 According to Fassin and his colleagues (2014), the whole apparatus of municipal powers planning and orchestrating large-​scale evictions of Romani people is predicated upon what the authors call a “scatological politics of race” (2014, 39). Such a politics is primarily composed of a precise political discourse that dehumanizes Romani people by direct references to the animal world and various other historical and invented tropes. Evictions imply the use of state power to clear a building and to relocate its inhabitants, usually within the nearby territory. However, in the summer of 2009, a unique kind of eviction was carried out in Belgrade, Serbia. Around 178 Romani families –​about one thousand persons in total –​were evicted and relocated from the Gazela Bridge settlement, which had appeared in the city center in the early 1990s, to several locations in southern Serbia. This was one of the largest eviction operations in post-​WWII Europe. Planned and carried out with the help of the World Bank and European financial institutions, the official rationale for this massive eviction was clearing up “unhygienic settlements.” However, as explained by Kilibarda (2011, 597), What animated the participating European financial institutions was not the welfare of the Romani people in Belgrade, but the desire to upgrade the infrastructure of the Gazela Bridge, which had become a bottleneck along the E70/​E75 highway that is central to Pan European Corridor X.3. If one looks at various policy measures directed at marginalized Romani settlements across Europe, the vested strategic interests over the well-​being of the inhabitants remains a constant rationale. In Chapter 4, I will briefly mention a similar case of the dismantling of one “Gypsy camp” in Florence in 2012. These are only some instances of evictions of Romani collectives in European cities. The main issue at stake is that the ways in which these policies are legitimated –​and equally, the very conditions for imagining and implementing them –​often revolve around a racist understanding of the place of Romani people, and by extension any group deemed unworthy, in society. The racial structure of contemporary European urban society, however, should not be considered as the mere effect of racist perceptions. Rather, these very perceptions are inscribed and hence become understandable within the racial structure of the modern state based on the foundational principle of capitalist accumulation (Goldberg 2002). It is at this conjuncture of structural conditions and everyday perceptions and dispositions that it becomes possible to understand such a widespread and complex phenomenon as the spatial segregation of Romani people in European cities. And it is due to the importance of this relational conjuncture that it seems fundamental to adopt a historical perspective which allows this complexity to be kept in focus –​a perspective

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rooted in the colony–​metropole circulation that I discussed in Chapter 1. In light of this, rather than reducing its complexity by flattening the discussion to a direct correspondence between colonial and contemporary forms of spatial segregation, it is important to account for the variety and variability of contemporary mechanisms that produce spatial segregation. For this reason, displacement emerges as only one possible mechanism. In the next chapter, I will discuss omission as another local segregating mechanism –​one that is perhaps less obvious, but equally effective.

Notes 1 See, for instance, the results of such a policy in the UK: “Evictions from rented homes hit record levels in 2014,” The Guardian, February 12, 2015. 2 Throughout the book, I will use the shortened Cluj in place of Cluj-​Napoca. 3 From 1989 to 1998, average employment rates dropped by over 20 percent, income from 1990 to 2000 dropped by almost 40 percent, and unemployment rates went from 8.2 percent in 1992 to 10.8 percent in 2001 (UNDP RIQL 2001). Moreover, while from 1998 to 2005 income per capita constantly increased, in the same period the rate of income inequality also steadily increased (UNDP 2007). In comparison with all other EU member states, in 2009 Romania ranked first for employed persons at risk of poverty (Eurostat 2009). 4 Ladányi and Szelényi (2002) show that in Romania, the number of people experiencing poverty jumped from 34 percent in 1988 to 75 percent in 2000. 5 I had been living in town on and off for about fifteen months until September 2011. In addition, during 2010, I  conducted similar field research in two other Romanian provinces, Banat and Moldova. 6 The eviction was declared discrimination by the National Council for Fighting against Discrimination. As a consequence, the Local Council had to pay 2,000 euros. Consiliul National Pentru Combaterea Discrimiarii (NCCD), Comunicat de presa referitor la decizile Colegiului director al CNCD din data de 15.11.2011. 7 “Romanian housing law requires a minimum of 115 square meters for four people in social housing, with a useable area of 74 square meters. In addition, each social housing unit should include a bathroom and separate living and sleeping quarters. Romania, Housing Law 114/​1996, Annex No. 1” (quoted in Dohotaru 2013). 8 Amnesty International (2011) appealed to Cluj municipal authorities before and after the eviction. In addition, local grassroots groups that mobilized and continue to mobilize include the Working Group of Civil Society Organizations, gLOC, the Foundation Desire and the Romani NGO Amare Phrala. 9 The mayor’s words are included in an article published in Ziarul de Cluj on May 17, 2011: Evacuarea de pe strada Coastei s-​a facuta datorita faptului ca modul de trai al locuitorilor de aici a iscat extrem de multe controverse pentru locuitorii din zona si nu numai, pentru tinerii din zona si pentru tot ceea ce înseamna orasul. 10 I refer to Herzfeld (1997) and his concept of “icon” and, more generally, “iconicity.” The idea of “iconicity” is based on the principle of resemblance, rather than on that of correspondence; resemblance works by means of allusion, and “allusion, being indirect, discourages critical dissection” (Herzfeld 1997, 104) because it presents itself as a self-​evident truth. I provide an extensive theoretical discussion of “iconicity” in Picker 2013c.

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Displacement 67 11 My encounters with civil servants, therefore, only point to some of the most widespread and silently embedded iconic correspondences, which can be read as a moral rejection of matters-​out-​of-​place within the cultural order. Following Herzfeld, “once a cultural order can be represented as part of the natural order [what Bourdieu may have named ‘doxa’] the moral rejection of dissonant cases proceeds as a matter of course” (Herzfeld 1997, 102). 12 The quotation is from Margaret Thatcher, and I discussed it in Chapter 1. 13 When I encountered references to neoamini on a few other occasions, I witnessed how powerful the expression is for articulating some of the most violent epithets against Romani people in contemporary Romania. In March 2009, I  was interviewed by the national daily Cotidianul about my ongoing fieldwork in Cluj. The interview was published with the title “Romanians’ perceptions: ‘Ţigani’ are ‘neoameni’ for us.” After the article had remained on the newspaper’s website for a week, I  counted more than sixty comments posted by readers. Almost all commenters interpreted the word “neoameni” as “sub-​humans,” posting racist slurs denying personhood to Romani people. See “Perceptia romanilor: ‘Tiganii’ sunt ‘neoamenii’ de langa noi,” Cotidianul, March 5, 2009. 14 See the newspaper article “Rom, i volontari contro il Comune: ordinati più sgomberi della Moratti,” Corriere della Sera, March 11, 2015. 15 The politics of eviction of Romani people in France can largely be traced back to the 2003 Sarkozy law criminalizing unauthorized parking. For a reconstruction of the escalation of mass-​scale securitization and the construction of the “Roma issue” in France, see Chapter 4, and especially Legros 2010; Fassin et al. 2014.

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Omission

Racist exclusions and oppressions are […] often made possible by state omission. (D. T. Goldberg 2002, 161)

In the previous chapter, I examined the local segregating mechanism of displacement through the discussion of an eviction and relocation policy in Cluj-​ Napoca (Romania). I  showed displacement’s marginalizing effects on the evicted families in addition to scrutinizing its everyday subtleties, that is, the local knowledge and widespread representation of Romani people underpinning the entire displacement operation. I have framed the analysis within the political–​economic context of neoliberal urban restructuring that has been taking place in Cluj since 2004 and, more broadly, in Central and Eastern Europe since the early 1990s. In this chapter, I empirically turn west to look at omission as the second local segregating mechanism. I will ethnographically focus on Pescara, the main city of Italy’s south-​central region of Abruzzo, and in particular on Rancitelli, Pescara’s marginalized periphery neighborhood that has been unanimously stigmatized as “the Gypsy neighborhood” (il quartiere degli zingari). Heeding Goldberg’s claim in the epigraph to this chapter, I will examine, as in the case of Cluj, the fundamental role of public institutions and tacit everyday local knowledge in keeping the segregation of Romani people in place. Notwithstanding a condition of rooted social marginality affecting both Romani and non-​ Romani families in Rancitelli, Pescarian politics has rarely, if ever, articulated any debate or discourse on urban marginality in the neighborhood, let alone on Romani Pescarians living there. One of the most explicit examples of this political neglect is the silence accorded by regional authorities to a 1998 law proposal for protecting the cultural patrimoine of Romani people that was drafted by Pescarian Romani activists. Actually, the only significant public policy addressing social exclusion in Rancitelli was part of URBAN II, a European Union-​funded project which unfolded in the early 2000s and which had a rather meager impact on social

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marginality. This was mainly because its budget for minorities –​primarily Romani people –​was progressively cut throughout its various implementation phases. By largely omitting, in official documents and speeches, any analysis or substantial reference to social marginality and stigmatization affecting the neighborhood since the early 1990s, local authorities have facilitated the emergence of an effective system of control over Rancitelli, which is primarily, and almost unanimously, considered to be “risky,” “dangerous,” and “decayed.” In a void of political action and debate over material and symbolic conditions of marginality, deep-​rooted racist stigma attached to Romani people has functioned to ensure the socio-​spatial separation of Romani from non-​Romani Pescarians. The complex social dynamic of tacitly retaining this socio-​spatial condition is what I name the “politics of omission.” A sense of national and regional context is fundamental for an analysis of this condition in Pescara. Over the years bridging the last two centuries, socio-​economic polarization and marginality, especially at the bottom of the class structure, have continued to increase in Italy (Campesi 2003). This process occurred in conjunction with the collapse of the political system in the early 1990s, which brought about a decrease in the political claims favoring socio-​economic equality, typically put forward by the left; this brought about both a loss of trust in political institutions and a steep increase in social insecurity and job precariousness. In the south-​central region of Abruzzo, the experience of losing both social security and trust in politics intensified with the 2008 financial crisis –​from 2007 to 2014, unemployment rates more than doubled in the region, and from 2007 to 2011 the per-​capita expenditure for social services delivered to “immigrants and nomads” dropped from 14 to 9 percent (ISTAT 2012). Today, “nomads” (nomadi) is a common category across national, regional and municipal public offices, as well as one of the most widespread media idioms referring to Romani people in Italian national media. Its embeddedness in Italian statecraft goes back to the mid-nineteenth-​century nomad stigma and criminalization of vagrancy, madness and social deviance (see Chapter 1; Illuzzi 2014). Reference to “nomads” is frequently made in public offices. However, while a number of regional documents and publications –​all of which are strictly technical, that is, non-​political –​mention the word, virtually no document offers an analysis of the social conditions of “nomads.” The common and unproblematic social use of the word “nomads,” as I will show, is one of the ways in which Rancitelli Romani families are kept under tight control. In the following section, I will describe and discuss the ways in which this largely tacit regime of control operates and how it is able to create the conditions under which public institutions can easily refrain from addressing socio-​ economic marginality in Rancitelli, hence from easing processes of upward social mobility and access to resources for the neighborhood’s population.

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After outlining Rancitelli’s recent historical trajectory of territorial stigmatization and neoliberal governance, I will examine the implementation of URBAN II and its scant results. Subsequently, I will move more in depth to focus on local politicians’ dominant representations of Rancitelli and Pescarian Romanies. I will then scrutinize the relations between these first two issues and four key dynamics of the local governance of Rancitelli, namely: a) police enforcement in the neighborhood; b) media discourse about the neighborhood; c) urban “Gypsy” stigma in Pescara at large; and d) the ubiquity of surreptitious gazing in the neighborhood.

Governing an “ethnic bomb” With a population of 123,000, Pescara is one of the major harbors of the Adriatic Sea. Its recent history includes many of the key changes that have affected Italian society from the early 1990s onward. Along with de-​industrialization, a strengthened third sector and the steady increase of labor precariousness and social insecurity, especially at the social margins, a strong wave of urbanization has been driven by the progressive shortage of once-​ popular rural jobs. The neighborhood of Rancitelli is one of the most significant examples of this development. Founded in the mid-​1920s around the important Camplone foundry, at the end of the 1970s the neighborhood saw the construction of large-​scale blocks of social housing flats. This can be seen as both the first and last social policy with a significant impact in terms of providing social security to low-​income families. Later developments brought about increased socio-​economic deprivation, along with the proliferation of an informal economy and territorial stigmatization. In the late 1970s, once the block of social housing flats was completed, forty Romani families received one flat each (Manna 1996). The families had arrived in Pescara some twenty years earlier from other towns and cities in the region, following the decline in demand of jobs such as horse dealers, fair traders and craftsmen. Numbering about 170,000, Romani people have never been granted the status of national minorities in contemporary Italy.1 The majority of them are estimated to hold Italian citizenship, while the other main nationalities include Romanian, Serbian, Croatian and Bulgarian. Several individuals and families who arrived in Italy from Yugoslavia before 1995 are still stateless. Romani Pescarians, who are Italian citizens self-​identifying as “Abruzzo Roma” (rom abruzzesi), are estimated to number around one thousand people, that is, about 0.8 percent of the urban population. The majority of them live in Rancitelli, and while a number of Romani families living in the neighborhood can enjoy a certain sense of economic comfort, they largely live in conditions of diffused social marginality: of a total of 93 Romani children between six and ten years old, only 44 attend primary school; of 54 teenagers living in Rancitelli, only 31 attend high school (Guarnieri and Dicati 2005). Since the late 1970s, when some of these families moved to Rancitelli,

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the neighborhood has progressively become derogatorily stigmatized by the local media as both “the Gypsy neighborhood” (il quartiere degli zingari) and the “decay neighborhood” (il quartere degradato). These two forms of stigma continuously reinforce one another. In 1960, regional chronicles were beginning to report the presence of “dark faces,” and local councils started issuing ordinances against the settlements of caravans of “Gypsies” –​zingari in Italian –​establishing fees should those settlements not disperse. According to an account dated 1966: In Abruzzo the Gypsy problem represents the equivalent of what for the United States is the Negro Problem. The essential difference is that the U.S. government has already intervened, following the country’s legal philosophy, and has established Negros’ rights to racial integration. In Italy, by contrast, the question of the last nomads is far from being solved. (Pistilli 1966, 15) This excerpt shows the kind of racial stigma that was circulating in the region before the first Romani families moved into Rancitelli. This stigma worked, and to a large extent still works, by combining physical traits with deemed lack of morality  –​being nomad is seen as a potential threat to social life. When they settled in the neighborhood in the late 1970s, the stigma progressively territorialized and began to include the expression “decay” (degrado), which largely revolved around the issue of criminality and dangerousness but also entailed a moralized idea of incivility and disrepute. A journalist’s account of Rancitelli in 1988 is telling in this regard: “Risk neighborhood” (quartiere a rischio). This is the way Pescarians call the areas where Gypsies found abode [i.e., primarily Rancitelli]. The more Roma who arrived, the higher the tensions became in the neighborhood. In a couple of streets, which were disreputable to begin with, the presence of Zingari gave rise to some clashes.2 During the 1990s, these two types of stigmatization –​the racial stigma of “zingari/​nomadi” and the territorial stigma of “decay” –​reinforced one another within the wider context of increasingly neoliberal municipal measures in the neighborhood. These included, in short, the withdrawal of social and administrative services alongside increasing police and military enforcement. In 1992, in particular, the twofold “Gypsy-​decay” stigma intensified as forty Romani families fleeing Yugoslavia’s fragmentation found precarious and improvised shelter in Rancitelli; they were evicted three years later (Molinari and Sabatini 1996). From the mid-​to the late 1990s, the local council shut down many of its services in the neighborhood, including a primary school, the National Pension System front office (INPS), the municipal registry office and the chamber of commerce. Concurrently, a building hosting a secondary

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school and a day nursery was converted into a permanent Carabinieri barracks, thus imposing a military presence;3 moreover, the community policeman (poliziotto di quartiere), a traditionally friendly figure close to the local community, was removed, along with other public front offices. In 2002, the municipality ceased its financial support of the major local Romani association; as a consequence, the association was obliged to stop its activities, which included intercultural dialogue and education for Romani youth. Finally, the six municipal districts were merged into three circumscriptions in 2008, provoking the move of all public offices that had remained in Rancitelli to the circumscription’s headquarters about two kilometers away. In 2004, a local group of citizens carried out an informal survey on Rancitelli residents’ main concerns, noticing that: Rancitelli residents complain about the absence of community life and about the lack of services at various levels, such as street lighting, signposting, general lack of cleanliness, and inadequate public transport. The amount of police forces is considered to be scarce. Relationships with resident Gypsies (zingari residenti) are difficult. Further problems are: youth unrest; the presence of asbestos in several buildings; acoustic and air pollution, which are also provoked by the presence of the nearby airport; and finally, the lack of green areas.4 From this excerpt, it appears that the stigma of everyday “decay” (degrado) and its close links to “Gypsies” widely circulates inside the neighborhood. Furthermore, the stigma not only refers to material deprivation, but has to do with a more comprehensive dysfunction of the human and institutional capacity to care about the neighborhood. In order to govern this dysfunctional situation, the municipality used a highly effective strategy. Avoiding recognition of the presence of social marginality and racist exclusion while concomitantly withdrawing public services and increasing police presence, the local council paved the way for the neighborhood to be governed more through police actions than through social security services. Throughout this period, the municipality kept a constant silence about the problems of marginality and exclusion that both Romani and non-​ Romani people were facing. However, one EU-​ funded policy, URBAN II, which was coordinated and managed by the municipality, did address Rancitelli’s largely deprived social conditions. It is virtually only in URBAN II policy texts that the municipality’s view on Rancitelli Romani families can be found. An in-​depth analysis of this social policy action will show that, while an official –​albeit silent –​discourse on Romani people and social marginality was constructed, this was largely functional to the perpetuation of the politics of omission. URBAN II (2000–​2006) was an urban periphery rehabilitation program involving 70 deprived European urban areas.5 With the final aim

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of tackling infrastructural underdevelopment and social distress (disagio sociale), the municipality deployed the “territorial stigma” of “decay” as the main conceptual standpoint for the preliminary analysis of Rancitelli’s social conditions. In this preliminary analysis, “decay” has two meanings, “physical decay” (degrado fisico) and “urban decay” (degrado urbanistico). “Physical decay” relates to “abandoned industrial areas and isolation of socially disadvantaged groups,” and “urban decay” pertains to “bad housing conditions and vandalism by marginalized social strata, the members of which have problems in living together” (Città di Pescara, 2006). While the first meaning refers to decaying material conditions, the second underlines socially deviant behaviors and directly relates them to social marginality. This is also evident in the program section on “social distress” (disagio sociale), in which Rancitelli’s socially vulnerable groups are listed, including “immigrants, old persons, people on social benefits, high number of Romani communities [sic] with serious social integration problems, minor aged persons in danger, and criminal subjects.” The explanation of Romani people’s condition of social distress is particularly telling of the municipality’s dominant view: The Romani community’s condition of social distress is linked to Romani people’s strong attachment to certain ethno-​cultural traditions, such as strong identity feeling; nomadism, and the centrality of extended family. These traditions are inconsistent with the lifestyle that this community was forced to adjust to. In addition, living together with the local population proved difficult, due in part to reciprocal hostility and in part to the lack of trust vis-​à-​vis Romani people that is caused by Romani people’s recurrent illegal behaviors. (Città di Pescara, 2006, 5) This excerpt shows that the URBAN II program depicts Romani Pescarians as responsible for their own “social distress” –​specifically, it is their “ethno-​ cultural traditions” and “illegal practices” that allegedly cause their own social distress. And while the ill fit of “ethno-​cultural traditions” is explained as a consequence of the fact that they have had to adjust to the majority society’s lifestyle, their illegal behaviors are not explained in the document. These behaviors are described only as the reason for the majority’s lack of trust vis-​à-​vis Romani people. Romani people, therefore, are not only exclusively viewed as others “ethno-​culturally” and fundamentally deviant socially, but they are also considered responsible for the lack of trust they experience vis-​à-​vis themselves. In line with this view of Romani Pescarians as the only source of their own problems, the budget that was allocated to the only measure promoting ethnic minorities’ integration –​that is, addressing primarily Romani people –​was drastically reduced from 250,000 euro in 2002 to 80,000 euro in July 2007, effectively amounting, in September 2007, to only 51,000

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euro.6 URBAN II’s paltry results were summarized by a Rancitelli social worker whom I met in 2008: We set up this front office in this community center in order to welcome people living in all sorts of ‘social distress.’ They [URBAN II managers] created this very beautiful structure [i.e. the building], but never advertised it to the local population. Nobody knows that this service exists, and it’s already been three years since it was opened! This indicates a general lack of effort by URBAN II managers to promote social integration, prioritizing instead the construction of infrastructures such as the community center.7 Against the background of political omission, local politicians’ representations of Rancitelli and the relationships between Romani and non-​Romani Pescarians become important. An examination of politicians’ views completes the picture of the local dominant views –​however silent they may be –​of the neighborhood’s conditions of social marginality. It also provides a further indication of the extent to which the twofold stigma –​racial (“Gypsies”) and territorial (“decay”)  –​influences local elites’ understanding and hence their decision-​making processes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the view of Rancitelli shared by virtually all politicians I encountered, including the individual quoted below, displays a certain similarity to the tone and content of URBAN II’s documents:8 In that area [Rancitelli] there is a high concentration of Romani people, and we know that when there is a high concentration of a different ethnie [etnia], difficult situations occur. In the case of the relationships between Pescarians and Romani people, the situation becomes ever more difficult because today they [Romani people] are not recognized by the Pescarian citizenry. Rancitelli Roma are people outside of the rules, and forced to live in conditions that belong to the civil society; for example, living in houses. […] They are dirty, they keep music at a loud volume, they have arrogant ways of behaving and are often angry. They are involved in criminal activities, and therefore the police search their houses. This local politician believed that the problem was not racism: Racism is not the problem. The problems are some attitudes that some Romani people have that don’t get accepted by the population. Consequently, Romani people are homogenized and directly identified with those attitudes. Thus, this is also bad for those normal [Romani] persons who do not commit crimes, who are educated, and so on […] Since it is impossible to find a way of living together, politics should find the ways toward social integration, because that neighborhood [Rancitelli] is an ethnic bomb! And it could explode at any given moment.

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Local politicians’ representations of Rancitelli largely depict an urban condition of permanent tensions between, on the one hand, social deviance exclusively identified in Romani people’s alleged illegal behaviors, and on the other, a non-​Romani local society in which citizens and institutions are thought of as doing what they can to contain a social disorder entirely deriving from Romani people. According to several local politicians, in sum, Rancitelli Roma are generally deviant subjects responsible for their own social conditions, which in turn are the cause of tensions with Rancitelli non-​Roma. Against the background of local political leaders’ largely derogatory representations, it is not surprising that a coherent discourse and policy regarding Rancitelli and its Romani residents is absent. Political omission therefore can be seen as a diffusely conscious political strategy deriving from the lack of political will to address problems of social deprivation, as the concept of social deprivation does not enter politicians’ views of Rancitelli and its Romani population. In addition, a politics of omission proves fruitful, as it can easily capitalize on the circulation of the deep-​rooted twofold territorial stigma (i.e. “decay neighborhood” and “Gypsy neighborhood”), which consequently becomes a pivotal condition for maintaining social order in the neighborhood. Alongside the well-​established twofold stigma, other forms of stigmatization of Romani people unfold in Pescara everyday life. Before documenting these forms and their role in keeping social order in place, in the next section I will look at police actions and representations and at local media discourse, both with reference to Rancitelli; as I will show, these two phenomena provide the necessary background against which to analyze the workings of everyday stigmatizing dynamics.

“Racism is not the problem” The idea that “racism is not the problem,” in the words of the local politician quoted above, deserves closer scrutiny. The denial of racism is a constitutive part of the widespread ideological constructs that neoliberal doctrines endorse, especially when it comes to urban poverty and marginality (Goldberg 2009; Omi and Winant 2015). The notion of racism implied in the idea “racism is not the problem” seems confined to the sphere of the individual (and in this sense is indeed coterminous with the popular expression “I’m not racist, but …”). Only if understood as individuals’ openly racist slurs and offences can racism be considered irrelevant. The reason for this is that openly racist slurs and physical aggressions, in Pescara and in Europe at large, are socially stigmatized; hence, they are relatively rare, although not infrequent. Overwhelmingly understood as an individual behavior, racism seems virtually never to be the problem. If, instead, racism were understood as a structural force organizing social-​symbolic and socio-​spatial hierarchies and divisions, as well as access to resources, it would probably be more difficult to exclude it from the series of problems affecting Rancitelli’s Romani residents.

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Branching out from this consideration, denying that racism is of any importance in the reproduction of social inequalities, is coterminous with what Harvey (2005, 82) names “one of the central contradictions of neoliberalism” –​namely, denying that society exists. The emergence of neoliberalism coincides with Thatcher’s idea that only individuals and families exist, not society as a whole (Chapter 1). The politics of omission rests, ultimately, on the neglect of racism as a structural and powerful social force imposing various thresholds of inclusion and exclusion, domination and oppression, exactly because it conforms to the overwhelmingly accepted (de)politicized approach of denying or downplaying the importance of the structural in local and micro-​level social phenomena. From here, the hierarchies and thresholds which race –​and its (ideo)logical extension, racism –​impose need to be continuously policed in order to reproduce the segregated status quo. In view of scrutinizing the effects of denying racism as a structural force, and the consequences of refraining from tackling racist exclusion, I now turn my focus to two instances of policing Rancitelli’s physical and symbolic boundaries of segregation, namely police actions and local media discourse. In relation to the largely unsuccessful yet highly visible URBAN II project, police enforcement stands out as a particularly effective state measure for dealing with Rancitelli’s “social deviance.” From 2005 to 2011, 320 police raids per year were carried out in the neighborhood –​one per day, excluding Sundays.9 This intensive wave of state repression culminated in the summer of 2011, as the municipal assembly passed an ordinance imposing the presence of thirty National Army soldiers in the neighborhood.10 According to the chief police officer in charge of Pescara’s urban peripheries, the main problem in Rancitelli was the presence of drugs, and that Romani people were involved in the drug market. He then articulated his view of Rancitelli Roma: They [Roma] have a no-​work culture [cultura del non lavoro]. They are Pescarians now, but they do not ask for integration. Many of them do not send their children to school. The average Pescarian is prone to social integration, but they … they are not. A large number of those living in Rancitelli do not want to integrate, and think that they are the boss there [in Rancitelli]. He was pessimistic about the possibility of Romani people’s social integration, confiding to me, “if they do not want to step back into legality by sending their children to school, no solution [i.e. social integration] will be possible.” Furthermore, “For the good [i.e. non-​Romani] residents [residenti per bene] there are big problems, such as music played in cars at very high volume. For them, living together with Romani people is in general very difficult.” I then asked him what the police’s main strategy was, to which he replied, “Since the problem is their [Romani people’s] no-​work culture, the only thing we can do is a containment action [azione di contenimento] by constantly patrolling the

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neighborhood’s streets and periodically intervening with raids.” This shows clearly how the juxtaposition between Romani people and Rancitelli, deeply rooted in the twofold stigma of “decay” and “zingari” indexing social degradation and deviance, permeates the police’s views of the neighborhood. It also speaks to what I have already discussed in the previous chapter, namely the meanings of the verbal icon “mentalitate” as an alleged Romani characteristic deemed unchangeable. The dominant local media discourse on Rancitelli also articulates the juxtaposition of Romani people and the neighborhood with reference to criminality and emphasis on drug dealing. This discourse constitutes one of the most significant conditions under which territorial stigmatization has become impressively rooted in the town since the early 1990s. I conducted a thematic analysis of media representations of Rancitelli in the most popular news website Prima da Noi between 2005 and 2013; I then complemented the work by looking at articles written between 1995 and 2005 in the two most widely read local dailies, Il Messaggero and Il Centro. In the news website Prima da Noi, ninety-​three articles mentioned Rancitelli. Among them, I detected the following five main themes. “Handcuffing” was the most widespread, occurring in 41 percent of the articles; the second was that of “drugs and drug dealing,” occurring in 30 percent of the articles; the third theme was that of “nomads/​Roma,” occurring in 17 percent of the articles; the fourth, “police blitzes/​raids,” occurred in 6 percent of the articles; and the fifth, “robbery,” also occurred in 6 percent of the articles. This data shows that the image of Rancitelli produced by the local media is one of social deviance. The dominant local media narrative is rather straightforward –​handcuffing regularly occurs in the neighborhood due to drug-​related crimes, which are often committed by “nomads/​Roma.” The second local media analysis focused on the territorial dimension of local press discourse on Romani people and shows how such discourse progressively narrowed down to target Rancitelli. From the mid-​to late 1990s, only two geographical areas were mentioned: Rancitelli and the rest of the Pescarian province. The social actors who were mentioned in the two areas are particularly telling. In Rancitelli, the police and residents were the two major actors mentioned, followed by civil society groups and associations; in the rest of the Pescarian province, by contrast, civil society associations were the only protagonists. And in the early 2000s, the juxtaposition between Rancitelli, criminality and “nomads” was brought to completion, as only Rancitelli is mentioned, and “nomads” and the police are the only social actors. (see also Picker 2010, 220–​221). In conclusion, dominant local media representations seem to be similar to those of local politicians, depicting in this way a deviant urban population living in a neighborhood that requires major police enforcement. These representations also explicitly highlight the symbiosis between the twofold stigma, that is, “decay” (territorial stigma) and “Gypsy/​ies” (racial stigma).

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While public policy, police actions, local media and authorities’ representations are fundamental for understanding local mechanisms of segregation, it is equally important to look at what happens in the neighborhood on an everyday basis. To this end, I will sketch a series of ethnographic portraits, which I will organize around the intertwined everyday dynamics of racial stigma and surreptitious gazing as complementary devices of control over a population that is continually deemed deviant. Both dynamics and their multiple articulations, as I will show, unfold within a deep-​rooted urban common sense, which constructs a sort of civilization continuum whereby Romani people are deemed less civilized than non-​Romanies, and consequently perceived as a threat to social harmony and living together. In a similar manner to Cluj, everyday expressions stigmatizing Romani people are popular in Pescara. The most widespread everyday stigmatizing “icon” for identifying Romani Pescarians is “pigri,” which, coming from the Latin pingus (“fat,” “heavy”), literally means “the lazy ones.” However, in Pescara this word is attached to a different set of meanings, ranging from social inappropriateness to social deviance. For example, a person driving a convertible while listening to high-​volume techno music is considered a pigro (feminine pigra), as is a person or a group of people walking down the street dressed in dark leather clothes with big gold necklaces, as well as someone involved in robbery or other similar illegal activities. Therefore, this expression does not seem to come from the Italian pigro; rather, its origins seem to be Spanish, in which picaro means “[a]‌type of cunning person, belonging to lower social strata, who lives from trickery and similar actions.”11 Rather than addressing Romani people’s alleged laziness, as the literary meaning would suggest, pigri refers to a more comprehensive domain of borderline moral, social and legal behaviors. The use of pigri is widespread in urban life, and it is usually coupled with two main devices of stigmatization, namely reference to clothing and the social use of surnames. In the eyes of non-​Romani Pescarians, Pescarian Romanies generally wear several earrings and are likely to have a distinctive haircut. This view is particularly prominent with regard to women rather than men, and in this respect, Romani women are typically considered to be more easily recogniz­able than Romani men. In 2008, Carlo, a forty-​year-​old non-​Romani Rancitelli resident, explained to me the extent to which physical appearance can be a sign of belonging: Romani women wear long dresses. The classic female dress is a long one, with much gold on it, bracelets and so on […] They have their own way of dressing, finally. Yet a little part of them [of Romani women and men] has adjusted to the others [non-​Romanies] […] and we call them svestiti [lit. “the undressed ones”]. We say, “She has undressed,” meaning she gradually took distance from her own traditions, and now she wears normal clothes as a normal citizen. Yet the majority of them still wear long dresses.

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Although svestiti may appear to be a typical expression, I  have only come across it in this encounter. Carlo’s description is particularly telling and articulates in a very detailed way how the racial stigma seeps into everyday representations without appearing as openly racist. Clothing, as Al-​Saji (2009, 78)  aptly shows, can be seen as an extension of one’s own bodily surface. Indeed, clothes occupy much of one’s own bodily appearance, especially in urban public spaces. The body, and in particular the female Romani body, emerges in Carlo’s representations as an unequivocal sign of identity and a clear marker of belonging, which, in his subsequent reasoning, is articulated as racial: These [Romani] people now live here, and it has been like this for years. They settled down in Pescara. Due to this fact, they have remained traditional exclusively as stock, as race [come ceppo, come razza]; also in the uses of their traditions and in the language they speak. Traditional Romani people were a group that used to move from place to place. One of non-​Romani Pescarians’ most common everyday idioms for describing Romani Pescarians aligns exactly with Carlo’s historical narration articulating rigid dichotomies, such as yesterday’s pure authenticity versus today’s impurity. The discourse of Romani people’s loss of cultural habits, first and foremost “nomadism,” allows this narration to distinguish the cultural habit of “nomadism” from its attribute of racial marker. It is only the fact that Romani people are believed to have lost “their own traditions” that allows them to be deemed “a stock, a race.” Racism, this instance again confirms, is deeply embedded in Pescara’s widely shared everyday representations. Ultimately, the ubiquitous icon of “nomads” is a topical instance of this racist idiom, as the expression conveys a deterministic idea of intrinsically out-​ of-​rule and deviant subjects. The second device of stigmatization is surnames. Mario, a thirty-​nine-​ year-​old Romani man living in Rancitelli, explained to me why he was unemployed: “It’s now been two years since I asked the municipality to buy a space for opening my shop. However, as soon as they heard my surname […], they refused to sell me the space.” In Pescara, surnames are one of the most common devices of identification of Romani people, both in media accounts and in everyday knowledge, and everyone is aware that there are typical Romani surnames. “From the surname alone,” a social worker confided to me, “you cannot be one hundred percent sure whether someone is Romani or not. This has an exception, namely the ‘historical’ surnames, such as […]. There are many surnames that you would never associate with Romani people, but we cannot be sure […] whether someone is Romani or not.” The two stigmatizing devices –​reference to clothing and social uses of surnames –​clearly revolve around the notion of ancestry. Since clothing is seen as an extension of the body as well as part of the hereditary condition of

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being a “nomad,” and surnames mark the boundaries of kinship, racialization is the domain within which everyday stigma is articulated. Along with the stigmatizing expressions pigri and nomadi, everyday racialization exists in the ultimate commonplace, banal knowledge that seems to be able to maintain the acceptable social order in Rancitelli. However, there is an additional dynamic in the neighborhood’s public space that provides an even stronger basis to the architecture of social control of Rancitelli: surreptitious gazing. In the summer of 2008, Renzo, a fifty-​year-​old Rancitelli resident, was working as a wholesale trader. One afternoon, while I was standing with him in one of the neighborhood’s main streets and talking about the local association I was volunteering for, he pointed at a car parked some twenty meters from us and told me, “You see there, that car? Those are policemen in plain clothes. Everyone knows they are policemen, and they know that everyone knows. They stay there hours and hours waiting.” “What for?” I asked. He replied: For drug pushers. They wait for those who are not living in Rancitelli and thus cannot recognize them. This is our everyday life here. And you know, people know, everyone knows here that zingari are the problem, but nobody will ever tell you that … because people are worried about retaliation. Here it is hell [è n’inferno]. Here you’re lucky if you move out! During my stay in the city, this sense of synoptic control, collective suspicion and constant tension related to eye-​contact games, appraising and sizing up was significantly pervasive in the neighborhood’s public spaces. During a late summer afternoon, while chatting with a Romani family in a little park in the center of the neighborhood, one of the family members addressed me and pointed at a man walking nearby. “Do you see that guy? He is a Carabiniere in plain clothes. You can tell from the way he walks: very fast and not looking around at all!” Both the gaze of my interlocutor and the Carabiniere’s deceptive attitude were signs of a surreptitious control that anyone could easily perceive. This continuous gazing dynamic made it difficult to escape from social control in the public space. As I have shown in the previous sections, this feeling of being under control was provoked by a whole set of everyday and media discourses, police actions, attitudes and ideas that contributed to inform a functional urban governance dynamic able to keep social order in the “decayed Gypsy neighborhood.” If triangulated with the other parts of my analysis –​the URBAN II policy, the representations it embedded, and its scarce results: politicians’ private representations; state police practices and representations; and media discourse –​everyday dynamics inside Rancitelli become meaningful sites for understanding some of the most effective ways in which segregation and exclusion are safely kept in place. Against the background of the last forty years’ massively neoliberal urban policies and gradual growth of the twofold territorial

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stigma in the city (i.e. “decay” and “Gypsy”), these dynamics ultimately emerge as particularly effective tools for ensuring and supporting a pervasive politics of omission.

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Conclusion: racism and neoliberal doxa In this chapter, I have shown the ways in which the politics of omission have served as an important condition for leaving the governance of Rancitelli to police actions and everyday stigmatization, articulated through media coverage and day-​to-​day dynamics inside the neighborhood. These dynamics, and more generally local knowledge of Rancitelli and its Romani population, are predicated upon racial conceptions that are historically rooted in Rancitelli’s twofold stigma of “decay” and “Gypsies.” These concomitantly official and unofficial forms of urban governance, as I have shown, are ultimately predicated upon the racist socio-​spatial order, which in turn becomes both self-​ ­evident and widely accepted thanks to these governance dynamics. In Pescara, race works as a regulatory principle of the social and organizes both material arrangements, such as socio-​spatial distribution and access to economic and political resources, and widely shared perceptions, including references for the identification of both “self ” and “others.” Although not directly coordinated and comprehensively planned –​yet perhaps due in part to this feature –​the various local actors and formal and informal dynamics I have illustrated end up shaping a tightly woven system of control. In the context of increasing socio-​economic precarity and insecurity among the already marginalized, this system is largely made possible, if not induced, by the politics of omission, that is, the absence of both political actions and discourses addressing Rancitelli residents’ socio-​economic conditions and Romani people’s racist exclusions. The case of Rancitelli ultimately seems to suggest that when the normative “doxa,” such as the common perception of Romani pescarians, is widely shared, local politics can easily refrain from actively intervening to establish social order –​omission leaves the burden of governing urban marginality and exclusion to police raids and military presence, as well as to everyday stigma. Against the background of the last forty years of social services’ withdrawal from Rancitelli, and the concomitant increase of state repression through police raids and established military forces, this system of governance acquires an explicit neoliberal aura. First, it is not the state as such that has been increasingly withdrawing. The withdrawal of public services –​“the left hand of the state” –​and the simultaneous increase of the “right hand,” i.e., policy enforcement, is a clear sign of post-​1970s dominant governing doctrines (Wacquant 1999). Second, the social inclusion agenda of URBAN II, as established by municipality managers, was significantly downplayed in favor of more visible, and therefore immediately politically profitable, infrastructural measures. Finally, the local media discourse on Rancitelli since

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the mid-​1990s complements the picture by constructing an almost exclusively deviant urban area whose chief features lay in the perceived tendency of “Gypsies” to commit crime, hence establishing a racist perception that is rarely understood as such by the majority  –​indeed, as a local politician revealingly pointed out, “Racism is not the problem.” As in the previous chapter, I now conclude by discussing two issues: resemblances between contemporary and colonial urban rule, and topical instances of omission in other European cities. The primary effect of the politics of omission in Rancitelli seems to be the imposition of a tightly controlled social order predicated upon the racial criminalization of Romani people, powerfully articulated along an alleged continuum of civilization. The imposition of a strictly racist socio-​spatial order in which non-​whites rigorously occupy, and are encouraged to remain on, the lowest level of a supposed civilization continuum is what happened in Italian Addis Ababa. The main priority of Italian Fascist architects and governors was to ensure the separation between “barbarians,” i.e., local inhabitants, and “civilized people,” i.e., Italians. This symbolic and spatial distinction was determined by the idea that “barbarians” lacked any sort of culture or history that would be comparable to the two-​thousand-​year-long Italian history, narrated by the Fascist propaganda as rooted in the glorified Roman Empire (Chapter 1). Similarly, among large portions of the local non-​Romani society, the alleged “lost authenticity” of Romani Pescarians positions them in a cultural vacuum where their collective formation is only understood in terms of “a stock” and “a race,” as it emerged from one of my encounters. Omission as a segregating mechanism can also be found in postwar Kosovo, where two humanitarian camps located by the Trepça mining complex, near Mitrovica, have been hosting several Romani Kosovar IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) since 1999.12 In that case, the politics of omission was enacted by international organizations in charge of minority protection, including the UN (UNMIK: United Nations Mission in Kosovo) and NATO (KFOR: Kosovo Force). In the winter of 1999, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) relocated all Romani families previously living in Roma Mahala, the historic central Romani neighborhood of Mitrovica that had just been destroyed, to the extreme urban periphery, near the Trepça mining complex. While this was a necessary humanitarian action and planned as only a temporary solution, what happened later speaks of a choice of omission. The two UNHCR camps were located in a highly toxic area, and in 2000, two rounds of blood tests among camp inhabitants revealed highly dangerous levels of lead. However, Dr Bernard Kouchner, the then-​Special Representative of the Secretary General and UNMIK’s highest authority, decided not to evacuate the camp. The next round of blood testing was done in 2004 after the death of a girl. Subsequently, World Health Organization officials in Kosovo ordered UNMIK authorities in Mitrovica to carry out an immediate evacuation of the camp, but they refused. In 2006,

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after several media interventions in the case, UNMIK decided to consider relocation. In the meantime, twenty-​eight people had died in the camp due to the toxic conditions, and fifty women had had miscarriages. As of 2011, about eighty Romani families were still living in highly toxic areas. The case of poisoned Kosovo Romanies not only shows how the politics of omission ensures and perpetuates segregation, but also offers one of the bluntest examples of “necropolitics” (Mbembe 2003) in one of Europe’s most deprived national contexts.

Notes 1 In 1999, upon voting the only law protecting national minority, Romani people (rom e sinti) were purposely excluded. 2 Villoresi Luca, 1988. “Ma a Pescara vive un popolo di zingari con fissa dimora,” La Repubblica, January 22. 3 Carabinieri is a military force responding to the Ministry of Defence, whereas the State Police (Polizia di Stato) is a civic force which responds to the Ministry of Interior. 4 Pescara Vicina, 2004. “In un questionario la parola ai cittadini della circoscrizione di ‘Villa del Fuoco’.” December, 5, 21. 5 Pescara was awarded both URBAN (1994–​1999) and URBAN II (2000–​2006) European Grants, although Rancitelli featured only in the second part of the program. 6 See Comune di Pescara (2007). 7 URBAN II scant results are also underlined by Mingione and Nuvolati (2003). 8 I interviewed two prominent politicians of each of the three main local political parties: one center (the direct successor of Christian Democrats), one right-​wing and one left-​wing. 9 Pescara police department, personal email exchange, 2011. 10 See “Pescara: militari in città dal 1 agosto fino alla fine del 2011,” Il Pescara, July 27, 2011. 11 Merriam-Webster Dictionary online. 12 This chronicle is taken from the campaign website “Toxic Waste Kills,” in which a detailed reconstruction of the events is provided. See also Kramer and Dzihic (2005).

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Chapter 4

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Containment

In the previous chapter, I ethnographically examined the segregating mechanism of omission, showing the ways in which omitting political engagement from urban marginality ultimately contributes to perpetuating a condition of spatial segregation. I dissected how, in this virtually complete political vacuum, the only forces and institutions ensuring social order in Pescara’s stigmatized “Gypsy neighborhood” are a police and military presence and everyday and media-​perpetuated racial stigmas. Since race is overwhelmingly neglected in public discourses across Europe, the racist underpinning of omission is effective: as it largely goes unnoticed, it ensures that the politics of omission is somehow considered both obvious and natural. In post-​ 9/11 European cities, however, the politics of omission can hardly be effective when the presence of dispossessed foreign nationals becomes a public concern –​at times, as in France in the summer of 2010, reaching the point of obsessive media and political frenzy. In such circumstances, the state in its national, regional and local ramifications becomes crucial in articulating publicly accepted responses to collective alarms and anxieties relating to newcomers, especially the homeless and dispossessed. In this chapter, I focus on one such state response to largely dispossessed and racialized foreign newcomers: containment, which I see as the third local segregating mechanism, in addition to displacement (Chapter 2) and omission (Chapter 3). Containment should here be understood as a physical enclosure in typically isolated and fenced-​in housing facilities, set aside from urban life in largely precarious material conditions and affected by territorial stigmatization. I will empirically analyze the emergence and management of socio-​spatial containment in Florence (Italy) and Montreuil (France), discussing two similar urban infrastructures of containment of foreign Romani people: “nomad camps” (campi nomadi) and “incorporation villages” (villages d’insertion). Considering these devices as “Gypsy urban areas,” I will show the ways in which, in both urban contexts, the “Gypsy camp,” an institutionalized form of socio-​spatial containment that first appeared in Western Europe in the late 1960s (Chapter 1), establishes a tight nexus between the urban-​spatial and the racial and, by direct historical extension, between the metropole

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and the colony. In so doing, like other kinds of camp formations including refugee camps and camps for asylum-​seekers, the “Gypsy camp” ensures the monitored and benevolent containment of one typically unwanted population (Picker et al. 2015). In March 2007, in a northeastern suburb of Paris, the first village d’insertion was inaugurated: a fenced camp equipped with caravans and modular mobile housing units, monitored and governed by public authorities and NGOs through a strict regime of rule. This was the first time after WWII that French authorities had designed and implemented the publicly monitored enclosure of a homogeneously classified “ethnic group” of people independently of their legal status and the lawfulness of their behavior. Meanwhile, in neighboring Italy, the mayors of Rome and Milan were signing two pacts with the Minister of the Interior entitled “Pact for a secure Rome” (Patto per Roma sicura) and “Pact for a secure Milan” (Patto per Milano sicura). In both texts, which share many similarities, the two main reasons for the perceived lack of urban security were first “immigration and integration” and second “campi nomadi,” literally nomad camps. These two pacts inaugurated a new policy strategy vis-​à-​vis Romani people that included the counting and collection of camp residents’ biometric data, revealing unprecedented similarities to Fascist politics of racial profiling of Romani people and their confinement in concentration camps.1 The particular ways in which both campi nomadi and villages d’insertion have operated in the late 2000s and mid-​2010s have much in common with rationalities of colonial urban rule. Both camp formations aim at morally re-​educating and socially integrating (or assimilating) largely dispossessed Eastern European Romani people, enforcing a disciplinary power by containing Romani bodies within fenced portions of the urban space. This fundamental ambivalence of protection and control is functional to various ruling agencies’ arbitrary actions upon spatially contained lives and symbolically contained “threats.” It is this profound ambivalence, as I will show, that informs the nexus between the colonial civilizing mission and the contemporary governance of “Gypsy camps.” This nexus is predicated upon a normative conception of the proper place in the city for the racially deemed, heeding in this way a parallel with colonized “native towns.” From this perspective, race emerges as a pivotal social force in ordering the regimes of governance and control that link colony and metropole.2 I will first outline the colonial origins of camps for civilians as governing devices. I will then connect colonial practices and imaginary behind the use of camps to post-​WWII camp policies for Romani people in urban Europe; subsequently, I will narrow my focus to examine the specific dynamics of containment in contemporary Florence and Montreuil. In the final section, I will extend the discussion to include containment as a segregating mechanism beyond the two urban and national contexts, unpacking the relations between colony and metropole in light of the two case studies.

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Colonial genesis Camps for civilians, usually fenced areas in which civilians are kept under more or less strict regimes of rule, originated during colonial domination (Césaire 2004; Kotek 2005). While used in different ways in different colonial settings,3 camps typically aimed to contain colonized people deemed dangerous (or potentially dangerous) through physical enclosure. Hence, colonial camps can be seen as governing tools for maximizing empires’ exploitation, conquest and general domination over land, goods, trade and people. Some of the most notorious colonial camps were implemented between 1895 and 1904 in Spanish Cuba, British South Africa and German Namibia, largely functioning as both concentration and labor camps. In those camps, or as a result of time spent inside them, a total of 200,000 Cubans, 20,000 Boer people in South Africa and 14,000 Herero people in Namibia died (Kotek and Rigoulot 2000).4 As with most colonial practices and events, colonial camps are often neglected in the school programs of former colonizing countries and are typically overshadowed by those in twentieth-​century Europe, especially Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Particularly silenced is the fact that Third Reich officials learned a great deal, both directly and indirectly, from German colonial governance in south-​west Africa, concerning the management of colonized populations (Eichsen and Olusoga 2010). Along with measures such as forced labor, however, colonial and Nazi camps share a more fundamental rationality: constraining groups of subjects deemed racially dangerous and inferior into isolated and degrading fenced facilities.5 Before discussing the timeliness of these issues for contextualizing the distinct post-​WWII containment of Romani people in camps, another type of twentieth-​century camp should be mentioned. After WWI, as Arendt (1966) has seminally discussed, placing civilians in camps became a common practice of European states. Once the Treaty of Versailles rendered Europe a dense web of national borders, camps became necessary humanitarian shelters for housing refugees and stateless people, who, due to their legal status, could not be assimilated into any national polity. The protection of human rights was the main rationale for these camps, thus replacing the colonial impetus for repression of potential uprising. In this regard, the emergence of humanitarian camps is crucial for understanding the historical trajectory of camps for civilians across colony and metropole. While in the colony –​and in Europe during WWII –​camps were built and managed primarily by military officials, humanitarian camps were instead both planned and managed by civil bodies, first and foremost the League of Nations’ Commission for Refugees, founded in 1921. This historical move is fundamental –​not because camps stopped being used as military and repressive devices for civilians after WWII (e.g. the Guantanamo Bay detention camp),6 but rather because after WWI, camps came to be seen as normal, banal devices of everyday bureaucratic management, used to address

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people who did not qualify for citizenship rights. Despite this very significant difference between colonial and humanitarian camps, both types of camp were still containment devices for people who did not –​and, importantly, could not –​match the majority social order, either because of their behavior, deemed hostile vis-​à-​vis colonial powers, or due to their legal status, incongruous with the renewed (inter)national political order. In both cases, those who were encamped were seen as a hazard to the socio-​legal order (Rahola 2003). The “Gypsy camp”7 is undeniably part of this historical trajectory linking colony and metropole. First appearing in the late 1960s as a state-​provided housing facility for deemed “nomadic” Romani people in Western Europe, in contrast to its predecessors, this type of camp immediately acquired an urban dimension. Often located in urban peripheries, it was imagined as a tool for social integration that would allow its residents access to municipal offices, hospitals and schools, typically located in or near cities. At the same time, similar to humanitarian camps, the “Gypsy camp” soon became a handy device for the control of a population that was constantly considered threatening. This was largely the consequence of late-​1960s and early-​1970s state intention to reduce mobility in order to increase the control and discipline of working-​class groups, especially in cities. The priority of control became the policy framework within which the state and civil society groups combined efforts toward providing halting sites and camps of both care and control. One of the chief motives of these efforts was the protection of nomadism, considered to be a feature of all Romani and Traveller people, which was at risk of extinction. Due to their importance and variety, these dynamics and their logics deserve a closer look.

Containing the outlandish As I discussed in Chapter 1, nomadism as a form of social deviance attributed to Romani people in the nineteenth century, re-​emerged in the 1960s as an authoritative and relatively handy policy category. The pervasiveness of the “icon” nomadi in Pescara that I discussed in the previous chapter, for example, has one of its roots in this late-​1960s policy framework and its related expert knowledge. The tendency toward oversimplifying group belonging and identification was the condition under which Eastern European Romani people who first arrived in Western Europe in the mid-​1960s were largely lumped together with “Gypsies and other travellers.” In Chapter 1, I also outlined the importance of considering the colonial principle of “lumping together” various groups of people for the sake of control and more general rule. This colonial principle is an important background against which to understand the rationale of planning and constructing camps or “sites” for Romani people in both Italy (campi nomadi) and France (villages d’insertion), largely placing families, to quote again Fanon (1964, 17), “under the obligation to match the idea one has of them” (see Chapter 1).

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By containing groups of families deemed (potentially) deviant within a fenced portion of the urban periphery, typically near highways, railways and abandoned areas, local authorities were able to have full control over these groups while keeping the city clean and ordered. In Italy, the first post-​WWII camp for Romani people that inaugurated a model for subsequent camps was opened in March 1979 on the outskirts of Turin; it was supposed to host both Italian and Yugoslav Romanies, two groups lumped together in the name of an alleged nomadism (Picker 2013a). This inaugural instance of containment paved the way for subsequent sedentarizing efforts targeting “nomads.” As I discussed in Chapter 1, “nomadism” as a signifier almost juxtaposable to the one of “Roma and Gypsies” was “scientifically” constructed as a racially criminalizing trope in the late nineteenth century. Rather than merely serving descriptive functions, it referred to racially marked social deviance and threat, squarely inscribed within the discourse of morality. Its underpinning normative and moral meaning functioned as a connecting ground between criminality and race. European institutions and the state were not the only actors –​or by any means the main ones –​behind the imagining, planning and construction of the first halting sites and camps for Romani people in Italy. One of the most influential non-​state actors was the Catholic-​oriented charity Opera Nomadi (Nomad Work), which in 1965, two years after its foundation, became the government’s main partner in charge of Yugoslav Romani children’s education. The charity’s hard work in providing schooling to caravans of “nomads” was essential, and Turin was one of its major experimental sites. Concomitantly, local Romani families themselves played a role in this process by requesting a place where they could avoid evictions while keeping their craftsman and merry-​go-​round jobs. Toward the early 1980s, moreover, the police had become an increasingly important authority in the management of the marginalized across Europe; hence, on the outskirts of Turin, the frequency of eviction of Romani caravans –​temporarily located by rivers in order for horses to drink –​intensified, and local authorities’ tolerance threshold lowered considerably. Though one has to wait for the post-​9/​11 tightening of national and urban security agendas to witness the punitive turn in social policy in Europe, the late-​1970s intensification of evictions of Romani people around Piedmont is a clear example of how that turn began. Over the same period, similar processes were at work in other Western European countries, including France.8 The 1969 Besson law addressing the issue of vagrancy introduced two major issues. First, it replaced the carnet anthropometrique  –​the personal identity notebook for Tsiganes  –​with the titre de circulation (permit of circulation). The novelty was that each Tsigan had to have a fixed registration in one municipality only. The law also introduced the expression gens du voyage (literally, “travelling people”) that has since been the official bureaucratic title for Tsiganes in France. Hence, the 1969 law reinforced through reiteration the idea of Tsiganes as primarily mobile

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people –​indeed, as “travelling people.” In this way, the law can be viewed as a contribution to perpetuating the dominant discursive domain within which the late nineteenth-​century stigma attached to wandering people (the mad, the tramps) functioned as a base for criminological theories (see Chapter 1). I am not suggesting all these processes of state stigmatization were purposely put in place in late-​1960s France. Rather, I am referring to the largely overlooked implications of crafting bureaucratic categories that were loaded with a history of racial classification and domination. The carnet anthropometrique, the main ground on which the 1969 law was based, was invented in the colonies and used for sex workers (see Chapter 1). In 1990 and in 2000, two new Besson laws were passed. According to the laws, every regional unit (département) was obliged to provide “special conditions for gens du voyage including transit and stay, children’s education and adults’ working activities.”9 Moreover, every municipality with more than 5,000 inhabitants was required to build equipped welcoming areas (aires d’accueil aménagées) for any travelling person. At the same time, the 1990 law gave municipal authorities the right to evict any travelling person staying outside the designated welcoming areas. In practice, then, for those used to travelling often, such as Tsiganes, aires d’accueil were simultaneously places of rights and opportunities, on the one hand, and devices of containment, restraint and enclosure, on the other; this occurred because what could be named “non-​welcoming areas,” i.e., any portion of the national territory that was not an aire d’accueil, became ipso facto a dangerous place for Tsiganes, confusing, in this way, issues of inclusion, exclusion, containment, and dangerousness. The ambivalent effect of the law was that it accommodated and at the same time domesticized, spatially and administratively, the “travelling way of life.” Due to the deep-​rooted racial stigma of vagrancy, the law ultimately contributed to constructing an image of “travelling people” as threats to the typically fixed socio-​spatial order. This ambivalence between protection and control is at the core of camp formations across the globe (Picker and Pasquetti 2015).10 The ambivalent rationale of governing “nomads” emerges most vividly in the Italian context. From 1984 to 1995, twelve Italian regional councils passed as many regional laws ordering the construction of camps for “nomads.” Prior to drafting these laws, the council members consulted with pro-​Romani NGOs, first and foremost with the increasingly influential Opera Nomadi. One of the dominant assumptions circulating during these consultations was that since Romani people must have necessarily been nomads, no matter where they came from, as such, like Italian Romanies, Yugoslav Romanies needed temporary places where they could halt their wandering and gradually integrate into Italian society. This act of lumping together Yugoslav and Italian Romani people families is the most fundamental element for understanding the longevity of nomad camps in Italian history. Currently, in 2016, the twelve regional laws that ordered the camps remain the only legislative documents

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to explicitly address Romani people in Italy, and many of the camps ordered by the laws are still in place, while new camps have been constructed over time. Much in line with the 1969 Council of Europe Recommendation n. 563, which I discussed in Chapter 1, the twelve regional laws urged local councils to provide Romani people with halting sites, or camps, taking the structure and ideas of management of the first “nomad camp” (1979) as a prototype. The chief reason why the twelve regional laws resemble each other lies in the Italian (and, more widely, Western European) expert knowledge on Romani people from the 1960s and 1970s, which largely underpins the imagination and actions of policymakers and civil society groups (Picker and Roccheggiani 2014). It is in this expert knowledge that the camps’ ambivalence received a properly systematized and authoritative theorization. Due to its fundamental importance, such expert knowledge deserves more in-​depth scrutiny. During the Italian Fascist regime, which lasted from 1922 to 1943, Romani people were systematically subject to racial theorization, eugenic experimentation and enforced re-​education programs (Bravi 2009; Roccheggiani 2013). While the dominant Fascist expert knowledge drew on a bio-​psychological paradigm, in the aftermath of WWII that paradigm shifted from a bio-​psychological to psycho-​social abnormality, and the notion of “protection of nomadism” became prominent (Picker and Roccheggiani 2014). In the mid-​ 1960s, a group of scholars with close connections to Opera Nomadi founded the journal Lacio Drom: Bimonthly Journal of Gypsy Studies (Lacio drom. Bimestrale di studi zingari), which became the main forum to offer debates and theories about “Gypsies’ nature” and “characteristics.” The prevalent theory was that zingari were at a lower level of development, mainly because “nomadism” was their most fundamentally innate psycho-​social characteristic. According to these scholars, due to their “innate nomadism,” zingari needed places where their “congenital psycho-​moral instability” (Karpati 1962, 92) could temporarily be sedated11 so that they could gradually be made to go through a re-​educative process. Hence, camps were identified as the most proper device for such a project. The dominant idea held that the isolation of “Gypsies” in camps would have ultimately allowed them to preserve their own “nomadic” lifestyle. Although expressions such as “racial” or “race” do not appear in these accounts, the racial underpinning of this theory is evident in linking morality (i.e., the instability thereof) with innate behavioral tendencies, that is, “nomadism.” From the mid-​1980s to the early 1990s, this expert knowledge effectively turned “Romanies-​nomads” into disposable objects –​ never consulting subjects –​of the twelve regional laws, envisaging the camp as the most appropriate device for both social inclusion and the protection of an alleged “nomadism.”12 In France in the 1960s and 1970s, a different corpus of expert knowledge became prominent, which was focused less on behavioral sciences and more on social structures.13 The notion of social exclusion was coined at that time in France and evolved alongside another concept that became fundamental in

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linking expert knowledge and social policy: the previously mentioned accueil (translatable as “reception”), like in the 1969 Besson law. The idea of “reception” referred to a number of social issues happening in France at that time. One of the most prominent and widespread during the heated spring 1968 media debates was the mass arrival of workers from postcolonial Africa. It is important to discuss the ways in which postcolonial African workers have been “received” in France, because this is the context in which to understand why, in the mid-​to late 2000s, state and local authorities viewed villages d’insertion, i.e. improvised and emergency urban camps, as the best solution to house Romani families coming from Romania and Bulgaria, two countries that had recently accessed the EU. One of the most popular and widespread French housing policies addressing postcolonial migrant workers since the 1950s has been the foyer, meaning “dormitory,” which today is commonly referred to as foyer migrants. A  description of these dormitories, dating back to the mid-​1990s, gives an idea of the type and functions of accommodation for migrant workers from the former colonies: The foyer is a social universe of non-​French males, an island of workers, usually unskilled or low-​skilled, away from their homelands and isolated from their families. In fact, foreign workers have had high rates of unemployment in recent years, so that the foyer has become a kind of reservoir of cheap foreign labor. The function of the foyer is to provide sleeping accommodations and common facilities for its inhabitants. Several workers may share a room or a group of small individual bedrooms, grouped around a shared kitchen/​dining facility and a bathroom. (Diop and Michalak 1996, 74–​75, quoted in Keaton 2006, 63) As it emerged from some of my encounters in mid-​2010s Montreuil, foyer migrants played a central role in imagining and planning villages d’insertion. In the 1970s, then, the village modulaire (modular housing village) was introduced. This alternative type of accommodation for migrant workers has also served as a reference for Montreuil’s authorities in terms of housing Romani families. The chief advantage of villages modulaires was that they could conveniently be displaced –​a flexible and adaptable solution to a fast-​growing immigrant population in urban areas (Bernardot 2008). These references to postcolonial migrant housing policies converged in Montreuil public authorities’ imagination for dealing with largely dispossessed Romani families coming from Romania and Bulgaria after 2007.14 In order to contextualize the establishment of villages d’insertion, it is also important to consider the political dynamics of the early 2000s, in particular the tightened post-​9/​11 security agenda introduced by President Nicolas Sarkozy. His political project was not only targeted at reducing immigration, but was more broadly engineered toward constructing and subsequently

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repressing alleged social threats –​including banlieues inhabitants, as he pointed out in his famous 2005 speech.15 One of the laws that was passed under his presidency marked the first instance of criminalizing the unauthorized occupation of private or municipal land, imposing a six-​month detention period and a fee of 3,750 euros in case of transgression.16 The accent on urban security and civility, and consequently on reducing circulation and mobility, also played out in the state’s massive investments in clearing slums (bidonvilles) (Olivera 2011; Legros 2010). And since 2007, clearing slums provided the most immediate rationale for constructing villages d’insertion. Thus, while in late-​1970s and 1980s Italy campi nomadi were set up in order to simultaneously preserve nomadism and encourage the sedentarization of lumped-​together Yugoslav and Italian Romanies, the official rationale of villages d’insertions in the mid-​2000s was to clear urban periphery slums set up by dispossessed foreigners, including Romani people, who faced a lack of alternative housing solutions. However, these two national contexts shared a similar twofold goal: providing social care and containing disorder. In the following section, I will detail the ways in which, in each city, care and the containment of disorder have been organized. This will clarify the two partially diverging local segregating mechanisms. Florence Florence, central Italy’s world-​famous art capital, had about 320,000 inhabitants when I arrived as a researcher in early 2007. In two different camp locations on the urban periphery, about six hundred Romani persons were living in highly precarious hygiene and economic conditions. One of the two camps, located near the airport, was fenced and was the more dilapidated of the two. The other, opposite south, was not fenced and was relatively better equipped, thanks to some little wooden houses that had been recently built. Both camps were managed by the council’s social service office, along with a number of local NGOs. As I had expected, both Romani and non-​ Romani local activists unequivocally shared the same idea: in the city of Michelangelo and Lorenzo de’ Medici, it was a shame to have such dreadful housing facilities. Often quoting Florentine writer Antonio Tabucchi’s 1999 book Gypsies and the Renaissance: Living as a Rom in Florence, the activists repeated a slogan that I came to understand was part of local culture: “Oltre il campo nomadi! [Beyond the nomad camp].” Notwithstanding the unanimous intention to provide better housing to Romani people, these camps showed no sign of disappearing: the local administration was still pouring money into their maintenance and governance, and NGOs did not seem to disdain their own involvement in the camp’s co-​management. Struck by this contrast between intentions and material conditions, I decided to understand in-​depth the conditions under which these camps were constructed and had been maintained for over 25 years. Thanks to generous employees

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of the local library, I was able to consult key documents in the regional archives. As Colacicchi (1996) has comprehensively documented, in the summer of 1986, the inhabitants of the mid-​high-​class neighborhood of Castello organized a roadblock to protest the presence of a number of caravans belonging to Yugoslav families. As these mobilizations increased, in the spring of 1987 regional councilman Bini read a proposal for a law that included the construction of camps for “nomads.” The rationale of such a proposal combined Opera Nomadi’s views of “nomadism” with the council’s emerging need for a stronger politics of securitization: We see, including in big cities like Florence, informal camps without essential services such as water –​hygienic utilities –​with consequences for the health conditions of the inhabitants. In addition to these disadvantages, difficulties stemming from lack of work are also present, illiteracy as a consequence of lack of education […] and this situation represents a risk for young people and their behavior, which is sometimes at the margins of the legal framework. (Regione Toscana 1987, 1, my translation) Stemming from this rationale, Bini explained that the law had three main goals: (1) To promote the implementation of camps (campi sosta) for sedentary people (sedentatizzati) and transit areas (aree di transito) [for those who travel], and set up health and social assistance interventions for the guests. (2) To safeguard the positive values of the nomadic culture, especially folk arts and crafts, through ad hoc initiatives aimed at the development and production of handmade goods; financial support for the creation of handcraft work activities within the camp. (3) To provide school education for persons below 18 years old, and to combat illiteracy. (Consiglio Regionale della Toscana 1987, my translation) As it appears, the idiom of travelling and nomadism constituted the pillar of the first law addressing Romani people in Tuscany. This is not surprising, considering that the law had been written after sustained consultations with a number of “experts,” including Opera Nomadi volunteers. For example, on October 8, 1987, the special commission on “Health and Social Care” consulted with “experts,” one of whom stated that: One of the fundamental dimensions of the Gypsy way of life is a nomadic style. It is important to state this, also because […] there are [in the text of the law] some elements in favor of those who decide not to be nomadic any more, and thus, by this, do not give enough guarantees to those who

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are still nomadic. The latter do not carry out a nomadic way of life just because they are less developed, but because this lifestyle belongs to their fundamental dimension. (Consiglio Regionale della Toscana 1987, 14) In this regard, it is necessary to point out that in Tito’s Yugoslavia, the percentage of “nomadic” Romani people was so tiny that it would have been almost impossible that the majority of the Romani families in Florence fleeing the post-​Tito socio-​economic downturn were actually living a nomadic life. Indeed, as later research made clear, the vast majority –​if not all –​of these families were living in blocks of flats that typically dotted the peripheries of Yugoslav urban landscapes. While the camps’ official goals were primarily to support Romani people, protecting “the positive values of the nomadic culture,” the experience of Adin, a Kosovar man in his forties, discloses the camps’ main goal as it emerged in practice. Rather than relieving Romani families from socio-​ economic constraints, camps served the more pragmatic and repressive goal of enforcing order by controlling and disciplining Romani individuals, who were largely perceived as a threat to urban security. In 2007, I met Adin inside the camp, where he had been living since it was established in 1988: [Before 1988] when I was living first in Via Pistoiese and then in Via Sestese [both on the northern semi-​periphery], policemen used to come and bring me to their headquarters in Borgo Ognissanti [a nearby street]. Once there, they were beating me, and making me cut the grass in the garden. They were asking me who the thieves were, who had guns … but I only knew the situation of my own family, and it was perfectly legal. Our neighbors hated us. Once there was a small fight involving young locals and some of us. The next day, they [the locals] agreed to burn down our caravans with fuel. Don Sergio, a priest, alerted us, saying, “Go and tell the other Romani people! They want to burn down your caravans.” All our families escaped, and I remained alone with my mother and my aunt. Carabinieri came to protect us. After that day, I got to know Italian activists and priests, to whom I started talking about our miserable living conditions. In March 1988, the law proposed by Bini was passed, and in the summer of same year the first camp, named Olmatello, was established close to Florence airport. With mounting hostilities toward Romani people in post-​Tito Yugoslavia, and the beginning of the Bosnian War in 1992, more families from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo reached Florence and settled in the two camps. Living conditions rapidly worsened. In the words of one camp inhabitant,

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At the beginning, life here was pleasant, we were not so many –​sixteen families. Then the number of people increased and the camp became too small for all of us. In a situation like that, hostilities and rivalries between each other appeared. People’s conditions got worse, and the camp’s life got damaged. (Quoted in Lapov 2004, 57) In facing this situation, local politics gradually shifted from providing care and service to people toward an increasingly repressive control. In 1990, the mayor ordered the expulsion of three hundred “abusive Roma” (rom abusivi) from the camp and the dismantling of any mobile housing unit outside authorized areas. Expulsions from the camp continued to take place throughout the 1990s, accompanied by frequent demolition of barracks and canopies. A new concrete fence was built around the camp in 1993; in 1994, the first mobile housing units were placed inside, near the old dilapidated caravans and containers. In 1995, research among encamped families uncovered for the first time that the vast majority of the families were not nomads.17 As a consequence, the same year a new regional law was passed, abrogating the previous one. While the new law emphasized “communication between cultures” (Article 1) as opposed to an ultimate otherness of nomads/​Romanies, it nonetheless maintained the idiom of nomadism. As Article 1 made clear, This law dictates the norms for the preservation of the Romani people cultural patrimony and of the Roma and Sinti identity, in order to facilitate the communication between cultures, to grant the right to a nomadic life, to the religious practice, to stop and to stay within the regional territory. Hence, nomadism, though absent or virtually absent among Romani people in Florence, remained a constitutive part of the policy vocabulary. In 2007, the legacy of the nomadism discourse was still pervasive among civil servants. The person responsible for providing social services inside the Olmatello camp confided to me that she had been struck by what one Romani man living in the camp had once told her: “If I do not get a job, I will go away!” “And he left for Germany,” she continued. “I would never be able to leave like that, from one day to the next. This is the point: maybe they have this vagrant impulse [senso girovago] in their blood, according to which they can easily travel.” Another civil servant disclosed a similar view: If a civil servant follows a [Romani] family for twelve years, after which that family does not do anything, and they sit down and wait for help, I come and say NO! […] Some of them abandon their jobs. Of course I understand it –​they are nomad people! I do understand this.

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These types of racial perceptions informed and guided local governance. The head of the district council responsible for the governance of the Olmatello camp explained to me how this governance functioned: Our priority has always been people’s dignity. Our collaboration with various charities and cooperatives has always been crucial […] Equally important was our collaboration with the police concerning the control over abusive presence and more generally over legal behaviors. For example, if a family builds a penthouse, I send a technician there who suggests they demolish it. If the family does not do that, I send an ordinance, but if the penthouse remains, I  send the police. There is often this tug-​of-​ war, but we understand that if we menace them on the last day, they do what we ask them. It is a work of patience, construction of relationships, intimidation, and menace. This shift in the narration from an initial accent on “dignity” toward the final point about “intimidation” and “menace” can be taken as a micro refraction of the macro ambivalence of “Gypsy camp” governance in twenty-​first-​century Italy. Its causes are firmly rooted in the 1960s expert knowledge about the “congenital psycho-​moral instability” of Romani people that I discussed in the previous section. From places of reception and care –​as the initial official rhetoric maintained –​“nomad camps” in Florence have become tools of repressive control and urban security, tightly wrapped, both practically and discursively, within the stigma of the nomadic threat. The striking ambivalence of the initial goal of the post-​WWII Italian “Gypsy camp” (campo nomadi ) –​sedentarizing and protecting nomadism –​is one of the conditions of possibility for its persistence until today: a permanently unstable object, escaping coherent conceptualization, the “Gypsy camp” serves local and national authorities’ pragmatic goal of controlling and containing a “threat.” The Olmatello camp was dismantled in the summer of 2012, when the local council saw a promising economic opportunity in building a new stadium nearby. The second camp, Poderaccio, is still –​in 2016 –​ up and running, hosting about three hundred people. I will now turn to France to analyze the case of Montreuil and the function of similar “Gypsy camps.” Montreuil Montreuil is located in the Paris metropolitan region. In 2014, when I did my fieldwork, its population amounted to 103,000. A historically working-​class city, 37 percent of the housing stock is publicly owned, and local authorities are generally proud of the relatively high levels of social mixing (mixité sociale).18 This fact is the most distinctive aspect of an urban political culture that has traditionally been anchored in the Socialist party. Tsiganes are considered to be one of the first groups to settle in the city, and this seems to enhance the pride with which local authorities engage with Romanian and Bulgarian

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Romani people, many of whom, in 2014, were living in two “Gypsy camps” or villages d’insertion. Similar to Florence, in Montreuil I wanted to understand the rationale, both official and “on the ground,” behind the construction of the camp, and the conditions of their persistence. The official reason for establishing the camp was clear –​clearing the slums where a considerable number of Romani families were making their living. Since 2007, when the first village was constructed in France, not far from Montreuil, “clearing slums” had become a popular expression in both media and local and national state rhetoric. In the summer of 2008, a squat in which about 300 Romani persons were living caught fire. The municipality then provided two emergency and temporary sites for the displaced families: one belonging to the municipality, and the other a private site rented by a company. In the first site, tents were provided, along with a number of caravans offered by a civil society group; three toilet buildings were also set up. It was a very precarious site, with only partially available electricity and clearly insufficient hygiene facilities. The second site was even more hazardous, with families rooming in garages. The material conditions in both emergency sites were unbearable. In view of improving these precarious conditions, the municipality set up a so-​called MOUS. A Maitrise d’oeuvre urbaine et sociale (MOUS) is a policy device consisting of a multitasking group including NGOs, municipal representatives, and housing suppliers, all working toward creating easier access to housing for disadvantaged households. A MOUS is usually established by one municipality in order to deal with a contingent issue occurring within the municipal area, and it can last from one to three years. Usually, the state finances up to 50 percent of each MOUS; the municipality is responsible for the other half of the budget, and NGOs can apply for a grant with a social inclusion project. In Montreuil, this particular MOUS lasted five years. In 2008, the MOUS was agreed upon between the municipality and one of the oldest NGOs working with French Romanies, implicitly lumping them together with Romanian and Bulgarian Romani families in this way. The MOUS officially began in January 2009 and targeted the two camps, one of which became the largest village d’insertion in the whole of France. At the time of its establishment, the camp hosted two hundred people. Access was strictly regulated, and round-​the-​clock CCTV cameras soon appeared. The camp consisted of modular housing and caravans, much like camps in other cities throughout the region such as Aubervilliers, Saint-​Denis, Saint-​Ouen and Bagnolet, where similar MOUSs had been set up. One of the seemingly most common aspects of this deployment of public resources for Eastern European Romani people is the language of framing the whole operation. The color-​blind, égalité-​driven French Republican ideology of citizenship dictates the rules for state actions. Hence, as with any other policy in France, MOUSs cannot address any particular ethnic group. However, in Montreuil’s public offices, “MOUS Roms” (literally “Romani MOUS”) was an everyday expression, to the point that the 2012 municipal report assessing

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the policy was entitled “Report on the Evaluation and Information Report of the ‘Romani MOUS’ ” (Rapport de la mission d’information et d’évaluation de la Maitrise d’oeuvre urbaine et sociale “Roms”). The report starts by noting that “Montreuil is a living witness of Gypsy diversity” (diversité tsigane), referring to the long-​term presence of French Romani people in the city. Besides lumping together French and foreign Romani people in a similar manner to the Italian regional laws of the 1980s, what primarily stands out are the unproblematic ways in which the policy was ethnicized, establishing an ultimate difference between Romanian and Bulgarian Romani people, on one side, and both Romani and non-​Romani French society, on the other. In a national context where citizenship is rooted in the ideology of color-​blind égalité, local authorities’ discursive construction of a diversité tsigane bears the questions of what exactly this difference means, how it is used politically and administratively, and what consequences this has for urban life.19 Answering these questions may help to contextualize the official rationale of “clearing slums” in the implementation of villages d’insertion. This suggests taking a look at the logic through which villages d’insertion have been set up and how they are being governed –​what is being said and done, in everyday and bureaucratic life, with regard to this peculiar type of policy-​driven urban camp. In designing the “Romani MOUS,” Pierre, the then-​councilman responsible for dealing with the two emergency sites, planned the whole integration measure addressing Romanian and Bulgarian Romani families. As anticipated above, the main reference for this plan came from housing policies for postcolonial migrants, which had been implemented in France since the 1950s, especially the foyers migrants.20 Drawing on his long-​term experience in dealing with foyers migrants in Montreuil, Pierre thought they would be a good solution. However, the particular social situation of Romani people, as well as his own view of them, led him to consider a more specifically tail­ ored solution: “To me, Romani people are those who live in the street with their families and children, neither more nor less than this.” To Pierre, this represented a major difference from postcolonial African male workers, who typically arrived alone, in search of better socio-​economic conditions. The implication of such a difference was that, due to their highly precarious conditions of homelessness, Romani people needed a provisionary housing solution in between the camp, or “village,” which was seen as a necessary first step, and social housing. The inspiration for an in-​ between housing solution arrived from the Netherlands.21 Pierre had recently visited a new modular housing project for students in Amsterdam that carried a strong advantage: not only were the small modular prefabricated housing units relatively cheap, but more importantly, they could easily be displaced in different locations and arranged in different order (e.g. one above the other). To Pierre, this type of accommodation resonated with another familiar housing solution, the village modulaire for migrants, so popular in the 1970s. This set of references to previous

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national and the current need of flexible and temporary solutions for Romani families convinced Pierre that Amsterdam students’ housing was the answer to Montreuil Romani families. Moreover, these small units were safer than the large foyers migrants, as the latter had problems with fire and gas safety. Disposable, displaceable, cheap and safe, the Amsterdam student housing units became the model for planning the temporary logements passerelle (“bridging housing”) in Montreuil. Each unit was supposed to host one family for a limited time, during which the family could transition from the village to a social housing flat. Their disposability and flexible adaptability allowed the modular units to be temporarily placed in so-​called dents creuses (“hollow teeth”), the spaces that are left empty after a house is demolished. The notion of Romani people as simply “those who live on the street with their families and children” seems to coincide, from a policy perspective, with the view of them as disposable subjects, displaceable there, where the contingency allows. Indeed, socially marginal conditions are barely considered beyond their spatial locations –​the most emphasized dimension that I encountered within policymakers’ and practitioners’ representations of Romani people was spatial location. The director of one village d’insertion agreed with this view when she explained to me that the main goal was “housing those families.” This was certainly the official rationale of the entire Romani MOUS, that is, clearing up slums and providing “normal” housing conditions to marginalized Romanian and Bulgarian Romani families. However, in practice, this rationale seemed to get translated into a mere technical matter of spatial location, as if moving in space would automatically ensure moving toward better socio-​economic conditions. This sort of assumed automatism emerged in several other dialogues I had with many local public officials, and it interestingly mirrors the twentieth-​ century mainstream French policy discourse on Tsiganes. Since the 1912 law imposing the carnet anthropometrique on nomads, with ever-​growing tension during that period between the 1969 and 1990 Besson laws, the policy and public debate on Tsiganes has been confined to the issue of space and territory –​the main question being “how to curb travellers’ habit?” (Bidet 2008). An issue framed as purely technical –​non-​ethnic, as the Republican ideology imposed –​was able to discursively shift the policy framework from social marginality and precariousness to a less politically implicated administrative control.22 Pierre’s rather enthusiastic accent on the disposability and displaceability of logements passerelles, therefore, directly speaks to the twentieth-​century French debate in that it seems driven primarily by the question, “Where to place these people?” (Additionally, as the manager of one village d’insertion told me, “We had five years to house these people.”) By establishing a juxtaposition between Romani people and housing, the entire discourse ultimately implied Romani people’s disposability and displaceability as the necessary condition for imagining the process of housing integration, signaling a dominant view of Romani people as entirely passive subjects.

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The combined issues of passivity and the power of the Leviathan state in dealing with Romanies can be observed in another aspect of the MOUS Roms. Clearing up slums, that is, the official rationale of the entire project, which in practice translated into “housing the Romani people,” created the necessary conditions for authorities to overlook one far more fundamental aspect of the social integration of foreigners in the EU. With the “transitional provisions,” the EU regulates and limits the rights of new Member States’ citizens to work. In France, these provisions have been valid for Romanians and Bulgarians from January 2007 to December 2013. As several authorities and NGO employees confided to me, EU labor restrictions were a fundamental obstacle in finding employment for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens living in villages d’insertion. The reason for this was that employment for villages residents was usually arranged by an NGO: once the employer agreed on the work contract, the future Romanian or Bulgarian employee had to submit a work permit application to the prefecture, and here the problem started. In the words of a social worker: Waiting time [after the application at the prefecture] for getting a work permit could be up to 8 months. After 8 months the employer usually said it was too late and consequently withdrew from the agreement […] When we explained this problem to the prefect, the prefect replied that there was not enough personnel in the prefecture, so applications could not have been processed faster […] We have lost about 30 possibilities of employment due to EU transitional provisions. The solution to this problem came from an exception to the law. The prefecture issued a number of exceptional work permits only to those who were included in the MOUS by relying on the Ministry of Education Circular (26/​ 08/​2012), which allowed removing restrictions relating to transitional provisions. Hence, the MOUS became the subject of a second exception: after being ethnicized as a MOUS Roms, it became the site for engineering state-​ driven inégalité by excluding those outside the project. The chief interest of these dynamics for the discussion at hand does not reside in the exception per se, but rather in what can be seen as the main condition for it. What happened is inscribed in the whole rationale of security-​driven urban policy, inaugurated by the Sarkozy presidency, which I have discussed in this chapter. Exclusively considering the dimensions of housing/​urban space and the specific state-​dictated priority of clearing slums eventually overshadowed the dimension of labor rights. Clearing up slums, in practice, was not primarily aimed at improving Romani families’ conditions, but rather at cleaning up dirt, disorder and other threats from the city, while ensuring that the families living there were disposed of separate, largely hidden and fenced villages. Later, they had to again be displaced into temporary housing. In order to for this to happen, however, they needed a job –​and this is where the exception

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was established, creating inégalité for the sake of spatial displacement. Rather than “how to meet the socio-​economic needs of Romani families,” the question was “where to put these families?”

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Conclusion: a spatio-​racial political technology During my fieldwork in Pescara, one of the local Romani activists repeatedly told me how proud he was that camps had never been constructed in his city. Although regional and local authorities in the 1970s and 1980s intended to build camps in Abruzzo for newly arrived families from Yugoslavia, he and his comrades firmly, and ultimately successfully, opposed their construction. In his own view, camps were the epitome of the failure of policies for Romani people. Sharing the same conclusion, in 2000 the NGO European Roma Rights Centre published a research report entitled Campland:  The Racial Segregation of Roma in Italy (ERRC 2000), arguing that the tightly woven system of containment and segregation of urban periphery camps clashed not only with human rights, but also with any possible conception of social justice. As I have shown in this chapter, containment is a specific form of arbitrarily imposing isolation, separation, enclosure and ultimately radical segregation. In its constitutive parts, containment is different from confinement; the latter is typical of prison and prison-​like institutions, such as military and civil detention centers for undocumented migrants.23 Unlike prison-​like institutions, containment essentially allows the state, and the media as its extension, to embed the contained within discursive formations of different kinds of threats, including economic, cultural, hygiene and racial threats –​often as subtexts of multicultural rhetoric.24 The confined are instead relegated to a relatively static and temporally fixed position of isolation, like a prison. The contained, in contrast to the confined, are therefore disposable, malleable and less forcibly bound to a specific socio-​spatial and socio-​temporal configuration; however, the symbiosis between the contained and the camp is symbolically established in everyday, state and media perceptions and discursive formations. In principle, the contained are able to gain a public voice because their citizenship rights are not withheld; in practice, however, they are often constrained by their social and legal statuses, which largely prevent them from even questioning the state and civil society agencies that support the persistence of camps.25 While the classification of inmates rests largely on legal constrictions, physical barriers and moral requirements, the classification of encamped Romani people revolves around supposed behavioral characteristics, theorized and imagined as eternal, fixed and hereditary. As socio-​spatial configurations, however, the “Gypsy camp” and the prison have the common function of ordering the social by enclosing the threat, isolating it, and separating it either temporarily or more permanently from mainstream society.26

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The Italian and French urban camp systems partially diverge in terms of colonial correspondences. Campi nomadi seem to resemble two distinct colonial segregation rationales. The chiefly ambivalent rationale of nomad camps –​ that is, preserving nomadism while ensuring sedentarization –​bears certain resemblance to the French colonial rule of preservation.27 As discussed in the case of French Rabat, the rationale for maintaining a strict physical separation between “natives” and white French colonizers was part of a cosmology according to which “natives” were at a lower stage of civilization. This cosmology was quite similar to the Italian expert knowledge from the 1960s and 1970s that I discussed in this chapter. The theoretical architecture that was built within the pages of the Lacio Drom journal suggested that this was by far the most authoritative view of “Gypsies” that circulated among authoritative scholars of the time. Villages d’insertion, on the other hand, serve the purpose of creating urban order and propriety. This suggests a similarity with Italian Addis Ababa’s segregation rationale, albeit less closely than in the case of the campi nomadi–Rabat connection. In the Ethiopian capital, the imposition of a racially segregated order was the impetus for the spatial separation between colonizers and colonized. The French camp system of villages d’insertion also has the goal of facilitating social integration, just as much as in the Italian case. However, the prominence of technicality and spatiality in the case of the Romani MOUS –​that is, “We had five years to house these families” –​ over substantial rights for Romani people, such as labor rights, speaks more of management and physical placement than social integration. As I have discussed, the very immediate sense of physical separation (and encapsulation in camps) in continuity with postcolonial workers entering France after the 1950s is what provided inspiration for public authorities in dealing with Romani people. However, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, in the case of Villages d’insertion no clear correspondence with segregation rationale in colonial cities can be detected. Camps for Romani people are not an Italian or French prerogative. The 1968 Caravan Act in the UK and the analogous policy in the Netherlands (Woonwagenwet) sanctioned the first post-​WWII Romani-​related confinement policy in the name of protecting the allegedly cultural (but constructed as racial, see Chapter 5) trait of nomadism. Hence, in late-​1960s Western European urban peripheries, a new racially segregating device emerged: the “Gypsy camp,” ambivalently aiming both to protect nomadism and to sedentarize “nomads” so as to socially integrate them. Largely due to this quintessential ambivalence on which it rested, as well as to camps’ deep-​rooted colonial history, this segregating state-​ordered governance device was not only tolerated, but also proactively supported and encouraged by civil society actors –​Opera Nomadi in Italy, for instance –​that largely thought of themselves as anti-​racist groups. The “Gypsy camp” in Europe –​a peculiar governance device for the control and inclusion of subjects deemed deviant –​ can heuristically be viewed as a “political technology” in the sense suggested

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by Foucault (1977): a policy device that is considered to be neutral, technical –​ especially in the case of Montreuil –​and ipso facto necessary and positive. Political technologies present themselves as non-​ideological and inevitable solutions to a problem – slums in France, nomadism in Italy. Both problems, as I have shown, were crafted by an intensive ideological endeavor. Largely relying upon the nexus it establishes between the spatial and the racial, and by historical refraction between the metropole and the colony, the “Gypsy camp” emerges as one of the first and most widespread spatio-​racial devices in post-​WWII European cities.28 While the Council of Europe has been at the forefront, in the late 1960s, of establishing the “Gypsy camp” as a resourceful and effective integration policy, similar bodies such as the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed concern about the conditions of segregation of many Romani families in Italy (CERD 2008). However, the socio-​legal national and supranational order upon which this agency grounds its claims is not that different from the one that proposed, encouraged and proactively sustained the sedentarization of Romani people in camps for the sake of integration and “cultural protection.” The Romani people–​camp symbiosis was established in part through media, bureaucratic and everyday discourses of the very agencies which today complain about the camps’ materially and symbolically degrading and segregating effects. The aura of threat that the racially deemed hold in the eyes of Western European elites reverberates in the latter’s liberal indignation at the “Gypsy camp” while remaining unchallenged and secure in its constitutive and fully overlooked colonial roots. The liberal indignation which refuses to acknowledge racial inequalities in France and the racial basis of camp policy in Italy seems unable to provide solutions which create equality and social justice. It instead resorts to “technical” and “policy” measures, which are thought of as effective. As always, solutions depend upon the definition of the problem. Ignoring the work of race and racism in shaping life trajectories including housing conditions remains the preferred way in which to define the problem. In the next chapter the empirical focus will shift to include the governance of a “Gypsy camp” in the UK. While focusing on a similar type of camp to the two discussed in this chapter, I will highlight the ideal of social cohesion as the main ideological reference in governing Romani and Traveller people in the UK. The discussion will draw on a genealogical analysis of a caravan site in Salford, Greater Manchester, but I will enlarge the focus to highlight the idea(l) of social cohesion as one of the most powerful governing devices in twenty-​first-​century UK social policy discourse.

Notes 1 See Patto per Roma sicura and Patto per Milano sicura. The parallelism with racial profiling during the Fascist regime was drawn by MP Claudio Fava (see Loy 2009,

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104 Containment 32). On the 2008 “state of emergency in relation to settlements of nomads” that followed the two pacts, and the racialization of Romani people through the government’s collection of fingerprints, see Daniele (2010), Hermannin (2011) and Picker et al. (2015). 2 Clearly, I am not suggesting that race is articulated in exactly the same way in both metropole and colony, nor that the colonized lack any agency. What interests me here is an anatomy of power as an organizing principle, rather than one specific agent or Aristotelian “unmoved mover.” 3 The first French camps for civilians can be traced back to the early nineteenth century (Césaire 2004), while in the case of Italy, camps for civilians were first used in Libya in the 1930s in order to prevent riots and other kinds of problems for the colonizing Fascists (Labanca 2005; see also Chapter 1). 4 Morgensen (2011, 69) argues that camps for civilians first appeared during the US expansion, when Native Americans resisting land occupation were held in internment camps; the author specifically mentions the 1837 Treaty of New Echota. I am thankful to Irit Katz for pointing me toward Morgensen’s work and this important historical fact. The contemporary debates and struggles over colonial reparations in Germany reveal the importance of the struggle around recognizing the extermination of entire populations in colonial camps as genocide. For an overview of historical events and current recognition claims, see the comprehensive BBC documentary Namibia –​a forgotten holocaust (2004). 5 Rahola (2003) has an extensive case about the camp “matrix,” which goes beyond the mere morphology of camps to include their functions and underpinning ideologies. 6 Gregory’s (2004) work is in this regard fundamental. 7 I have co-​developed an analytic of the “Gypsy camp” in Picker et al. (2015). The category of “Gypsy camp” is an analytical tool for understanding the myriad different camp formations for Romani people in Europe. 8 The 1968 Caravan Act (1968) played a fundamental role in setting the policy imaginary and agendas vis-​à-​vis Romani and Traveller people across Western European countries; it was the first state policy after WWII which enabled local authorities to impose containment in camps of Romani and Travellers (see Chapter 5; Picker et al. 2015; Smith and Greenfields 2013). The Netherlands did the same in the same year, and an Italian Opera Nomadi programmatic statement dated 1971 took the Dutch experience as a reference for planning the construction of the first nomad camp near Turin (Picker 2013a). 9 Loi (Law) n° 2000–​614 du 5 juillet 2000 relative à l’accueil et à l’habitat des gens du voyage, II. –​Dans chaque département, au vu d’une évaluation préalable des besoins et de l’offre existante, notamment de la fréquence et de la durée des séjours des gens du voyage, des possibilités de scolarisation des enfants, d’accès aux soins et d’exercice des activités économiques, un schéma départemental prévoit les secteurs géographiques d’implantation des aires permanentes d’accueil et les communes où celles-​ci doivent être réalisées. 10 If ambivalence is a fundamental feature of modernity (Bauman 1991), then camps can be seen as some of the first and most explicit examples of modern governance (Agamben 2005). The colonial origins of camps ultimately inscribe them squarely into the expansionist, looting and “civilizing” grain of Western capitalism up until the present day. 11 Mirella Karpati was at the time the most authoritative scholar working “on Gypsies.” For a detailed account of post-​WWII expert knowledge on Romani

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Containment 105 people, and its impact on state policy and municipal practices, see Bravi (2009); Picker and Roccheggiani (2014). 12 Roccheggiani’s (2013) book is, to date, the most in-​depth and comprehensive account of the government of nomadism in Italy from the Renaissance to the present day. Combined, Bravi’s (2009) reflections on education policies excavate the past and present of state racism, as well as the making and persistence of what the author names “the Auschwitz paradigm,” namely a shared perception linking Fascism with post-​WWII expert knowledge all the way to today’s Italian mainstream approaches to marginalized Romani people. For a genealogy of contemporary urban governance of Romani people that extends back to late nineteenth-​century racialist theories, see Picker and Roccheggiani (2014). 13 It is interesting to note that in contrast to France, Italian expert knowledge on Romani people was chiefly based on German psychology, especially on Arnold (see Roccheggiani 2013, 127 et passim). Arnold and other psychologists working on nomadism as a hereditary psycho-​moral feature were also influential in the UK. On this point, see also the important article by Acton (2016). 14 The accent on “accueil” should also be considered retrospectively in light of the strongly morally loaded discourse of solidarity vis-​à-​vis the socially disadvantaged in the 1990s. Presidet Chirac championed this kind of discourse, aptly articulating it along with the emergent one on repression and urban security. On the French politics of compassion and the link between humanitarianism and control, see Fassin (2012, ­chapter 1). 15 In the aftermath of the 2005 Paris riots, during a speech in Grenoble, Sarkozy famously described banlieues residents as racaille, meaning scum. 16 Loi du 18 mars 2003 pour la sécurité intérieure, Article 53 notes that the unauthorized occupation of a territory belonging either to a municipality, or to anyone else, with the intention of establishing a housing facility (habitation), even temporarily, is punished with six-​month imprisonment and a fee of 3,750 euros. See also Legros (2010). 17 For an analysis of path dependency across the Tuscan regional laws for Romani people, see Picker (2011). 18 Social mixing (mixité sociale) is a particularly loaded term, indexing color blindness, that is, one of the most important pillars of the French Republican ideology of citizenship and national belonging. The expression refers to people belonging to different socio-​professional categories living spatially proximate to each other. It explicitly stresses “social” as opposed to “racial” or “ethnic.” This has enormously important repercussions on the ways insertion (incorporation) is conceived, especially with regard to migrants. See on this point Simon (2002). 19 In this regard, it is interesting to analyze the French “National strategy of Roma inclusion.” I proposed a critical scrutiny of the document in Picker (2012). 20 Citées de transit should also be mentioned. Legros (2011) establishes a relevant parallel between citées de transit and villages d’insertion. While there are meaningful similarities, it is important to add that while the former were primarily concerned with labor policy, hence emphasizing the dimension of the active citizen contributing to the French nation, the latter are pivotally concerned with housing, and precisely with its spatial dimension, ensuring first and foremost the containment of an everlasting factual or potential public threat. The activation dimension of citées seems profoundly different from the chthonic dimension of villages d’insertion. Although villages d’insertions inhabitants are supported in finding employment, the whole idea of this support is profoundly different from citées programs. 21 Ironic resemblances –​Italy’s first detailed plan for constructing nomad camps in 1979 –​make direct reference to the Dutch experience of constructing camps for

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106 Containment travellers. In Montreuil, the in-​between housing solution for Romani people also came from the Netherlands. 22 See ERRC 2005, 138–​146. 23 The specific relational similarity between the “Gypsy camp” and undocumented migrant camps and “centers” emerges in Picker and Pasquetti (2015). On the relative linkages between camps and camp-​like institutions globally, see also Agier (2014), although this overlooks state-​planned “Gypsy camps.” 24 One of the main interesting research endeavors on urban governance vis-​à-​vis marginality, in which typically non-​Western migrants are overrepresented, focuses on the European Left and its discourses of tolerance and multiculture. Però (2005, 2007) has insightfully accounted for the typical left-​wing discrepancy between inclusionary rhetoric and exclusionary practices in the governance of migration. A specific focus on Romani people is included in Però (1999). 25 This point is controversial. Evidence shows that Romani people in Italian camps can sometimes eschew this passive image and engage in relatively successful political and social action, gaining resources that they would otherwise likely not have gained (Sigona 2014). However, besides personal gains, collective goods have scarcely been achieved. For example, CIDAMEN, the only Romani association that was established inside a “Gypsy camp” in Florence, had relatively limited success; it contributed positively to the early-​1990s turn away from the false idea that Romani people in Florence were nomads, yet this newly established knowledge refrained from substantially modifying regional laws’ main idiom of nomadism, viewed as lying at the roots of segregation (see, e.g., Picker 2011, 2013). For further evidence of the limited range of alternative Romani action to that of the municipality, see the case of Rome in Clough Marinaro and Ulderico (2011). 26 Fontanari (2015) aptly shows that in the case of camps for asylum seekers in Germany it is the experiences of the encamped that suspend their lives in a permanent temporariness. 27 Indeed, nomad camps could inspiringly be compared to reservations, for example Canadian or US reservations for Native Americans. Piasere (2006) interestingly puts forward the argument that Italian nomad camps directly resemble reservations in their role and function. 28 For the reasons I outlined in the Introduction, and which I will unpack in Chapter 6, the race–space link in European cities has received very little scholarly attention to date. Unlike the US, Brazil and South Africa, for instance, continental Europe remains largely overlooked as an incubator of urban processes of racial exclusion and segregation.

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Chapter 5

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Cohesion

[If they don’t evict Dale Farm’s families], it means there won’t be any Greenbelt in Basildon anymore, because everyone would be out to move in the Greenbelt, [claiming] ‘I’m a Gypsy –​I’m living in a caravan, so I’m a Gypsy.’ How can you distinguish between the two [Gypsies and non-​Gypsies]? […] And, if these were allowed to stay here, this would then set a precedent across the country: we would then start getting the Romanian, the Lithuanian, and the Polish Gypsies over, and they would be doing the same. (Dale Farm neighbor, 2011)1

In Chapter 4, I discussed the third local segregating mechanism: containment. Along with displacement (Chapter 2) and omission (Chapter 3), containment effectively enacts segregation and keeps it in place, materially and symbolically separating “Gypsy urban areas” from the urban fabric. The peculiarity of containment resides spatially in its bounded form, the camp, and symbolically in the pervasive discursive juxtaposition of mobility (nomadism) and (either potential or factual) social deviance. The fourth and last local segregating mechanism I propose is cohesion. A widespread subject across the social sciences, the concept of social cohesion is mainstream in social policy discourse across Europe and beyond. Social cohesion can actually be defined as a “quasi-​concept” (Bernard 1999, 2000), a hybrid and malleable analytical tool whose meanings may well vary in relation to specific contexts and users. An in-​depth analysis of its multifarious expressions in local policy contexts is beyond my intention and available space here. What I would instead like to propose is a discussion of the ways in which the idea –​often an “ideal” –​of social cohesion functions in practice in the UK when it comes to Romani and Traveller people. I will show that under certain conditions, social cohesion may function in ways that are both conducive to and legitimizing of separation, residential isolation and ultimately spatial segregation. By empirically focusing on the city of Salford, Greater Manchester, where I have intermittently conducted fieldwork between 2013 and 2015, I will suggest that one such condition is the set of racial premises

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concerning the relationships between Romani and Traveller people on one hand, and non-​Romani and non-​Traveller neighbors on the other.

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Background Data from the 2011 UK Census suggest that Romani and Traveller people (“Gypsies and Travellers”)2 experience dire socio-​ economic conditions.3 Twenty percent of them are unemployed, compared to 7 percent for the whole of England and Wales, and 60 percent of them over the age of 16 have no qualification, compared to the 23 percent of residents in England and Wales; and they have the lowest proportion of any ethnic group rating their general health as “good” or “very good” –​70 percent, compared to 81 percent of the overall population of England and Wales. In addition, life expectancy is significantly lower than the rest of the population; suicide rates are high; judicial assumptions often lead to long periods in custody, and the relatively low use of alternative dispute resolution; and children’s educational achievements are generally worse than the national majority (Cemlyn et al. 2009). In addition, policymaking at times relies on racial categories such as “full blooded Gypsies” as referred to a supposed lack of authenticity, actually signaling the ideal of ethnic purity as the prerogative of state policy (Smith and Greenfields 2013, 46). This situation has its roots, not only in the late nineteenth-​century making of racial ascriptions and criminalization (Chapter 1), but also in the post-​ 1945 political landscape. Since the end of World War II, when war bombing had left Britain with a considerable scarcity of housing, the number of caravans and other types of mobile housing swelled. The necessity to regulate this burgeoning mode of dwelling led to the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which aimed to organize the uncontrolled development of inner cities. Indeed, caravan settlements were largely viewed as similar to the polluted, crowded and slum-​like inner city areas, and the problem was framed in terms of hygiene. While the Ministry of Supply was favorable to allowing caravans to be stationed for short periods of time on urban outskirts, the Ministry of Health refused categorically. This refusal, as Taylor (2008, 117) observes, “was an indication of the depth of their [the Ministry’s] prejudice towards caravans.” During the 1960s, this prejudice intensified. The 1960 Caravan Sites and Control Development Act was the first significant measure to tackle the increasing post-​WWII numbers of non-​nomadic people travelling in caravans, either temporarily or on a permanent basis. The act aimed to increase state control over mobility by providing local authorities with the right to build caravan sites, requiring planning permission and site license for landowners. This affected the lives of many Romani and Traveller families, who “saw this Act as yet another attack on their way of life” (Adams et al. 1975, 10), and its consequences were exacerbated eight years later with the 1968 Caravan Sites Act.

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Since 1945, the itinerant trajectories of Romani and Traveller families across the country have increasingly been urbanized due to the unviability of traditional occupations such as traders and tinkers, which was partially caused by the rise of retail outlets. In addition, as automated vehicles became widespread and affordable, eventually replacing horses, families could reach further-​away workplaces from a fixed place without having to travel constantly. As a consequence, many traditional stopping places for caravans were closed, and settlements on urban peripheries started to appear; traces of these settlements are today visible in street names such as “Gypsy Lane” and “Gypsy Hill,” which can typically be found on urban peripheries.4 While the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act did not mention “Gypsies,” it clearly indirectly addressed several Romani and Traveller families making their way across the UK. In 1968, state control was reinforced by the Caravan Sites Act, the first post-​WWII state policy in Europe to explicitly address “gypsy encampments,” which ordered the construction of halting sites. The context in which the Leviathan state amplified its role as supreme control agency of socio-​spatial deviance is key for understanding the role and logic of cohesion as a racially segregating mechanism. During a 1968 Parliamentary debate on the just-​ voted-​ upon Caravan Sites Act, MP Macdonald stated that the act’s main goal was “to ensure that proper provision shall be made so that the [nomadic] way of life is not offensive to other people.”5 The MP was speaking in support of the act; indeed, its ultimate objective was to decrease the possibilities for the nomadic “way of life” to offend other people, who were homogeneously deemed non-​nomadic. This included first and foremost preventing Romani and Traveller people from abandoning scrap metal and car bodies in towns and the countryside, particularly near roadsides (see Adams et al. 1975, 18). This kind of disorder often led to tensions with local residents, who at times organized protests against the presence of Romani and Traveller people in their vicinity. Hence, unlike the first Italian nomad camps, which officially aimed at social inclusion and protecting nomadism, and unlike villages d’insertions, which officially aimed at clearing slums (both types of camps are discussed in Chapter 4), the official goal of the first UK camp policy was to clear up cities (and the countryside) and prevent “Gypsies’ ” alleged habits and traditions from creating disorder and offense to “other people.” This reference to “other people” is fundamental. It shifts the focus from what might be seen as the first addressees of the act, that is, people living in caravans, including “Gypsies,” to its real subject: the relations between “Gypsies’ way of life” and “other people,” namely non-​nomadic local residents. As Smith and Greenfields (2013) put it, “… the settlement of Gypsies and Travellers […] has long been a concern of the state, which has regarded a mobile existence as threatening to, and potentially undermining of, social cohesion” (2013, 3, my italics). In Britain, particularly within minority and diversity policy areas, social cohesion has a peculiar local dimension. Most often, it is referred to as

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“community cohesion.” The idea of community, as opposed to society, implies a peaceful and comfortable context in which conflicts are largely absent and harmony rules. Within the semantic domain of community, the specific priority of local authorities is often to prevent conflicts and tensions between neighbors and residents of designated “Gypsy encampments.” In this context, as Jones (2013) perceptively discusses, community cohesion policy is largely characterized by inherent contradictions. One of these is a tendency to overlook inequality in accessing public resources and in receiving support from the state and fellow citizens: “By celebrating difference without recognizing that some differences are treated differently to others, one can simply reinforce division and ignore inequalities of power” (Jones 2013, 180). The Romani difference is definitely a case in point. One of the signs that such a “difference” receives peculiar treatment is that state policy, including the Caravan Sites Act, is predicated upon widespread assumptions of Romani and Traveller people’s allegedly innate “cultural” or “behavioral” tendencies. Largely ignoring economic inequalities, deprivation and marginality while chiefly addressing cultural specificity –​coupling it, more or less explicitly, with deviant tendencies –​suggests that community cohesion may play a consistent role in engineering segregation.6 The Romani difference may be celebrated –​as long as its spatial manifestations do not exceed the boundaries of an urban camp, or “site,” where that “difference” remains relegated. Camps, therefore, while created with the initial intent to preserve cleanliness and prevent offense “to other people,” have translated into useful devices for curbing social disorder, which was typically identified with Romani and Traveller people as opposed to their seemingly clean and proper neighbors. And although “Gypsies” are included in the 1976 Race Relations Act (in 1989 they were recognized as an ethnic minority, and Irish Travellers in 2000), their stigmatized, essentialized “culture” diffusely remains their most distinctive trait upon which both the public discourse and state action addressing them are based. This point becomes clearer when one considers the definition of “Gypsies” in the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. Clause 16 defines “gypsies” as “persons of nomadic habit of life, whatever their race or origin, but does not include members of an organized group of travelling showmen or of persons engaged in travelling circuses, travelling together as such.” Against the background of the act’s main goal, as well as the historical rootedness of stigma attached to vagrancy and nomadism across Europe (see Chapter 1), this definition positions Romani and Traveller people close to potential criminals. Thus, the 1968 goal of preventing Romani and Traveller people from being “offensive to other people” built on the 1960 Caravan Sites and Control Development Act’s aim of increasing control over mobility. In this context, the economic sanctions for stationing caravans outside licensed sites established by the 1968 act reinforce the connection between the two acts. However, the most important innovation of the 1968 act resides in an explicit criminalization of Romani and Traveller people: “In any area designated […] it shall be an offence for

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any person being a gypsy to station a caravan for the purpose of residing for any period […]” (1968 Caravan Act, clause 10, my italics). Group criminalization was even justified publicly by the then-​Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, who, responding to a case in the House of Lords, noted shamelessly that the negative discrimination in Clause 10 could be considered marginal, because it was somehow counterbalanced by a positive discrimination in Clause 6, which, among other provisions, urged local authorities to provide working space inside caravan sites. The 1960 and the 1968 acts are to be understood as the first post-​WWII British state attempts to spatially and symbolically control and contain Romani and Traveller people, deemed, as I have shown, a threat for the sedentary majority. Subsequently, two Department of Environment circulars, passed in 1977 and 1978, respectively, made it easier for “Gypsies and Travellers” to find abode in camps, thus smoothing the process of cohesion and control. Following policies have progressively radicalized and tightened control and criminalization. The 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act is perhaps the clearest example of enforcing sedentarization in camps. This act removed the obligation of local authorities to provide sites for Romani and Traveller people and allowed the police to ban groups of twenty or more people in a particular area if they feared “serious disruption of the life of the community.” “Way of life offensive to other people” and “disruption of the life of the community” are terms through which Romani and Traveller people were turned into dangerous subjects. It is evident, then, how social and community cohesion emerge as the highest values to be preserved against the “Gypsy threat.”7 In this context, cohesion instead becomes segregating cohesion –​namely, defending the life of majority communities from criminalized minorities rather than allowing durable and sustainable relations between the two. Another similar measure was the Welsh Office Circular 1/​94 (1994) preventing sites being built within the Green Belt, which is typically viewed as an area where nature and beauty are to be carefully preserved and protected. The ­policy-​led socio-​spatial exclusivity of both the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and the Welsh Office Circular 1/​94 speaks directly to the late nineteenth-​century criminalization of mobility that I outlined in Chapter 1. Thomas (2000, 112) aptly unpacks this point by noting that “planning policies reinforce the construction of gypsies and travellers […] as a threat to social order, as people ‘out of place,’ and as best managed in spatially peripheral sites, typically screened from general view.” Sites are usually in the least desirable locations –​by railway lines (e.g. Swindon), next to run-​down ­council estates (e.g. Coatbridge and Easterhouse), or near rubbish dumps, sewage works, or motorways (Cemlyn et al. 2009). All of this, I suggest, was largely sustained by the politics of cohesion. The material and symbolic juxtaposition of Romani and Traveller people, and “spatially peripheral sites” as natural and self-​evident, legitimizes

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the logic of socio-​spatial exclusion. The construction of a clear hierarchy between sedentary and non-​sedentary modes of livelihood rests on a racial –​ and by extension racist –​understanding of the relationships between human behavior and the public space. Evidence of this does not only emerge from the debates prior to the passing of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act (Picker et al. 2015, 740–​742), but also from the policy assumptions and practices concerning the spatial governance of mobility. A comparison of two evictions speaks of the dominant belief behind policy-​making and implementation of the time.8 In the winter of 1961–​1962, a large group of Romani and Traveller caravans was evicted from their site in Darenth Woods, Kent. The family resisted, but without success; as no alternative housing solution was given to them, in mid-​January they became homeless and spent several months camping near a highway. Three years before, a totally different eviction took place in Egham, Surrey, where a group of non-​Romani caravan dwellers was residing on an unauthorized site. Resistance was organized in this case, as well, but equally without success. However, unlike the Darenth Woods case, Egham’s families were not evicted in winter; instead, the authorities waited until spring, and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government intervened to put pressure on the county council, which provided accommodation to the caravan-​dwellers. This briefly sketched comparison shows that the main state attitude vis-​à-​ vis Romanies and Travellers’ housing conditions is not simply based on their “nomadism.” Rather, it rests on a much deeper belief that this population is innately more dangerous than the majority society. Post-​WWII state interventions regarding Romani and Traveller people, hence, largely rest on a racially informed understanding of space: as Sibley has noted, [Camps] are all racialised spaces, […] encouraging a sedentary life, but one that has to be lived in a degraded environment. Site locations are invariably the outcome of efforts to minimise conflict, or to distance from disgust. (1998, 126, my italics) Besides discussing the race–​space nexus crystallized in the “Gypsy camp,” Sibley (1998) also argues that the very idea of urbanity embedded in the policy discourse normatively imposing Romanies’ and Travellers’ transition from rural unregulated areas to organized and fenced urban camps reproduces nineteenth-​century Victorian ideas of civility and decorum. While the space and landscape of the countryside is overwhelmingly seen as the pure and clean end of the spectrum, allogeneic elements ultimately represent pollution and decay at the opposite end. During several of my conversations in Salford, it emerged that people may find it desirable to live in campsites.9 As one local civil society organization’s leader told me, “They want to be segregated!” Lea, for instance, in her thirties, grew up in the “site” and loved it as her own home. However, her mother,

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Mary, in her seventies, was still disappointed about having to move into a fenced camp after having grown up and raised children while moving around in a caravan. Other encounters I had and other research findings suggest that families may not find it agreeable to live in a fenced space side by side with other families, who are often unknown.10 Since the implementation of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, residing in camps has been the only lawful residential option for Romani and Traveller people besides private and social housing. Hence, segregation, while being a choice for some of the families, needs to be understood within structural political, economic and social forces that converge in limiting available housing options to a racialized population deemed dangerous. I now turn to analyzing the genesis and governance of the Salford “Gypsy camp.”

Segregating cohesion The Salford “Gypsy camp” opened in the summer of 1988 as a temporary location on Duchy Road, close to the main arterial road connecting Salford and Manchester. Local media chronicles accompanying the establishment of the site are revealing of the pivotal role that prospective neighbors’ aversion played in public discourses. The only local chronicles of early 1988 that covered the debate over the “Gypsy camp” accounted for future neighbors’ discontent, expressed through establishing the Duchy Road Action Committee and making public statements. The three major themes found throughout the chronicles were: a) fear of “Gypsies” stealing; b) fear of dirty and messy roads; and c) the disappointment about the designation of the area, which neighbors wanted to use for recreational activities. Foregoing the neighbor of Dale Farm whom I quoted in the epigraph to this chapter, the manager of a nearby company threatened to relocate if “Gypsies” came to Duchy Road, explaining, “We could not continue in this area if we had a Gypsy camp […] It would just be hopeless for us to operate our eighteen vehicles with the worry of Gypsies stealing the batteries.” A long-​term resident and baker invited readers to consider “all the rubbish and rubble that is going to be blowing round the place” before noting that “it would be disastrous if the Gypsies come into this area!”11 About a month later, another stream of news articles accounted for citizens’ anxiety, reporting that “angry residents claim […] the space [of the planned ‘Gypsy camp’] is too close to houses and businesses.”12 Far less prominent in the media discourse were the voices of Romani and Traveller people themselves. In the only 1988 article reporting two Travellers’ own points of view, a very interesting point emerges. After quoting three Traveller women about their views of Salford and their living conditions, the journalist wrote “… they [all Travellers, ignoring gender] insist in marrying into their own kind […] Fear of intermarriage is one of the reasons the tribes stay on the roads.”13 The prevailing representations of “Gypsies” as primitive creatures who are closer to nature because of their way of life implicitly

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emerge among the depictions of Duchy Road “residents.”14 While the local media discourse depicted “Gypsy and Travellers’ values,” the same did not occur regarding “residents’ values.” Duchy Road residents were implicitly depicted as “non-​Gypsy,” and by virtue of that, as non-​threats to public order; at times they were even represented as do-​gooders, such as a factory manager who was planning to extend his plant surface close to Duchy Road, but once he became aware of the project, he began “considering not building the factory, which would employ around 60 to 70 people.” In 1992, the city council brought up the camp to permanent standard.15 This included furnishing it with additional utilities, including showers and toilets, as well as building a fence around the entire camp. It also included a series of relieving measures for camp residents that were required by the 28/​77 Department of Environment Circular (1977), such as carrying out evictions “humanely and with compassion” and providing alternative residential options before evictions took place. These were the Labour government’s incentives to alleviate the clearly constraining consequences of the 1968 Caravan Sites Act on people’s lives as a palliative reaction to abruptly imposed policies of sedentarization and segregation. However, due to the seemingly unrecognized racial criminalization contained in the 1968 Act, and –​equally importantly –​ to the rise of Thatcherism, these relieving measures were the legitimizing carrot, while the stick of criminalization remained in disguise. The relationships between the national government and local authorities in the late 1980s need to be discussed at more length. In those years, Mrs Thatcher was in her third premiership, which lasted from 1987 to 1990; this suggests that Thatcherism was by that time the largely dominant doctrine in public policy. Since her first mandate in 1979, local authorities had increasingly been submitted to the control of the central government due to fear that local communities could overtly cultivate collectivism in contrast to individualism, which was indeed one of Thatcher’s main concerns. This was not an abstract concern –​ local authorities usually are the state officials most sensitive to the basic needs of the people, such as public transport and social housing. With over sixty Acts of Parliament addressing local government, Thatcher orchestrated a truly unprecedented attack on local communities during her office of prime minister (Edgell and Duke 1991). Knowing this is essential in order to understand the serious limitations that Salford authorities were experiencing when they decided upon the local “Gypsy camp” in 1992: the framework of the genesis of the Salford “Gypsy camp” was a multifarious combination of governmental constraints, increasingly required local entrepreneurship, and the perceived need to exercise control over an already widely criminalized population while adopting a benevolent approach. The local deep-​rooted Labourist culture could only mitigate this segregationist process, as central government imperatives gave local authorities no option of negotiation. Acknowledging this political context is key not only for contextualizing –​and hence more fully grasping –​the local process of camp-​making, but also in order to understand

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the ways in which the “Gypsy camp” was governed in the 2010s. About twenty years after Mrs Thatcher’s reforms, post-​2008 Conservative government cuts of local councils’ budgets and expenditures showed a renewed, certainly refashioned, and possibly radicalized upheaval of neoliberal statecraft. I will come back to these developments toward the end of this section. Similar to the first plans for Italian “nomad camps,” in 1988 the Duchy Road site was planned to host both transient and permanent residents. The twofold organization of the internal space –​pitches for transients on one side, and pitches for permanent residents on the other –​was a crystallization of the expert knowledge on nomadism that was circulating in Europe, including in the pages of the Italian journal Lacio Drom (Chapter 4). On Duchy Road, the area was divided into two sectors of similar size, one for transient residents and the other for permanent residents. The former caravans were allowed to stay for a limited period of time, while the latter had the right to stay permanently; this right would have been withdrawn if they exceeded the maximum amount of time allowed for staying outside the site. Regulation was strict in order to ensure that families followed the council’s rules and not their own. This was in line with the 1968 Caravan Act’s ultimate goal of control and sedentarization, while still allowing Romani and Traveller people to keep their itinerant lifestyle. However, the Salford camp’s organization has followed a different path –​ during most of its existence it hosted only permanent residents.16 In the mid-​ 1990s, the Gypsy Council started to manage the site, and appointed Roy,17 a man who had long since been living with his family inside the camp, as site manager. In the memories of Lea, who had been residing in the camp since it was opened, neighbors voiced their discontent directly at the camp residents in the late 1980s. At that time, Lea felt scared because the neighbors’ hostility was compounded by the rather disorienting novelty, for her, of living in a single place. Being forced to stop a travelling life was and still is traumatic for several families. No one expressed this feeling to me more clearly than George, a fifty-​eight-​year-​old Irish Traveller who at the age of thirty-​six moved with his family to a block of flats: “It’s like you live in your own flat all your life, and all of a sudden you start living on the road.” Once the camp was fenced in 1992, Lea’s fears slowly dissolved. Gradually, neighbors’ protests stopped, as the camp eventually came to be perceived as a lawful emanation of the local council. In 1999, Luke, one of Roy’s relatives staying inside the camp, took over the management of the camp, a responsibility he held until 2011. From the mid-​1990s to the early 2010s, the vast majority of the families living in the camp were permanent residents. Hence, the camp was a “community” whose leader was watching over the safety of his own and neighboring families, providing them with a reliable connection to the council and any other external party. Once Luke left in 2011, the city council took over the management of the camp, outsourcing it to a local company. At that moment, most of

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the families did not know whether to stay; they felt they had lost safe and reliable protection. Moreover, most of them did not know that the site had been planned to accommodate both permanent and transient residents: since its opening, the site had been primarily inhabited by permanent residents. Once the council decided to turn the site back to its original plan, long-​term residents felt largely unsafe because unknown Romani and Traveller families could come in and stay only temporarily. In 2011, when rumors spread that a “Gypsy camp” in nearby Manchester was to be dismantled, Duchy Road camp residents worried that people evicted from Manchester would eventually end up living in their camp. As a result, many long-​term residents left for other camps or social or private housing. Meanwhile, in the Housing Act 2004 the central government included a countrywide scrutiny of the housing conditions of Romani and Traveller people (Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment, or GTAA).18 In Salford, the GTAA essentially led to providing more and better-​equipped pitches in the Duchy Road camp through a number of grant applications to the Homes and Communities Agency. This result is interesting, as it shows the role of the state in perpetuating, and even exacerbating, a condition of segregation that was first imposed as the only available option to travelling by the 1968 Caravan Sites Act. The first City Council bid in 2008 successfully granted £150,000 from the government exclusively for three amenity blocks with toilet and washing facilities. Although welcomed by the families living in the camp, the quality of the materials was very low. For example, while showing me a just-​built toilet close to her caravan, Lea pointed out the extremely poor construction: the wooden floor in the toilet would constantly get soaked. It should also be mentioned that the Salford GTAA document, based on consultations with the camp residents and manager conducted by the City Council in 2005, did not state how many residents were interviewed. In one of the two consultations, only two out of the eighty-​six residents were interviewed, and the questionnaire that was distributed to all residents ended up with just eight respondents. No details were disclosed as to how residents were contacted. All of this accounts for approximations, on the basis of which a final report on the needs of camp residents was drafted. Shortly after Luke left in 2011 and the atmosphere in the camp began to worsen, the city council installed a temporary prefabricated office inside the camp for about two months. The plan was to conduct personal consultations with the camp residents in order to understand their needs. Besides returning the camp to its twofold function of accommodating both temporary and permanent families, the council consulted the residents and decided to build an entrance gate, which could only be opened with a special magnetic card; CCTV cameras watching over the entrance were also installed. Camp rules changed and became much stricter. Along with privatization, the 2010 national election of the Liberal Democrats–​Conservative coalition brought about a number of serious changes at the local council level. In two years,

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from 2011 to 2013, local government funding had fallen by 26.8 percent. In 2011, the Salford council had its yearly budget cut by 15 percent, and the decision was made to cut the specific budget for services –​primarily activities for children and youth services. Over the years, this has strongly impacted the extent of the offer of social services for Duchy Road camp residents.

Conclusion: racially structured cohesion It is within a fundamental ambivalence that the relationships between Romani and Traveller people and their neighbors have unfolded. This ambivalence was already ingrained into the 1968 Caravan Act’s very idea that the “Gypsy threat” could no longer simply be contained through the usual criminal justice procedures, but needed to be prevented, constantly disciplined and monitored by setting up ad hoc segregating devices. The ambivalence rests on the very understanding of the problem in terms of cohesion, for which camps were considered the most appropriate solution. Thus understood, this ambivalence matches the slow move toward neoliberal governance in the 1960s: as Venn (2009, 226) has pointed out, “neoliberal politics […] in rejecting the idea of redistributive justice can only foster ‘social’ and ‘cultural’ values of cohesion by promoting reinvented racism and nationalism.” The recent and current financial cuts of local councils’ social services speak of a worsening of social provision for the needy. In such conditions, social cohesion is reached only by fixing the racially deemed, the “outlandish,” and the “troublemakers” into bounded urban spaces, isolated from the majority and watched over until social cohesion is guaranteed, with fewer and fewer resources for social care. A 1988 Salford press article argued, “the problem hounding travellers all over the country is the lack of sites.”19 At first sight, this is a common-​sense statement that was also put forward by left-​leaning activists and groups –​ indeed, by that time, the number of campsites provided was way below the actual need. However, the public discourse unanimously ignored, and still seems to disregard, the main reason why more sites were necessary: the 1968 Caravan Act’s criminalization of vagrancy. The choice to neglect structural causes is still pervasive in media, policy and political discourse across the country. Ignoring or keeping silent on the ultimate cause of the presence of campsites –​that is, the 1960 and 1968 Acts, and their underpinning views –​ speaks of the ways in which, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, issues concerning Romani and Traveller people, and in general vagrancy and itinerant life, were commonly perceived: attention was placed on individual, immediate, and contingent causes, as opposed to collective, historical and structural ones. This view coincided with the newly established understanding of the social that was massively promoted by Thatcher during her time in office (1979–​ 1990). Deep-​rooted structural conditions, according to this understanding, did not count as much as immediate circumstances: “There is no such thing

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as society. There are individual men and women and there are families,” Thatcher famously stated in 1987.20 Her view on the fundamental causes of human arrangements were certainly neither collective nor structural, but chiefly individualist. This individualization of causes and mechanisms regulating social arrangements does not only shed more light on the efficacy of the “changing the heart and soul” project (see Chapter 1), but it also enables an understanding of the role of social cohesion in maintaining segregation –​a role that would hardly be effective without the racial underpinning concerning how to engineer social cohesion while dealing with a group that is deemed innately (factually or potentially) deviant. This is similar to the dilemma encountered by Italian and French authorities that I presented in the previous chapter. And, in that case, the form of segregation discussed was also the camp. However, while there was certainly containment in Salford, I maintain that in the UK, the “Gypsy camp” cannot be reduced to an issue of containment. The state’s main worry behind the planning of segregating “Gypsy camps” as social provision is, unlike in Italy and France, strongly predicated upon deeming the majority “British society” as morally good. This is an idea to which Thatcherism contributed substantially, and which had and continues to have the consequence of defining all that is not British and white as seemingly morally bad –​or worse than white and British.21 As I showed in this chapter, it is the deemed morally good British majority –​rather than the outlandish minority –​that is the real concern of the state when it comes to Romani and Traveller people. Largely constricted within a pacified view of social relations as naturally equal, the discourse of social and community cohesion ends up merging with that of civility, intended as publicly accepted morality. Equally importantly, the choice of ignoring or keeping silent on the ultimate cause of the insufficient number of sites means turning a blind eye to how “certain differences are treated differently than others” (Jones 2013, 180), meaning that social inequalities and hierarchies, and ultimately the role of race in shaping them, are typically ignored. The Salford community is not simply considered as cohesive once naturalized and essentialized “diverse” groups live side by side without tensions between them. In order to have social cohesion, groups should abide by the implicit moral rules of civility, intended as socially accepted behavior that includes modes of hygiene, physical distance and cleanliness. By extension, miscegenation, we may conclude, is only the extreme of an already established continuum of fear of breaking silent moral codes. Racism is therefore predicated upon the idea(l) of community cohesion, which can then be seen as racially structured cohesion insofar as it is articulated along publicly accepted moral codes within the British-​white order. When it comes to Romani and Traveller people, then, the threat is easily materialized, and social cohesion finds the externality against which it should be preserved. In the context of forty years of rampant neoliberal doctrines, the state occupies the pivotal role as engineer of this process of

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bordering, both spatially and symbolically –​policing borders only when needed, such as in the case of Salford, whose “Gypsy camp” was essentially left ungoverned as long as self-​rule could prevent the spread of any threat to the socio-​moral order. From this perspective, then, British camps for Romani and Traveller people can be seen as spatio-​racial devices for enforcing a socio-​racial (white) cohesion. Socio-​racial cohesion also plays out in less evident forms than camps. With the arrival of Romani workers and their families from newly accessed European Union countries in the early 2000s, British cities have been confronted with inflamed media and political discourses about “invasion” (Clark and Campbell 2000). Within such discursive formations, two major phenomena characterized the urban processes of this migration flow. First, due to highly constraining housing prices across the country, newly arrived families tended to cluster in low-​income arrival neighborhoods, such as, for example, Govanhill in Glasgow, Gorton in Manchester, Page Hall in Sheffield and, not least, Higher Broughton in Salford. These so-​called “multicultural areas,” often containing dilapidated housing and largely stigmatized as dangerous and criminalized in media and everyday discourse, seem to have acquired a further charge of disdain once Romani families settled in them. Second, and more relevant for this discussion, municipal offices in charge of “Gypsies and Travellers” were often mobilized to provide services to newly arrived families from Eastern Europe. While this is not surprising, in light of the already mentioned prevalence, in the state’s eyes, of Romani workers’ cultural belonging over socio-​economic conditions, it raises questions as to what in particular allowed those foreign workers and Romani and Traveller people to be lumped together in the same social-​policy ethnic box. One of the most immediate answers, I suggest, is the deep-​rooted European discourse on “Roma, Gypsies and Travellers” that has increasingly permeated public policy since the 1960s (Chapter 1). The reason why Eastern European Romani workers and families arrived in the UK was certainly less related to the fact that they were Romani, than to the search for better socio-​economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Apart from a common vocabulary and a contemporary “revitalization” of European Romani dialects among Romani people in the UK (Matras 2010), Romani and Traveller people in the UK on the one hand, and Czech and Slovak Romani people, on the other, may share much less than, say, Romani and non-​Romani Britons. In any case, besides this observation –​ which is indeed contingent to the context –​a priori lumping “Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers” together in the same box seems rather arbitrary.22 One small anecdote reveals this point perhaps more clearly. When I was in Manchester in 2013 attending a meeting of one of the many EU-​funded social inclusion projects for “Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers,” one social worker belonging to the Traveller community stood up and said, almost shouting, “We are tired of being lumped together with Roma. We are not Roma!” This instance speaks

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to a general discomfort I could witness among other NGO employees and volunteers self-​identifying as Travellers. As I discussed in Chapter 1, lumping largely marginalized groups together is a typical colonial practice indicative of a view that ignores subjective specificities and more or less purposely avoids promoting the participation of the marginalized. In the case of lumping “Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers” together, the typical assumption is that there is an invariable and necessary similarity between the three groups. As invariable as it may be, language is also a contextual phenomenon (Okely 1983). Hence, the a priori attitude of unproblematically assuming that the three groups share more than what divides them arguably withdraws from them resources for participating in designing their own lives. It certainly replicates the same attitude vis-​à-​vis Romani and Traveller people underlining the project of the Caravan Sites Acts, and it is consistent with the other three local segregating mechanisms that I have outlined in the previous chapters, and particularly containment, which shares with cohesion the spatial governance device –​the camp. Okely (1983, 66, italics in the original) has raised this point lucidly: For the central authorities, the problem seems to have been to find a sufficiently inclusive category which would cover all nomads or quasi-​ vagrants, whereas for folklorists and those charged with making local site provision for a select few, the concern has been with an exclusive category which would enable them, for different reasons, to discriminate between an acceptable minority and a mass of rejects. Ultimately, I argue, this lumping together draws on the racial thinking according to which deemed-​different humans are disposable material that those who retain power (to define, to govern) can make use of, in either exclusive or inclusive ways –​while often in both ways –​for the sake of efficiency in reaching certain goals. Over the last fifty years in Britain, as I have discussed throughout this chapter, the underpinning major goal seems to have been community cohesion in its peculiar, racially constituted fashion. Since the 1968 Caravan Site Act, the concern about the relations between criminalized minorities and the supposedly non-​criminal and “good” majority has been articulated through the lens of propriety and civility, and by extension hygiene. This point is reminiscent of the dominant segregation rationale at work in British New Delhi, as discussed in Chapter 1. However, socio-​racial cohesion seems to have, in practice, the ultimate goal of ensuring social order, intended as the absence of conflicts and tensions. Therefore, the rationale behind Addis Ababa’s racial segregation seems to also be part of the various correspondences between colonized and contemporary cities as they play out in today’s Salford. A combination of the two colonial segregation rationales –​hygiene and the imposition of social order –​seems to be at work in the British town with reference to the local “Gypsy camp.”

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A pacified neighborhood strategy that does not disturb the socio-​moral order can also be found in other parts of Europe. Authorities in Turin, for instance, have dealt with two of the biggest shantytowns in Europe in similar ways. Along the river Stura, on the northern periphery of Turin, two makeshift housing settlements have existed since the late 1990s where several hundred Romani families, primarily from Romania, make a living. In 2010, during an interview, one civil servant in charge of the settlement confided to me: Today, relationships between Romani people and the local council occur only when an article is published in the local newspaper La Stampa or Repubblica. Until an article is published, nobody is interested in the issue of Romani people in town, not even the local council –​they want to know nothing […] For the council, the shanty towns are invisible […] My boss always tells us, ‘You should stop at some point, you cannot bring [social care] too far in the shanty towns.’ The implicit idea of social cohesion is ingrained in the way the Turin social services department officially ignores the informal settlements while continuing to monitor them, in strict collaboration with the police. This recalls Sibley’s (1998) previously mentioned view of the camps’ goal “to minimize conflicts”: the ultimate meaning, arguably, of social cohesion in practice.

Notes 1 In October 2011, 86 families were evicted from Dale Farm, the largest caravan site in the UK, hosting about 1,000 Irish Travellers. The event was highly mediatized, with activists fighting against the eviction for several months, ultimately unsuccessfully. The excerpt quoted comes from the documentary Battle of Dale Farm, by Daniel Coutts, 2011. 2 In the UK, the standard media, policy and civil society expression is “Gypsies and Travellers.” Following again Hancock (2002, xxi; see also Introduction), I will instead use “Romani and Traveller people” except when quoting official documents and public discourses. 3 These data come from the Office for National Statistics, Gypsy or Irish Travellers smallest ethnic minority at 58,000. Released January 21, 2014. 4 I wish to thank Will Guy for very interesting conversations, which informed much of this discussion. 5 Quoted in Adams et al. (1975, 20, my italics). Note the discursive construction of “people” by symmetric opposition to “way of life”: peoplehood is conceived of only within a (supposedly) sedentary dimension. This is reminiscent of the 1969 Council of Europe recommendation n. 586 discussed in Chapter 1, as well as the objectifying hyperculturization of “nomads”  –​by deploying the expression “way of life” without reference to subjecthood –​discussed in Chapter 4. 6 For a thorough discussion on how social and community cohesion relate to racelessness and racism, and cognate questions of belonging in the UK, see Yuval-​Davis et al. (2005, 524–​525, 529), [Belonging] becomes a pre-​requisite of [social cohesion]. But the construction of belonging found here [introduced by Home Secretary Blunkett] is one which

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is about loyalty to the British state, rather than any meaningful inclusion or attempt to provide conditions for enabling social participation and emotional identification. 7 For a close-​up look at the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act’s impact on Gypsy and Traveller families, see Smith and Greenfields 2013: ­chapter 2. 8 I take this example from Taylor (2008, 124–​125), who exhaustively documents how state discrimination toward Romani and Traveller people in the UK has continued to grow during the twentieth century. 9 This point is far wider than I  can discuss here, and concerns debates over the nature of coercion and free choice that would also apply to the other three empirical chapters, besides many other social contexts across the globe. Due to the limited scope and space here, I only point to the important works by Cemlyn et al. (2009) and Smith and Greenfields (2013). 10 See Powell (2012). Individual and family trajectories within the history of sedentarization of Romani and Traveller people in the UK differ substantially. My interest here, as in the other chapters, is on the structural process limiting housing options to camps, rather than in mapping individual and family trajectories. For a comprehensive and recent look at these trajectories and different dimensions of housing transition experiences, see Smith and Greenfields (2013). 11 “Firms hit out at gypsy site. ‘We might pull out’ say two companies,” Salford City Reporter, January 7, 1988. 12 “Campsite is not suitable,” Salford City Reporter, February 18, 1988. 13 “Salford is home to us say travellers …” Salford City Reporter, February 18, 1988. 14 The trope of “Gypsies” as closer to nature also emerged in everyday narratives in Pescara (Chapter 3); more generally, this is one of the deepest-​rooted representations of Romani people that the 2014 documentary A People Uncounted powerfully unpacks and contextualizes. See also on this point Piasere (2006). 15 Salford Environmental Protection and Planning Committee, sessions on July 1 and 7, 1992. The site also became permanent because of a 100% Gypsy site grant of £100,000, a measure that was disposed by the 57/​78 Department of Environment Circular. 16 Sibley (1998, 126) notes that “The purpose of sites seems quite transparent, but gypsies [sic] are not all subject to the same control regime. Some sites seem highly controlled, but others demonstrate the ability of gypsies to transform space so that sites become more like autonomous zones. I doubt that this is conscious resistance. It is more a reflection of differences in the local authorities’ enthusiasm for policing sites.” 17 Pseudonyms have been used throughout the text. 18 The 2006 circular Planning for Gypsy and Caravan Sites re-​stated the requirement to conduct a GTAA. 19 “Salford home to us say travellers …” Salford City Reporter, February 18, 1988. 20 Interview with Women’s Own magazine, October 31, 1987. 21 I intend “whiteness” here not only in terms of skin color, but as a broader social condition of privilege and power articulated within different dimensions including economic, cultural and political. Whiteness, like blackness, is a contested and fluctuating cultural category, which, as Stuart Hall (2002[1980]) explains, assumes different meanings and values in different contexts. In this specific case, Romani and Traveller people generally have lighter skin, but the stigma attached to them often revolves around issues of pollution, dirt, etc. –​that is, some of the classic tropes associated with blackness and black bodies –​demonstrating that the cultural meanings of whiteness and blackness are not exclusively related to skin color. While Thatcherism goes beyond the then-Prime Minister’s opinions, the words

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Cohesion 123 of the soon-​to-​be Prime Minister during a 1978 television interview tell something about the racial politics engrained in Thatcherism: “If we went on as we are, then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped, people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in.” 22 Clearly, arbitrary does not a priori mean erroneous. Also, it might be argued that this book contributes to the “lumping together” process, since this chapter focuses on both Romani and Traveller people. Yet, as stated in the Introduction, my chief focus is on spatial formations, rather than on “groups” as such, meaning on detecting how segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas,” including caravan sites in the UK, have emerged and persisted. As I have suggested throughout, the making of these areas has played a role in the “lumping together” process, which I am analyzing in this book.

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Neoliberalism’s diffusion of old binaries and borders merely reconfigures rather than destabilizes familiar forms of domination. (F. El-​Tayeb 2012, 82)

After the journey across the four local segregating mechanisms (displacement, omission, containment and cohesion) and the five geographical and historical nodes (stigmatized and segregated “Gypsy urban areas” in Cluj-​Napoca, Pescara, Florence, Montreuil and Salford), in this chapter I assemble these translocal and transhistorical nodes to sketch a historical sociology of GUAs. I do so by establishing correspondences between the four mechanisms and the three colonial segregation rationales that I singled out in Table 1.1, Chapter 1, when I studied the cases of French Rabat (1913–​1930), British New Delhi (1911–​1931) and Italian Addis Ababa (1936–​1941). Toward the end of each empirical chapter, I have offered a brief discussion of single correspondences. Directly engaging with King’s (1989, 1) overall idea –​“Contemporary urban hierarchies and patterns of urbanization have largely resulted from colonial rule” –​which I used as an epigraph to Chapter 1, I will offer a synthesis of the genesis and persistence of GUAs, situating colonial rationalities of urban rule alongside local segregating mechanisms in contemporary urban Europe. This series of closely linked analytical steps will allow me to discuss the variety and variability of forms of racial segregation in today’s European cities, as well as their resemblances to different colonial contexts in which segregation was experimented with and engineered as part of policy agendas. Heeding El-​Tayeb’s point I quoted as the epigraph to this chapter, I will show that the relative continuation of material and symbolic processes of (spatial) separation and (cultural) distinction between colony and contemporary European cities does not destabilize “familiar” forms of racial segregation imposed in colonized cities. In the conclusion, I will define racial cities and underline their heuristic values.​ The entire discussion will primarily serve to account for the multiple ways in which race, as a pivotal principle of socio-​spatial organization, has been

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Table 1.1  Colonial ideologies and segregation rationales Colonized city

Major colonial ideology

Major segregation rationale

French Rabat

Protection of local culture

Cultural preservation

British New Delhi

Wealth: commerce and industry; Overseas hegemony

Hygiene and sanitary conditions

Italian Addis Ababa

Demographic colonialism; Re-​imposing white supremacy in East Africa

Enforcing social order

permuted from an explicitly and proudly embraced assumption behind colonial urban rule to a subtle and powerful social force in neoliberal urban Europe. This permutation will be discussed as one of the key background conditions for the genesis and persistence of GUAs, whose widely perceived ordinariness is, to a large extent I will argue, informed by “the silence of race” in Europe (Lentin 2008). Drawing on the four empirical cases, I will show that this “silence,” disaggregated into the twofold phenomena of racelessness and depoliticization, is functional to the persistence of spatial segregation. Rather than engaging in a structural comparison of the four local segregating mechanisms, I consider them as case studies of contemporary forms of segregation. Comparing them to one another would mean enclosing my analysis within one single ethnic (“Romani”) configuration, assessing the variations within. Instead, as I discussed in the Introduction, my unit of analysis is the various GUAs, seen as an example of global forms of governance and skyrocketing socio-​spatial inequalities, particularly at the bottom of the class structure in European urban societies. With this context in mind, and drawing on the centrality of circulations between colony and metropole, I here adopt comparativism in a different fashion: rather than making a synchronic gesture, I will stress diachronic correspondences between European colonial segregation rationales and contemporary segregating mechanisms in the former metropole. Drawing diachronic correspondences will allow for a greater view of influences in the ways race and the urban space combine as vectors of segregation. Meanwhile, throughout the analysis, a number of convergences and divergences between the four segregating mechanisms will also emerge. In establishing correspondences, I  follow Robinson (2016, 3)  in that “we can trace the specific historical events and influences which explain the particular urban outcomes amongst many other interrelated outcomes […] and explore the trajectories of phenomena, their ‘assemblage’ and co-​ordination.” Accordingly, correspondences between colonized and contemporary European cities should be understood as “symptoms” or “clues,” in Carlo Ginzburg’s (1989) terms. The historian discusses the genesis of the “method of clues” by examining a variety of circumstances and stories, including the

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late nineteenth-​century figure of the art critic. Similar to a physician’s process of diagnosis, the art critic’s method aimed to identify, “within a culturally conditioned system of signs such as the pictorial, those which appear[ed] to be involuntary, as is the case with symptoms (and the majority of clues)” (1989, 118). In placing colonial segregation rationales and contemporary segregating mechanisms side by side, I will look for “involuntary” clues, or “symptoms.” As I have empirically shown throughout the previous four chapters, race is the pivotal force in various segregating mechanisms; as such, I will illustrate how race as a common element in both colony and contemporary Europe regulates social and spatial distribution and organization in both colonized and contemporary European cities. I will first assemble the six nodes, or GUAs, by singling out the main correspondences between colonial segregating rationales and the four local segregating mechanisms; subsequently, in dialogue with the second part of Chapter 1 (Metropole: from Sedentarization to Segregation), I will unpack the two most striking issues to emerge from this analysis: racelessness and depoliticization. The final section will wrap up the discussion in preparation for my closing notes in Chapter 7.

Assembling nodes The first of these correspondences lies between Florence, on one side, and Rabat and Addis Ababa, on the other.1 As I noted in Chapter 4, racial containment in Florence functions as a powerful force by fusing regional policy with representations of the “nomad threat” that have been deeply rooted in authoritative expert knowledge. In the mid-​1980s, this conjuncture discursively and spatially turned Romani workers and families arriving from Eastern Europe, primarily from still-​dismantling Yugoslavia, into disposable subjects for whom the camp was deemed the best –​and somewhat natural –​urban location. As a handy infrastructure replicating colonial government tools, the camp allowed regional authorities and experts to spatially and symbolically lump together different groupings of those deemed “nomads” under the official headline of cultural protection. The first Tuscan regional law ordering the construction of camps for Romani people, dating from 1988, sought to protect a supposedly “nomadic culture” while claiming to protect the highly ambivalent “right to nomadism.” This idea of protecting culture was predicated upon the expert knowledge of “Gypsies” (zingari), which had been widely promoted since the mid-​1960s by the charity Opera Nomadi and its journal Lacio Drom: Bimonthly Journal of Gypsy Studies; according to this body of authoritative knowledge, nomadism was the key intrinsic, innate and indelible character of all Romani people. Such racially connoted conceptions of nomadism informed regional policymakers’ decisions to lawfully order the construction of camps for deemed nomads, bearing the twofold ambivalent aim of protecting nomadism while encouraging sedentarization as a path toward social integration.

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This aim resembles the logic of the French mission civilisatrice. As discussed in Chapter 1, architect Henri Prost engineered Rabat’s spatial division between the Ville Nouvelle, inhabited by Europeans, and the Medina, inhabited by Arabs, by drawing on the rationale of protecting “Arab culture.” The main goal of the French administration in northern Africa was to protect an alleged “native” culture while “civilizing natives” in the conviction that they would eventually internalize French values. In addition to the key similarity of aims between the Italian expert knowledge underpinning the construction of nomad camps, on the one hand, and the French colonial administration, on the other, neither the first Tuscan regional law nor the legislation sanctioning Rabat’s spatial segregation made any mention of race. As discussed in Chapter 1, by avoiding the discourse of race, while using the one of class, the French colonial segregation rationale was proudly acclaimed as non-​racist at the 1931 International Conference on Colonial Planning. In a similar fashion, the discourse of race did not emerge during the 1987 debate around the Tuscan regional law ordering the construction of camps. However, in both cases, as I have empirically shown in Chapters 1 and 4, the assumptions and worldviews concerning “natives” in Morocco and “nomads” in Tuscany were fully legitimated by authoritative expert knowledge, which was largely predicated on racial assumptions concerning the lack of “civilization,” differently understood. Along with the French colonial principle of protecting culture and civilizing “natives,” another segregating rationale can be detected in the process of containment in Florence. As in the words of Adin, a long-​term camp resident whose experience is recounted in Chapter 4, camps have been implemented beyond the official goal of “protection”; they were actually intended as devices for the control and discipline of dispossessed and homeless Romani individuals. This actual aim, beyond institutional rhetoric, emerged publicly in full after the mid-​1990s, once the influx of families from Yugoslavia had declined and the issues of public order and urban security began to escalate within the local political agenda. This shift, from protecting a “culture” to imposing discipline through strict control over camps and the expulsion of surplus families, resembles Italian Addis Ababa’s main segregation rationale of enforcing social order. Unlike Prost’s vision and French colonial ideology, Italian Fascist architects Guidi and Valle, the minds behind Addis’ new plan, drew directly upon established racialist assumptions, according to which black Africans –​and blacks in general, considered “barbarians” –​occupied the lowest step of the socio-​moral ladder. In Addis Ababa, this led to a regime of governance chiefly targeted at imposing socio-​spatial control through isolation, segregation and repression. Over the last decade of the twentieth century, in Florence as in many other campi nomadi across Italy,2 the aim of “protecting nomadism” progressively vanished, while the goal of providing social integration has partially remained, undoubtedly coupled with isolation, control and repression.

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In Montreuil, where the containment of Romanian and Bulgarian Romani families began in 2008, no clear correspondence with any of the three colonial segregating rationales can be detected. This is the only such case, among the five cities considered, in which direct correlations do not immediately emerge. The empirical discussion in Chapter 4 illustrates that there were two different rationales of containing Romani families in villages d’insertion: one general and official, that is, slum clearance, and one particular and contingent, that is, the sudden humanitarian emergency that occurred in the aftermath of the June 2008 burning of a squat in the city. While the general rationale, the discourse of slum clearance may suggest the issue of hygiene, bearing resemblances with New Delhi, it may also call to mind the imposition of social order typical of Addis Ababa. In any case, this discourse was not prominent in Montreuil during my fieldwork, which is why it does not feature prominently in the empirical analysis; beyond the hypotheses of hygiene and social order, the case of villages d’insertion is in this sense undefined: either still too recent to show a direct correspondence with colonial segregation rationales, or void of any reference to colonialism beside the use of the camp. In light of this uncertainty, humanitarianism, the contingent rationale of containment, deserves further scrutiny. Absent from the three colonial segregation rationales (and potentially absent from all others as well), humanitarianism is nonetheless squarely inscribed in the history of the colony–​metropole nexus. The genesis of humanitarianism is to be found in the early nineteenth-​ century emergence of ideas of “humanity” and “compassion,” following the beginnings of mass urbanization and industrialization in the metropole that would gradually erode traditional forms of solidarity: Humanitarianism revealed an emancipatory spirit that included dissolving boundaries of indifference, creating new forms of community and obligations among its members, and instilling new kinds of commitments on the part of the fortunate to the welfare of the less fortunate. Migrating from the backstreets of London to colonial outposts in northern India and West Africa because of colonialism, capitalism and Christianity, these humanitarians began preaching a unity of mankind, encouraging individuals to identify with the suffering of others and demonstrating compassion to all living creatures. (Barnett 2011, 55) Investigating the genesis of humanitarianism enables the inference of “clues” or “symptoms.” The French colonial rule, targeted as it was toward the protection of local culture, seems the closest one to the humanitarian rationale in Montreuil. Colonizing Morocco, as discussed in Chapter 1, meant rendering “natives” docile and convincing them about the French “superior” civilization. In 2008, convincing the local population of the necessity of the current rule was part of Montreuil’s political decision of using humanitarianism to

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establish segregated camps inside the city: “using humanitarian issues for justifying a municipality’s social intervention means […] trying to realign the local electorate to your own political project” (Benarrosh Orsoni 2013, 15). The case of villages d’insertion and campi nomadi makes for a peculiar form of spatial segregation –​entrenched, under surveillance and constrained in a limited living space, the encamped are often forced to live side by side with people they might not know and might well not like. This condition of constriction retains similarities to prisons and prison-​like institutions, such as centers for undocumented foreigners. As discussed at the end of Chapter  4, however, there are conspicuous differences between carceral facilities, which work through confinement, and the “Gypsy camp,” which instead works through containment; one of the most important of these differences is the issue of formal citizenship rights, which are withdrawn only from prison inmates and not from camp inhabitants. The containment of Romani people in camps speaks more prominently to processes of racialization, which, as such, seem to overlap very clearly with colonial devices of population governance. Because the first camps for civilians appeared in the colonized territories of nineteenth-century North Africa and Cuba, and purposely aimed to contain “natives” deemed threatening, one of their key effects was the crystallization of race into fenced socio-​spatial formations. This meant producing the racially inferior as the disciplined subject par excellence, an engineered key condition for maximizing exploitation of labor, land, and resources (thus recalling Nazi camps, which share the same colonial history –​see Chapter 1). As discussed in Chapter 4, upon the post-​WWI construction of humanitarian camps in Europe, containment and humanitarianism fused with each other, eliciting the enforcement of humanitarian camps upon anyone who did not fit the renewed (inter)national order. Encountering the segregation rationale of humanitarianism in twenty-​first-​century urban France, therefore, adds another clue to the analysis and provides further evidence of the importance of the colony–​metropole nexus in grasping the specificities of present-​day segregating mechanisms. When considered in tandem, the cases of Florence and Montreuil display a major and unique “clue,” in Ginzburg’s (1989) terms: they speak to all three colonial segregation rationales. This is an important conclusion, as it directly connects the contemporary “Gypsy camp” to the quintessential colonial history of the camp as a device of population governance. It appears, rather explicitly, that the physical and symbolic containment of the racial threat can be easily enacted by resorting to a fenced infrastructure of both discipline and control. In addition to the previously discussed differences (and similarities) between the “Gypsy camp” and its colonial predecessors, the urban dimension should also be mentioned. Whereas in colonized territories, the state implemented camps primarily in rural areas, at times in deserts –​for example, early twentieth-​century camps for the Herero in German West Africa –​the “Gypsy camp” is an archetypal urban construct; it is squarely embedded,

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physically and symbolically, into the urban fabric, to the point that its presence is widely perceived as “infecting” the whole neighborhood, as is often the case in Italian urban peripheries (Clough Marinaro 2014). This issue makes colonial refractions appear vividly in the case of camps as urban infrastructures of containment. Social and community cohesion, the local segregating mechanism I detected in Salford (UK), can also be linked to the issue of containment. As I hinted at the end of Chapter 5, however, due to its national and local history, this mechanism bears resemblances primarily with British New Delhi and the segregation rationale of hygiene, and secondarily with Addis Ababa and the imposition of spatio-​racial order. Hygiene, and unsanitary threats in general, lay at the core of the British administration’s concerns in colonized urban India. In a similar manner to Rabat, New Delhi’s plan was largely based on the city-​as-​organism ideologies (Chapter 1), with the additional priority of protecting colonial settlers from disease and hygiene threats. Comparatively, through the lens of cohesion and “community cohesion,” it has been possible to engineer the enclosure in camps of populations whom the state has criminalized as troublemakers, with the specific goal of preventing them from littering streets and roadsides with trash and scrap. The 1960 Control and Development Act and the 1968 Caravan Sites Act, respectively, resemble the concerns of segregation rationales in Addis Ababa (i.e., establishing social order) and New Delhi (i.e., hygiene threats). Since the late 1960s, parliamentary debates over the Caravan Site Act and the issues of cleanliness and hygiene have pervaded the dominant discourse on Gypsies and Travellers across Britain. Parallel to this process, an increasingly strong policy discourse on monitoring the socio-​moral order has continued to unfold since the 1960 Control Development Act. These two rationales have remained in place in the context of draconian Thatcherism (1979–​1990) and have progressively crystallized around the key policy idioms addressing Gypsies and Travellers. One of those idioms is “cohesion,” whose opaque definition has allowed it to be used primarily as a synonym for lack of tension and conflict at the community level. These processes have also been at work in the making of the Duchy Road campsite in Salford. Since the 1988 establishment of the Duchy Road camp, the council’s priority has been to avoid tensions and public disorder with neighbors. This translated into, and was subsequently reinforced by, a laissez-​faire strategy whereby the local council left the camp’s government in the hands of the Gypsy Council, which appointed camp residents as managers between the mid-​1990s and 2011. The relative absence of conflicts between neighbors and the camp’s inhabitants created a general sense of cleanliness and propriety during this time. However, the strenuous efforts of social services to provide basic aid have continuously been financially restricted by the central government: heeding a Thatcherist fundamental conception of harming local communities while encouraging individual responsibility and growth, the government has continued to cut funds, most drastically after 2008. Notably,

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as I have discussed in both national and local politics vis-​à-​vis Gypsies and Travellers, the idiom of race has never been explicit –​the politics of racially structured cohesion, in this sense, have continued to develop without explicit mention of race or racial encapsulation in camps. As was the case in Tuscan and French policy processes, race appears as an underpinning social force that regulates and facilitates the segregation of Romani people while simultaneously being absent from any public discourse. Whereas the discourses of cleanliness, appropriateness and ultimately hygiene (New Delhi), coupled with the imposition of socio-​moral order (Addis Ababa), were the most distinct in imagining and implementing camps in the name of community cohesion, protecting Romani and Traveller people’s way of life could also be seen as a subtext –​albeit much less prominent –​in the making of the “Gypsy camp” in the UK, and Salford in particular. Indeed, unlike bricks-​and-​mortar accommodation, which is the most popular housing solution for socially marginalized households, campsites allow families to live in a caravan or park near their houses without great cost. In this way, from the perspective of the state, the need for cleanliness, appropriateness and hygiene on roadsides could be fulfilled in conjunction with the necessity for “community cohesion” without causing too much harm to the itinerant trajectories of Gypsy and Traveller families. Therefore, Rabat’s segregation rationale of preserving local cultures can also be partially observed at work in Salford. This conclusion speaks directly to the European Commission’s 1969 document addressing “Gypsies and other travellers,” mentioned in Chapter 1: this was the first European document to plainly call for the construction of “sites” as a compromise between the exigencies of sedentarization and itinerant lifestyle. At the same time, while Rabat’s rationale was dominant in Italian regional laws governing camps from 1984–​1992, including the 1988 Tuscan law, this way of thinking was surpassed in the UK, specifically in Salford, by the discourse of hygiene and socio-​moral order. While my discussions in Chapters 4 and 5 have primarily focused on the genesis, historical trajectory and functions of the “Gypsy camp” as one type of GUA organized by two distinct segregating mechanisms –​containment and cohesion –​in Chapters 2 and 3 I have offered relatively more in-​depth ethnographic insights into everyday urban life inside and around GUAs. In a similar manner to the implementation of camps in Florence, the segregation rationale of colonized Addis Ababa is refracted in Rancitelli, the stigmatized “Gypsy neighborhood” of Pescara (Chapter 3). Against the background of thirty years of withdrawal of public services, local media stigmatization and a concomitant increase of police and military presence, local politics have seemingly taken advantage of the complex formal and informal apparatus curbing social disorder in the neighborhood. The strongly criminalizing media discourse and the everyday racial stigmas attached to both Rancitelli and its “zingari” have created a context that, through this combination of dynamics, has led to increased deprivation since the early 1990s.

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In Chapter 3, I showed how the politics of omission in Rancitelli included the avoidance of political engagement with social exclusion in the neighborhood and authorities’ strategic sidestepping of efforts to tackle the neighborhood’s high rates of social exclusion, especially among Romani people. Furthermore, although Mussolini had a more explicit demographic goal for white Italians to occupy “black” Ethiopia, racial domination in Rancitelli retains similar traces of this objective. The civilization continuum upon which the dominant narrative addressing Romani Pescarians is based, the context in which the icon “nomadi” is primarily used, and the way in which gender stands out as a primary dimension of racial identification in public spaces, all bear a certain resemblance to the dominant idea of “civilized” racial superiority in Mussolini’s rhetoric for colonizing West Africa (see Fuller 1996). As Chapter 2 made clear, the case of Cluj-​Napoca appears to be relatively straightforward in its resemblance to British New Delhi. The politics of displacement enacted in the 2010 eviction and relocation were underlined by a pivotal accent on hygiene in both the public discourse and in civil servants’ “private” representations. The Colonia noua settlement near the Pata Rât regional dump, where over fifty families were relocated, can clearly be seen as a tool for defending the surrounding city from a material and symbolic hygiene and “miscegenation” threat. In increasingly unequal Eastern European societies, the 2010 eviction and relocation should be placed within the dominant widespread everyday idiom for identifying Romani people, especially that shared among civil servants. The social uses of the “icons” mentalitate (“mentality”) and Țiganu-​i ţigan (“Once a Gypsy, always a Gypsy!”), which I have ethnographically discussed, are both instances of an everyday stigmatization that is widespread among the citizenry and in local council offices. The racial basis of these representations lies in both the essentialization of Romani culture and their capacity to discursively fix Romani people in a position of backwardness. The direct and immediate correspondence between the two icons and the imagined “Roma,” no matter how abstract this image may be, seems to leave no space for dialogue, discussion, or change. Indeed, mentalitate is an overarching icon for all Romani people, indexing a corrupted work ethic that is deemed unchangeable. Here, an echo can be heard of the “no-​work” culture that the head of Pescara’s Police Department attributed to all Romani people. While these are important characterizations of local ways and forms of racism, the two Clujean icons should be viewed in their own socio-​economic and cultural context. Accordingly, they should be considered in relation to the socio-​spatial isolation of over fifty Romani households next to the region’s largest garbage dump, and the consequent loss of jobs, education opportunities and worsening health conditions. While these multiple correspondences shed light on the colony–​metropole nexus as it plays out in a number of contemporary European cities, they

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Table 6.1  Colonial ideologies, segregation rationales and segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” Colonized city

Major colonial ideology

Major segregation rationale

GUAs

French Rabat

Protection of local culture

Cultural preservation

Campi nomadi (Florence)

British New Delhi

Wealth: commerce and industry; Overseas hegemony

Hygiene and sanitary concerns

Colonia noua (Cluj-​Napoca); “campsite” (Salford)

Italian Addis Ababa

Demographic colonialism; Re-​imposing white supremacy in East Africa

Enforcing social order

Rancitelli (Pescara); Campi nomadi (Florence); “campsite” (Salford)

should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. As Table 6.1 shows, different colonial segregation rationales play out in the same city, as in the cases of Salford and Florence. Moreover, these correspondences do not occupy the entire space of analysis; other factors and dynamics are at stake in the making of GUAs. In Cluj, for example, the ways in which segregation works do not only refer to hygiene; as I discussed in Chapter 2, the political and economic context, policymaking processes and everyday local knowledge can hardly be reduced to a single segregation rationale. Similarly, pushing families into “Gypsy camps” may also speak of displacement, not just containment: each city includes a plurality of mechanisms and rationales regulating the ways in which segregation unfolds. Rather, what I have uncovered and discussed are the dominant or most important factors in each locality; such analysis facilitates a grasp of the systemic dimension of segregation and its varied urban articulations and forms. Ultimately, this analytical framework sheds light on what is virtually never discussed: the rootedness of racial thinking, practice and structures in European history and their contemporary configurations in urban societies. The explanation for each correspondence can be found in the historical trajectory of each local segregating mechanism, as well as in its national and supranational context. For example, the absence of both hygiene (New Delhi) and cultural preservation (Rabat) in Pescara can be explained by examining political omission, which has characterized urban governance over Pescara’s GUA (i.e. Rancitelli) since the late 1970s. The regional council’s 1998 refusal to consider a proposal for a law upholding the cultural protection of Abruzzo Romani people is only one example. Since the late-​1970s concession of public housing to forty Romani families, sedentarization has largely been perceived

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as a cultural loss; hence, “Romani culture” has not become subject to protection, although the “nomad stigma” has persisted. Another important aspect emerges by interpreting Table 6.1 through the lens of the East–​West divide. As stressed in Chapter 1, while in Western Europe the politics of cultural protection has remained popular since the late 1960s, in Eastern Europe socialist assimilationist policies have prioritized a class-​based approach. Therefore, the cultural protection of Romanies as a way to enact segregation, as in Florence and partially in Salford, is nowhere to be found in either socialist or post-​socialist European cities. In this respect, in the case of the 2010 eviction in Cluj, civil servants acknowledged cultural difference only by way of inferiorization, which accompanied the eviction: the unknown racial other was not the object of paternalistic rhetoric, as in Florence, but a threat to public health from which society should be defended.

Colonial past, neoliberal present: depoliticization and racelessness So far I have suggested that a number of “clues” (Ginzburg 1989) can be singled out between segregation rationales in the colonies and contemporary making of GUAs. I showed that looking in parallel at colonized and contemporary cities can shed light on common patterns of segregation. This analytical discussion aimed to provide evidence of the permutation of race from a proudly embraced and ordinary ideology in the colonies to a silenced yet equally effective one in contemporary Europe. Now I am going to zoom out, and consider two main conditions of possibility for this permutation to take place, and for race to maintain its allure and power. These two conditions are depoliticization and racelessness. The second part of Chapter 1 showed the means by which the colonial origins of liberalism provide some of the most important historical and ideological explanations for neoliberalism’s contemporary popularity (Venn 2009). The discussion not only stressed the structural dimension of neoliberalism as a market-​oriented ideology regulating the economy, society and the state, but also pointed out neoliberalism’s chief function as a political project striving for intimate change. In addition, Chapter 1 exposed the essential ambivalence upon which neoliberalism’s alluring power is predicated: benevolent while repressive, tolerant while disciplining (Hall 2011). So understood, as discussed toward the end of Chapter 5, one of the core values of neoliberalism is individualism. Individualism plays out, for example, in the tendency to attribute the causes of one’s own socio-​economic condition to one’s own capacities and efforts –​or lack thereof. This overall reduction to individual factors tends to overlook the importance of political, economic and cultural structures in shaping both individual and collective phenomena; this reduction is part of what can be called “depoliticization.”

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Depoliticization, however, as Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014) pointed out, should not be seen as an a-​political phenomenon. Rather than washing off politics, it reconfigures the political and by extension class relations. A crucial condition under which depoliticization occurs is that the neoliberal conventional wisdom, first theorized in the 1940s and then promoted by Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s terms in office, is indeed a highly political project which prioritizes values typically understood as “economic” rather than “political” or “social.” And yet, the surface of politics with its rituals such as Parliamentary debates, decrees, official ceremonies, etc. has very little to do with the kind of political power that contemporary economic elites exercise. Rather than formal political expressions, corporations, think tanks and financial predatory machines operate largely in disguise, the latter subjecting governments to their own criteria for measuring success (Sassen 2014). Hence, notwithstanding claims about the absence of political or ideological stance, it is clear that these important elements are all intrinsically political: stemming from an individualistic and anti-​solidaristic ideology, translating the anti-​Keynesian stance of the first neoliberal thinkers into the realm of social relations, neoliberalism can be defined as a politics of depoliticization. One instance of neoliberal depoliticization is Pescara’s URBAN II project, which aimed at socially integrating Romani people while attributing the causes of marginalization to Romanies themselves –​in this way suggesting, as the chief of police implied, that it is up to them to change. Neoliberalism “in practice” also emerged in Salford, with the post-​2008 government’s financial cuts of the regional council’s budget and the council’s drastic reduction of social service expenditure –​a phenomenon that I also documented in Cluj-​Napoca, and which is near-​ubiquitous across Europe and beyond. These financial cuts have had primarily material effects of impoverishment, de­socialization and precarization of labor relations, abandonment and isolation of the unemployed, and related changes in self-​perception. “Practiced neoliberalism” was also at work in Florence, when in the early 1990s the municipality began an aggressive politics of expulsion vis-​à-​vis the overcrowded nomad camp, prioritizing the re-​educative rationale behind camps rather than extending solidarity and support to families fleeing the dismantling of Yugoslavia. This institutional approach established a sort of “policy tradition,” and camps became constantly watched and policed. As urban territories of relegation, degradation and stigmatization, Italian nomad camps epitomize the conditions under which urban neoliberalism produces a widespread effect of selection, separating the worthy from the unworthy. The case of the 2010 Clujean eviction prompts perhaps even more significant reflections on neoliberalism, in its actual, concrete expressions. As Chapter 2 made clear, aside from attributing the lack of social integration to the Romani people themselves, civil servants in Cluj shared the assumption that a change on the side of the Romani people would hardly be possible. The entire operation was publicly justified by reference to public health and

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hygiene, which, coupled with local authorities’ use of “(Romani) mentality,” created the subtext of racial inferiority: an allegedly fixed, immutable and inherited attitude, which sets the Romani people apart. That the expression “[Romani] mentality,” while vividly present in local authorities’ views, was entirely absent in local public discourse, accounts for the dissimulation of racial thinking behind state actions. Neoliberalism’s individualization of the causes of one’s own social condition has a significant depoliticizing effect. For example, choosing not to intervene in the dire conditions of socio-​economic marginality and racial stigmatization, as Pescara authorities have done, means withdrawing social marginality from political debate and action –​hence, from the political dimension as such. Thus, by reducing, in practice, social marginality to a mere issue of infrastructures, urban security and military and police enforcement, public authorities “delegitimize[d]‌any attempt to collective resistance and redress” (Wacquant 2001, 118). A further example of depoliticization is the French debate about Tsiganes’ social conditions, as discussed in Chapter 4. During the 1960s and 1970s, the public discourse was exclusively technical and administrative, focused solely on “where to place these nomads.” The necessity of aires d’accueuil emerged from these debates, which shaped the background informing twenty-​first-​century state dispositions vis-​à-​vis Eastern European Romani people in Montreuil. Inscribed within Sarkozy’s public order and urban security agenda that emerged after the 9/​11 attacks, social marginality affecting Romani people was reduced to a depoliticized spatial issue, as discussed in Chapter 4. Similarly, the expert knowledge on “nomads” that informed the regional policies of Italian nomad camps from 1984 to 1995 was primarily predicated upon a depoliticized notion of “nomadism” as the quintessential feature of hyperculturalized subjects, whom regional authorities never classified as labor migrants or poor non-​EU foreigners (Picker 2012). Refraining from engaging urban poverty and marginality in politics led regional authorities to imagine the camp as the best service device for “nomads.” As such, since its appearance, the camp has functioned as a neutral, self-​evident necessity for governing a threatening “nomad” population. Now, in the mid-​2010s, over thirty years after the first nomad camps were constructed, camps periodically become targets of both right-​and left-​wing politics, which use them as specters of social, cultural, economic and sexual threats. Foucault’s (1977) reflection on “political technology” –​a tool deemed neutral, a-​ideological, purely technical and, as such, innocuously self-​evident for governing needy populations (see also Shore and Wright 2011) –​offers a useful lens through which to understand nomad camps. In “think[ing] of itself as the scientific description of reality” (Bourdieu 1998), neoliberalism is characterized by the sort of depoliticized framing technicality, and technophile framing, that informs camps for Romani people in both Italy and France.

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In addition to delegitimizing dissent from below, depoliticization also serves to prevent radical change from political and policy circles. The racially connoted hyperculturization of “nomads” in Tuscany, for example, by occupying the entire discursive space during the early-1980s debates in the regional council, resulted in sidelining references to social class, an effect that can also be seen in Pescarian politics of omission. In this respect, in her enlightening historical sociology of the use of black South African bodies in British published commentaries, Magubane (2004, 56) discusses an important correspondence between colony and metropole: What these texts effectively did, with their rhetorical linking of nomads at home and in the colonies, was to remove any discussion on poverty from discourses about poor people. In these texts vagabonds were nomadic simply because it was their nature to be so. Not only can this conclusion also be drawn in the case of Florence (although, as I have shown, material dispossession was at least mentioned in the 1988 regional law), but it can also be extended to post-​1945 Italian expert knowledge and early European Community policy addressing “Gypsies and other travellers.” Alongside depoliticization, the neoliberal conventional wisdom has increasingly reinforced the already widespread denial of race and its central role in shaping social relations –​a process which Goldberg (2002) refers to as “racelessness.” As I argued earlier in the chapter, the translocal and transhistorical “web” that GUAs form, linking cities across the East–​West European divide as well as the colonies to the metropole, accounts for a systemic socio-​economic, political and cultural phenomenon. Far from being new, this systemic phenomenon has been discussed by a number of philosophers and social theorists: the centrality of race to hegemonic ideas of modernity, hence to the European social fabric as a hegemonic, white and Christian social construct (Arendt 1966; Balibar 1991; Goldberg 2006; Hesse 2007; Lentin 2008). The most significant way in which race continues to shape social arrangements is what Lentin (2008) has called “the silence of race”: although its effects are palpable, race is overwhelmingly silenced and rendered invisible, especially but not exclusively in Europe. In both Western and Eastern Europe, particularly outside the UK, race is largely “unmentionable, unspeakable if not as reference to Anti-​Semitism of the past” (Goldberg 2006, 339). Building on the previous reflections on individualism and depoliticization, in what follows I will scrutinize the systemic phenomenon of “racelessness,” first in general, and then with reference to the four case studies. One of the major reasons behind race “unspeakability” is the obfuscation of references to racial domination that happened before the Shoah/​Porrajmos, in particular the five centuries of European empires’ colonial experimentation, exploitation and extermination. In this regard, the 1950 UNESCO

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Statement on Race, which was signed by eight experts including anthropologist Claude Lévi-​Strauss, and revised by fourteen internationally renowned scholars, established a fundamental normative landmark. In setting important standards and limitations for studying social phenomena, the statement is a crucial step in the formation of post-​WWII European knowledge and debates about human difference. The statement defined “race” as “a group or population characterized by some concentrations, relative as to frequency and distribution, of hereditary particles (genes) or physical characteristics, which appear, fluctuate and often disappear in the course of time by reason of geographic and/​or cultural isolation” (UNESCO 1950, 30–​31). It then continued by identifying precisely who was and who was not a “racial group”: “Catholics, Protestants, Moslems, and Jews are not races, nor are groups who speak English or any other language thereby definable as race” (1950, 31); it also made clear that “race mixture as such produces bad results from the biological point of view” (1950, 34), and claimed that “men and nations alike fall ill” unless “drives toward co-​operation […] are satisfied” (1950, 35). The statement then declared that the category “ethnic groups” should replace “races.” The 1950 UNESCO Statement was predicated upon the widespread idea that, since race is a non-​scientific, fictional construct, if the verbal connotation “race” is eliminated, what “race” implies, does, produces and regulates will also be put to an end. This recalls the assumption on which one Pescarian politician’s idea –​“racism is not the problem” –​is predicated: since “races” do not exist, the politician seemed to imply, we cannot talk about “racism.” One of the main effects of race “unspeakability” is that references to race are likely to appear extreme. Since concerns about race are mainly confined to a prerogative of anti-​Semitism, arguing about the presence of race in Europe today is often seen as siding with supporters of anti-​Semitism –​paradoxically, it would be considered extreme to claim that the racial conceptions of personhood, moral values and socio-​spatial order that have variously informed European history for several centuries are still largely untouched. Race “unspeakability” is one of the conditions under which race as a regulatory principle of social life operates largely undisturbed (Balibar 1991; Lentin 2008). “Raceless racism” can thus be seen as a structuring principle of exclusions and marginalization, and simultaneously as a capillary and flexible system of denials, obfuscations and strategies of hiding away, as if “race [would not] play a significant role in allocating resources or shaping life chances” (Gallagher 2008, 167). While neoliberalism and its depoliticizing work chiefly elicit racelessness, the presence and importance of race in contemporary Europe is also ignored due to public neglect of colonialism’s pivotal role in shaping contemporary societies in Europe and beyond (Césaire 1955). As Lentin (2008, 495) provocatively and rightly puts it, “The holocaust was Europe’s tragedy. Colonialism someone else’s.” As a background to this idea, with regard to the multiple circulations between colony and metropole, Robinson (2006) maintains that

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“western modernity’s projection of itself as the generative source of creativity relies on forgetting these circulations and borrowings” (2006, 19, my italics). This is a particularly appropriate premise for discussing the widespread lack of acknowledging race and its role in driving the four local segregating mechanisms I have analyzed in the previous chapters. As already mentioned, references to race and racism were absent from discursive repertoires of explaining the exclusion and segregation of Romani people in each of the five cities. This emerged perhaps most evidently in Pescara. Not only was this visible in authorities’ denial of racism as a problem, but the very notion of “omission” captures the lack of local authorities’ effort toward opposing racist exclusion. Italian expert knowledge on nomadism in the 1970s led to considering urban camps as favorable devices for families deemed “nomadic”; one of the major conditions under which this became possible, as the case of Florence has shown, was ignoring race and racism as some of the guiding principles of that very expert knowledge and those very urban material devices. In Salford, the defense of the “good” citizen and neighbor against the “bad” Romani and Traveller person was predicated upon a racist understanding of the relationships between social/​ethnic groups and space. Yet, references to racism were absent from public discourses. In Cluj, the absence of racism from official explanations and discourses on segregation played out in a partially different way: the causes of racial seclusion, isolation and discrimination were explicitly attributed to Romani people themselves and their allegedly cultural attributes, such as a deficient work ethic. A foremost accent on alleged features of Romani people (“mentality”) that are fixed and innate is not perceived as racial, but as “cultural.” It should also be mentioned that explicit references to racial ascriptions appear differently in Eastern Europe and Western Europe. While in the West hyperculturalization is often at work, through a liberal lens largely constructed by the post-​WWII dismissal of any references to race, in Eastern Europe references to class formation is the medium through which race is generally articulated.3 This issue strictly relates to the East–​West difference I pointed out in the first section –​ while in capitalist Europe, cultural protection remained popular between the 1960s and the early 1990s, class-​based assimilation has been the priority in socialist Europe. This distinction, as explained in Chapter 1, should be partially amended by looking at the underlying racial thinking of expert knowledge and policy in both parts of Europe. As extensively shown in the four empirical chapters, the post-​1989 era accounts for a convergence of the two “Europes,” thus centering race as the pivotal principle of spatial segregation.

Conclusion: defining racial cities In this chapter I have used Ginzburg’s (1989) method of “clues” for detecting correspondences between rationalities of colonial urban rule and local segregating mechanisms in today’s Europe. My analysis accounts for the various

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permutations of race from colonial to contemporary European urban rule –​ from a blatant principle of socio-​spatial organization in the colonies, to a silenced yet equally effective one, structuring cities in contemporary Europe. It is within the historical trajectory of these permutations, I argue, that the genesis and permanence of “Gypsy urban areas” should be understood. As I showed at length, this explanation involves both objective and subjective conditions, tightly connected to each other: the former ingrained in structural economic and political processes, the latter unfolding as perceptions and meanings. The in-​depth examination of precise socio-​spatial formations in their genesis and development was informed by Brenner and Theodore’s (2002, 351) call for “contextual specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emerged neoliberal, market-​oriented restructuring projects at a broad range of geographical scales” (see also Chapter 1). This has also meant heeding Maloutas’ (2012, 3) call for more context-​sensitive and comprehensive analyses of socio-​spatial segregation: Urban segregation is context-​dependent in the sense that its patterns and social impact are determined by the combined effect of mechanisms and institutions involving the market, the state, civil society and the specific and durable shape of local socio-​spatial realities. Theoretical models usually take into account part of this interrelation and, to a large extent, disregard the rest. The multiple correspondences also serve to open up a decentered historical perspective on one specific European social phenomenon: the emergence and persistence of “Gypsy urban areas,” whose logics and mechanisms of formation and maintenance eschew, superficial and generalized analyses. As I have shown, GUAs’ complexity resides primarily in the multiplicity of interconnected social forces, actors and dimensions at work locally –​namely socio-​economic conditions and urban political economy, local politics, local authorities’ “private” views, policies, strategies, media discourses and everyday dynamics of stigmatization. All these, happening within both formal and informal realms of urban politics and life, can be grasped by looking at the local segregating mechanisms they inform, and the specific effects these mechanisms produce. The resemblances between each local segregating mechanism and the three colonial segregating rationales account for legacies of the multiple colony–metropole circulations of various issues, including governance doctrines, physical mobility and its representations, and racial structures, and call for keeping the centrality of race in its class and spatial formations squarely in the analysis of urban Europe. In drawing a synthesis of the four case studies within the historical and theoretical framework I offered in Chapter 1, in this chapter I have sketched an approximation of a vaguely coherent system of social forces converging locally to ensure the spatial segregation of Romani people. GUAs become from this perspective

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the “nodes” of a web that expands oversees and back in history, to include colonized cities of the European empire. The systemic force behind this web, as I argued throughout, is race. Stemming from these considerations, I define racial cities as cities in which racially connoted material (political, economic, spatial) and subjective (representational) structures ensure the perpetuation of racial segregation. The varied interconnectedness of racial cities across space and time makes the concept not only heuristic descriptively, but also analytically, inasmuch as it allows detecting correspondences between colony and metropole as well as between different cities today. Racial cities can indeed be considered racist cities and, in contemporary Europe, raceless cities, following the analysis I proposed in this chapter. Emphasizing their “racial” structures and dynamics, and not directly their multiple racist outcomes (e.g. policies, discourses, districts, settlements, etc.) serves to highlight the social force and the logic behind socio-​spatial concentration, separation, isolation and segregation, as well as their historicity. The ultimate goal, as it will emerge in the following chapter, is to propose counter-perspectives, to inspire anti-​racist strategies and to imagine race as an inclusive principle of equality. Racial cities also suggest that it could be possible to talk about one distinctive social formation prototypically named “The racial city.” While well grounded, this hypothesis should probably be backed up by studies on cases other than the formation and perpetuation of GUAs in urban Europe. Hence, I prefer to keep the concept in a plural form, in order to point at the high contextual variety and variability of the mechanisms and dynamics through which race shapes urban socio-​spatial arrangements. Keeping it in plural form also allows the concept to eschew easy commodification –​a tendency which typifies many academic catchwords these days. While “the racial city” remains a working hypothesis, it is important not to consider the segregation of Romani people as the only or as an exceptional racial phenomenon in contemporary urban Europe. In the next chapter I will therefore unpack the discussion about race and racelessness in Europe from a global perspective, by pointing at how racial inequalities and partitioning are continuously maintained beyond the case of GUAs. Looking at European racial urbanities from such a global perspective, and building on the analysis of racial cities, I will suggest, opens a space for viewing contemporary European cities through a postcolonial lens.

Notes 1 For the sake of readability, I will omit the adjective “colonized” when mentioning the three colonized cities. 2 See for instance Clough Marinaro (2009) about the case of Rome. 3 For instance, the territorial stigmatization of Northern Sofia as made of “black spots,” with particular reference to “Roma neighborhoods” (Hirt 2012, 100).

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Chapter 7

Conclusion

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Beyond segregation?

If we are to move beyond racism we shall have, in the end, to move beyond current racial identities. (Anthony Kwame Appiah 1994, 55)

By taking stock of the four segregating mechanisms in Chapter 6, I underlined the power of race –​and its immediate extension, racism –​in structuring a number of European cities, allowing neoliberal statecraft to perpetuate racial domination in almost complete silence regarding its formation. Racelessness, in short, can be viewed as the politics of inherited reflexes of silence and oblivion that, moving from their irreflexive stance, suppresses insurgent race-​ aware politics. As such, racelessness is constantly in the making, a continuous confirmation of its own stance, identity, belonging, roots, whiteness: a doxa. The internalization of goodness coincides with the externalization of sinfulness, blaming the racially deemed for their own social conditions as they themselves represent a crack in the system of purity: ultimately, squaring the circle of bright-​looking white social order. A decentered and decentering gesture uncovering the politics and deep-​rooted roles of race in structuring local socio-​spatial arrangements, therefore, is both an analytical and a political necessity. Disclosing the fundamental racial common ground of statecraft and urban-​spatial configurations provides a crack in a system of dominant racist racelessness –​a silent fracture, certainly “impure,” partial and provisional; a committed effort, at the same time, toward proposing an alternative perspective on the urban, the social and by extension the political. This chapter tries to unpack this perspective, and argues that in order to go beyond segregation it is necessary to engage political anti-​racism. In Appiah’s statement in the epigraph to this chapter, I emphasized the words “in the end.” His exhortation requires a far longer discussion than what I can provide here, but those three words, “in the end,” capture its relevance for this book –​moving beyond spatio-​racial segregation can actually not be done, I maintain, by moving beyond racial identities, because the end is yet to be reached. My discussion of the four local segregating mechanisms in Chapter 6 showed that this is still the beginning –​if it is a beginning at all –​of

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understanding the extent to which race organizes today’s European urban societies. The extent to which segregation is not only politically and culturally decided and planned as the least detrimental alternative, but purposely enacted, maintained and reinforced as the best way of maintaining social order, hygiene, civility and cohesion is largely still unknown. GUAs provide an example, a case for discussing the fact that European cities are fully part of racist mechanisms of domination. Therefore, racial identities and structural forces should squarely remain in the primary focus of politics, analyses and actions. This is necessary perhaps primarily because in Europe –​unlike the US, to which Appiah actually refers –​the focus on race has been washed off unproblematically in the aftermath of the first half of the century’s genocidal policies, as discussed in the previous chapter. Appiah’s exhortation also offers grounds for better positioning the analysis and argument of this book. The philosopher does not aim to get away with race tout court, but only with “current racial identities” (my italics). Race cannot be swept away, the philosopher seems to warn, because it constitutes dispositions in such a deep and unreflexive way that moving away would essentially equal oblivion. This would entail forgetting the centuries during which race has invariably been crafted as a social force and conspicuously nurtured along with social injustice in various forms, including slavery and segregation –​its co-​constituting nature, alongside capitalism, of the social in its everyday, local and global dimensions. What Appiah suggests is rather not to limit our understanding of the social world to a matter of race, or sexual orientation or religion: [I]‌t is crucial to remember always that we are not simply black or white or yellow or brown or gay or straight or bisexual, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Confucian: but we are also brothers and sisters; parents and children; liberals, conservatives, and leftists […] (Appiah 1994, 134) This point allows clarification of how my analysis has prioritized a different angle, which makes it bound to the centrality of race. Rather than focusing on forms of identification such as “Romani people” or “Romaness,” my unit of analysis throughout has been urban territories, segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas”: their genesis, organization, rationales, dynamics and forces that transnationally and translocally (as well as transhistorically) converge in numerous ways to keep various groups of households in socio-​spatially segregated and stigmatized conditions. In doing so, I have uncovered race as the chief condition under which segregation is perpetuated. Rather than starting from forms of identification and analyzing their socially shared values and relevance, as Appiah has done deductively, I started from stigmatized and segregated spatial units and phenomenologically “studied up” the varying forms, mechanisms and strategies

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of power in crafting and maintaining these conditions. The relevance of the racial dimension has thus emerged inductively, rather than deductively. Having positioned the analysis of Racial Cities in its wider epistemological context, it is time to point at its value for research and practice. In the following I will propose a move toward postcolonial urbanisms in Europe and its implications in fighting racism and segregation. As Bhabha (1994, 163) aptly noted, It is crucial to remember that the colonial construction of the cultural (the site of the civilizing mission) through the process of disavowal is authoritative to the extent to which it is structured around the ambivalence of splitting, denial, repetition. The definition of “authoritative” can here expand to include “powerful.” In this light, the “ambivalence of splitting, denial, repetition” that colonial-​like forms of urban governance enact upon segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” in contemporary Europe shows the importance of understanding the logic and founding principle behind these processes. Race, as I have shown, emerges as this logic and funding principle, and therefore its centrality should be acknowledged not only out of analytical rigor, but also in view of envisaging horizons of change –​the splitting, in Bhabha’s words, of the urban space, and by either extension or proxy, the splitting of the “ethnic” imaginary of belonging anchored in the “us versus them” trope; the denial of any racial connotation in the process of splitting, and finally the repetition of the same process over and over, largely induced by that very denial and its concomitant depoliticization of socio-​economic deprivation and more generally urban marginality. There seems to be a nexus between the postcolonial condition and the segregation of Romani people in Europe. On this premise, it is necessary to widen the focus and look at today’s global circulations for understanding the context within which to position European racial cities. Since approximately the end of the fifteenth century and the first colonial projects, race has increasingly become a major principle regulating, while fabricating, human diversity (Goldberg 1993b). Hence, its power spans several social dimensions and contexts, primarily sustained by economic arrangements of capitalist exploitation. As Winant (2004, 134–​135, my italics) lucidly argues: Today soy cultivation in Brazil, oil extraction in Cabinda and the Ogoni region, and labor practices in Ciudad Juarez, Jakarta, or Calcutta are matters of concern in corporate headquarters in St. Louis and New York, as well as on Wall Street and at IMF headquarters in Washington. Northern involvement in southern “independent” countries’ environmental, social,

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and labor policies and practices has created  –​or perhaps I  should say reproduced  –​a worldwide pattern of employment discrimination, violence, morbidity, impoverishment, pollution, and unequal exchange that shares a great deal with its colonial antecedents. This global system of social stratification correlates very well with racial criteria: the darker your skin is, the less you earn; the shorter your life span, the poorer your health and nutrition, the less education you can get. (Winant 2004, 134–​135) This global correlation of race and class (better, race through class) speaks explicitly to segregation. Racial segregation, as hinted at in Chapter 1, is a global phenomenon with firm roots in colonial experimental practices and doctrines, which have radically informed the making of the modern state (Goldberg 2002). This historically global condition, as well as the multiple context-​dependent correspondences between contemporary GUAs in Europe and segregation rationales in colonized cities, suggest that contemporary urban Europe is shaped, to a varying extent according to its localities and dimensions, by the colonial past. In this sense, I maintain that a space can be opened to reflect on multiple European postcolonial urbanisms. The “postcolonial” condition of Europe should not be seen as simply a temporal one –​it is not the chronological aspect of it which is of interest here. Rather, the prefix “post” should index, as Brown (2010, 21) explained, a formation that is temporally after but not over that to which it is affixed. “Post” indicates a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on the contrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with this past. In other words, we use the term “post” only for a present whose past continues to capture and structure it. Understood as such, the postcolonial allows us to keep the continuous work of colonial experimentations of forms of knowledge, practices, ideas, dispositions, as well as artifacts and physical arrangements, especially the built environment, firmly in focus for analyzing contemporary European urbanisms. GUAs may well be seen as one particular form of European postcolonial urbanism, much in line with other forms and articulations of postcolonial urbanism in Europe and beyond. In other words, an approach to urban Europe from a global perspective can lead to understanding Europe as a site of postcolonial entanglements and tensions in which the varying connections between territoriality and race-​through-​class play a prominent role. This decentering move toward the postcolonial, I claim, is one of the ways for politics to gain prominence in debates and actions addressing inequalities and marginality in European (urban) societies and beyond.

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For the European city yet to come One way of posing the question of how to (re)imagine European cities within this global hierarchical order is to focus critically on the position from which the question is posed. If the postcolony has been the site of reimagining practices and theories of liberation and projects of emancipation, (re) imagining Europe as a postcolonial setting requires a continuous awareness of positionality: can the former colonizer be named postcolonial? Perhaps a more operational question: how can and should the former colonizer transform itself in order to enact and leave space for expressions of liberation and actions of emancipation? One possible answer includes a move from the tendency of “homogenizing exclusion and exclusivity to the [tendency] toward heterogenizing openness and incorporation, social engagement and shaping to reflect the interests and conceptions of all” (Goldberg 2002, 242). Hence, rather than beyond race, which would equal “racelessness,” and rather than “beyond current racial identities” (Appiah 1994), the challenge is how to reshape race as a principle of equality and as a space of justice in and beyond Europe. Historicizing race, as critical race theories do (and as I have done throughout), shows how race is constructed –​hence, how race can be reshaped, remodeled and reordered. Cities are historically privileged sites in which struggles for equality and justice have been taking place (along with –​ surely –​violence and injustice): one way of translating the “right to the city” into a postcolonial and race-​conscious act in Europe, may imply to first take distance from Eurocentric standpoints of classic analysis of European cities such as those by Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Walter Benjamin. The stake is about provincializing European cities as a critical counter-​movement to colonial Europeanization of urbanity globally. From here, the idea I would like to convey is about a postcolonial theory of European cities, which would start from addressing Roy’s (2011a, 31) claim that “[a]‌postcolonial theory of cities must be concerned with geographies of knowledge and articulation of subject-​power,” as well as Ong’s (2011, 2) related observation that “[h]egemonic theories of globalization and postcoloniality have long inspired a conceptual terra firma of generalizable global spaces” (see also Bhambra 2014). Eurocentric standpoints are as such hegemonic, as we have seen in Chapter 1, building on centuries of hierarchized arrangements in which the “upper,” deemed better North is opposed to a deemed “lower,” worse South, and, directly linked, the “better” West opposed to the “worse” East (Boatcă 2006; Böröcz and Kovács 2001; Melegh 2006; Todorova 1997). The challenge then may be to proceed intersectionally across the multiple global geopolitical and culturalist splittings, North–​South and East–​West, by relying on urban analyses that link micro and macro dimensions both synchronically and diachronically. Robinson’s (2006) notion of “ordinary cities” is one way of proceeding toward this challenge. Taking distance from urban theories which, more

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or less explicitly, establish hierarchies of importance between large and “famous” urban hubs on one hand and smaller, more peripheral cities on the other, the author proposes to consider all cities as ordinary. This would enlarge “the scope of imagination about possible futures for cities. This is as true for cities declared ‘global’ as for those that have fallen off the map of urban studies” (Robinson 2006, 110). The racial cities I have discussed in this book can be seen as “ordinary cities” –​they are normal cities, which are imbricated in racial segregation in an everyday way. Segregation’s ordinariness is possibly a further element allowing depoliticization and racelessness to remain in place: eschewing strong media attention, beside local media chronicles, GUAs remain usually hidden from national policy agendas and debates. As discussed in Chapter 1, the relatively uncontested effectiveness of racial thinking, practice and socio-​spatial arrangements typifying GUAs is primarily related to the deep-​rooted and powerful history of racialist knowledge and racist policy addressing Romani people in Europe, predicated upon the links between the various and variable discourses of vagrancy, poverty and morality. What I suggest by reference to Robinson’s (2006) work is that the twenty-​ first century’s working of race in urban Europe, along with being ensured and elicited by widespread blindness to its presence, finds a particularly suitable condition in the ordinariness of its urban manifestations. Uncovering urban ordinariness, I suggest, contributes to uncovering and understanding the specific mechanisms and politics of race(lessness); this move is possible, provided global inequalities between and within cities remain squarely in focus as the background –​and foreground –​of analytical and practical endeavors. After considering positionality and urban ordinariness as two desirable elements for reimagining European cities, I would like to discuss one specific analytical lens through which to look at the postcolonial condition of European cities with specific reference to GUAs. Roy (2011b) proposes to go beyond a postcolonial celebration of “the subaltern,” which in urban studies tends to romanticize what she terms “slumdog cities.” Instead, the geographer aptly proposes to make use of four emerging concepts: urban informality, gray spaces, peripheries and zones of exceptions. These concepts comprise a number of “constitutive outsides,” meaning “an outside that by being inside introduces a ‘radical undecidability’ to the analysis of urbanism” (Roy 2011b, 235, emphasis added). What is remarkable is that these four concepts fit, to different extents, some or all of the five segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” I have discussed throughout. Among the four concepts, informality is the one I have not extensively unpacked, and yet it plays out at various levels in the five racial cities. The cases of Pescara and Cluj, for example, show how governance practices are largely predicated upon deep-​ rooted representations, either rather directly (as in the 2010 eviction in Cluj) or mostly indirectly (as in the politics of omission in Pescara).1 Besides urban informality, “Gray spaces,” “peripheries” and “zones of exceptions” are also conducive to establishing analytical bridges between GUAs and urban forms

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and processes in the Global South; for example, between European camps for Romani people (campi nomadi and villages d’insertion) as zones of exceptions, and camps for Bedouins and Mizrahim in Israel (Katz 2015), as well as governance dynamics in refugee camps in the West Bank (Pasquetti 2015); or, again, between multiple displacements and evictions in contemporary Romania and state-​planned displacement operations in South Africa (Samara 2011) and Brazil (Caldeira 2000). Roy’s proposed conceptual architecture also allows connections within Europe –​for example, between dynamics of territorial stigmatization in Pescara’s stigmatized “Gypsy neighborhood” and state criminalization of people of color in Paris (Fassin 2013; Keaton 2006). These linkages across cities and their peripheries may allow the rethinking of Global North–​South and European East–​West connections, offering perspectives from which to examine instances of circulations and borrowings between the (former) colonizer North and the (post)colonized South. These can in turn be seen as examples of globally “connected sociologies” (Bhambra 2014) of ordinary European urbanism, which, as I discussed, requires a reflexive and decentering move, at once theoretical and political, from Eurocentrism to postcolonialism, as an extension of Catherine Hall’s (2002, 9) claim which I quoted as the epigraph to the Introduction: “In order to understand the specificity of national [and urban] formations, we have to look outside it.” Studies on European cities, as also hinted at in the Introduction, however, largely embrace another perspective –​they substantially rely on Max Weber’s historical work on Medieval and early modern urban formations whose genesis is identified with the birth of Western democracy. Weber’s account essentially overlooks colonialism and its contribution to the wealth of European nation-​states, including their cities. While an emerging sense of going beyond (methodological) nationalism through a focus on cities is explicit (e.g. Glick-​Schiller and Çağlar 2011), contemporary studies on urban Europe do not seem to distance themselves from a Eurocentric stance; moreover, with a few exceptions, they equate European cities with Western European cities, largely ignoring the presence of Eastern Europe (see Introduction). A decentered and decentering perspective on urban Europe across the North–​ South and East–​West divides is therefore an important task. And yet, without a reflexive awareness of both past and present connections across this twofold divide, it does not seem probable that we will get to a full understanding of a number of current phenomena. One of these phenomena involves the experiences of youth of color in Europe. The often-​ used expression “second-​ generation immigrants” (or “third-​generation immigrants”) fixes millions of people living in Europe in a rather timeless dimension of otherness whereby, even if they were born in Europe, they are deemed to remain mobile subjects, by extension restless and therefore never fully belonging. “European others,” as El-​Tayeb (2011) discusses at length, are continually being produced by Europe’s dominant cultural and legal conceptions of polity, citizenship and belonging, chiefly

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predicated upon colonial conceptions of personhood, which extends to that of population as separable by “ethnicity.” The overwhelming accent on ethnicity, as the author suggests, obfuscates the very material conditions that constantly shape the process of belonging, identification and participation –​for example, it leaves out of the picture the socio-​economic conditions that drive workers, older people and children to leave their places of living for seeking better chances in Europe. The constraining power of legal structures is also, for example, the case of the concept of allochtonen in the Netherlands, which means “nonnative,” irrespective of nationality, citizenship, or birthplace. The concept clearly builds (on) racial thinking because any non-​white person can legally be considered allochtonen. Underneath this concept, there is the idea that “decisions to preserve national identity and protect national interest can overlap with the protection of natives and can therefore not be made with or in the presence of nonnatives” (Nimako and Small 2009, 226). A global perspective on the social conditions of European “others,” as El-​ Tayeb (2011) suggests, takes into account the global dimension of inequalities and its racial underpinnings.

Urban research and practice My analysis of the genesis and persistence of segregated and stigmatized “Gypsy urban areas” adds up to these multiple studies of at once symbolic and material racial structures shaping urban life across the “old continent.” Throughout the book, I have not proposed a theory of European cities, but I have pointed out the importance of considering race in its various articulations for understanding contemporary Europe. Nor have I suggested that the working of race is the only factor shaping urban arrangements, but rather that ignoring race is likely to help those arrangements become less and less clear, and therefore ever more crystallized as societal norms, in this way risking reducing, ultimately, the room for alternatives and social change. As explained in the Introduction, race is not easy to capture in its entirety, especially in its everyday subtle, hidden and varied manifestations. Articulated through the different prisms of ethnicity, gender, religion, and class, moreover, race does not allow the analysis to transcend contextual peculiarities. In her ethnography among a group of Muslim girls in Paris, Keaton (2006, 88), for instance, underlines how “lived experiences have taught racially inferiorized groups that ‘race’ cannot be discounted in such encounters. Not knowing with certainty if treatment is ‘race’-​driven attests to the insidiousness of the social reality of race.” Urban life’s complexity and often contradictory expressions add up to the post-​1945 abandonment of any analytical gaze on the racial structures and racist expressions of European societies. This partial conclusion may, as such, encourage a dynamic approach to spatial segregation, not exclusively in Europe. Understanding race as a subtle and changing social force leads to considering material and symbolic spatial

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distributions, concentrations and separations as dynamic phenomena, and focusing on their continuous making. Among them, segregation –​if viewed as a process with a genesis, a series of dynamics and a complex and changing logic that is structured around local knowledge and experiences –​requires an open-​ended and in-​depth approach, along with historical imagination, genealogically linking the past and the present in view of contextualizing and illuminating contemporary, often invisible logics and dynamics. So understood, the study of segregation in European cities and beyond can uncover fundamental issues and provide detailed knowledge on how in certain given contexts segregation starts, unfolds and changes; this approach can ultimately contribute to complementing the literature focusing on the levels of spatial segregation, its characteristics and longitudinal developments (see Introduction). Such a dynamic and in-​depth approach of segregating mechanisms in Europe will also allow particularly meaningful comparisons and linkages with segregation anywhere, including where modern-​day segregation was first imposed, that is, the colonial world. There may however be a certain easy appeal to generating analytical connections and comparisons globally, by using expressions such as “apartheid,” for instance, to describe the spatial segregation of Romani people in contemporary Europe; this generalization may lead to obfuscating not only the specificities of segregating mechanisms at work within and around GUAs, but also and more generally the very contemporaneousness of forms of racial exclusion and domination in the “old continent,”2 including racelessness and depoliticization –​ two factors which played a relatively marginal role during the almost fifty years of institutional segregation in South Africa. Similarly, establishing links between the “Gypsy camp” and the ghetto without evidence concerning parallel institutional structures inside the “Gypsy camp” may lead to appealing evocations which tend to overlook peculiar forms of socio-​spatial isolation and its mechanisms of reproduction.3 What is rather needed, as I have argued throughout, is a focus on the obvious and subtle ways in which segregation, isolation, separation, enclosure and so on are shaped and reshaped in practice. Apart from providing a comprehensive understanding of Europe and its urban formations, a race-​conscious and context-​sensitive research (and teaching) agenda is able to bridge academic knowledge and other forces of social change, including social movements. Stemming from the political constitution of race, its political–economic genesis as both a modern capitalist ideology and a Western system of hierarchical classification and domination, stressing the relevance of race today implies stressing the relevance of politics in a wider sense –​from multiple social struggles for social justice to decision-​ making processes, both in public and private institutions, all the way to everyday social relations. Going beyond segregation, I argue, requires a politics of social justice, which acknowledges the working of race as a major social force shaping relationships, thinking and institutions. Appiah’s epigraph to this chapter, then, probably deserves a major rethinking by firmly stressing

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the words “in the end”; if we adopt a radically decentered perspective for looking at European postcolonial urbanism, the erasure of racial identities, while desirable in theory, seems more a distraction than a necessity. An awareness of the importance of keeping race firmly in focus comes from Romani anti-​racist activism over the last thirty years. While the raceless discourse of Human Rights has prevailed among pro-​Romani groups and associations, especially, yet not only, in Eastern and Central Europe, other Romani voices have emerged, building their claims on rather contrasting grounds, such as critical race, feminist and postcolonial theories (see Trehan and Kocze 2009). Alongside legal struggles such as those carried out by the European Roma Rights Centre, social and political engagement may find inspiration in postcolonial and decolonial experiences and narrations. Another key motive of this book has been the role of governance, especially urban governance, in shaping local segregating mechanisms. Feldman (2011) suggests that policies contribute to a large extent to inform the limits of the acceptable interpretations of social reality. Hence, reimagining European cities in terms of ordinary and race-​conscious urbanity may also contribute to more race-​conscious policymaking and governance processes. The essential condition, I want to suggest, is moving away from a depoliticized and merely “technical” approach to policy-​making and instead embracing a political agenda with anti-​racism as a priority. One example of such a “technical” approach with regard to Romani populations is the EU Framework for National Integration Strategies up to 2020, whose main rationale rests exclusively on economic benefit. Why, one may dare to ask, if the “inclusion” of Romani people is so economically advantageous, has it not yet been reached? These merely technical approaches to deep-​rooted, varied and complex social issues, whose origins –​as I have discussed throughout –​go back for centuries and include overseas domination, seem unlikely to achieve substantial results. Instead, confronting privilege and power that is embodied in the racial structure of European democratic institutions and societies may be the first step toward acknowledging its historical genesis and therefore to engaging national policies of reparations of colonial injustice, linking them politically to the “exclusion” of Romani people. This would then entail a recognition of the legacy of empires in the contemporary migration and minority policy of affluent countries, leading to a rethinking of the boundaries and mechanisms of citizenship. Since the 1999 African World Reparations and Reparation Truth Commission request to former colonizing countries to pay 777 trillion USD within five years, political will for reparations across Europe has not been raised. And still, can a politics of race-​conscious justice be possible, one may ask, without first engaging in reparation programs? Would that not be a necessary first step in the construction of anti-​racist politics, which would lay the groundwork for going beyond spatial segregation? Would it not be a first step for opposing depoliticization and racelessness?

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In two of the four case studies in this book, Florence (Chapter 4) and Cluj-​Napoca (Chapter 2), regional and local authorities actually engaged in debates and politically deliberated on policies vis-​à-​vis a number of Romani families living in precarious socio-​ economic conditions. However, those policies were never presented as political decisions, but as necessary technical measures tackling deemed “objective” “social problems.” Although embedded in political processes, those measures were fully depoliticized. In the case of campi nomadi in Florence, as discussed in Chapter 6, left-​wing regional politicians decided to take action only when citizens organized protests in their neighborhood against the Romani people living in precarious conditions. Hence, the regional council did not take a political position, but merely responded to public disorder in the streets. The policy process, then, relied entirely on “experts of nomadism,” whose knowledge was predicated upon positivist psychological stances on “nomadism” as inherited restlessness. As a consequence, the hyperculturalized notion of “nomads” uncritically entered the policy vocabulary and became the grounding principle for planning camps as the only housing policies for Romani families in the late 1980s. Thus, although technically going through a political process of council debates and deliberation, camp policies were implemented as urgent and temporary measures for tackling public disorder: while justified as social security provision for “nomadic” urban poor, moreover, the camps’ real rationale –​ which became explicit in the early 1990s –​was guaranteeing social control and urban security through police monitoring and actions (Chapter 4). The case of Cluj (Chapter 2) is similar in that the 2010 eviction and relocation policy was officially a reaction to an issue of public (hygiene) security, which was presented in terms of contrasting with civility and progress rather than being part of political agendas. Officially, the eviction was a solution to a hygiene threat. The two policies also share a fundamental institutional approach –​the absence of Romani people in the decision-​making process, which shows additional resemblances with colonial rules. As I have pointed out elsewhere (Picker 2013b), this is one of the most common features of policies addressing Romani people at any governance scale in Europe. In Romania, for example, where the National Agency for Roma (ANR) is officially supposed to consult public authorities at the national and regional levels on matters concerning Romani people, substantial consultations with ANR are de facto avoided, as was the case with the 2010 Cluj eviction. In Italy, no such body has ever existed –​since the 1960s, “experts” on nomadism, who are rigorously non-​ Romani people, have preferred to remain in the spotlight as policy advisers without leaving space for Romani people. In the case of Florence, the importance of involving Romani people and groups in the decision-​making process is proven by the involvement of Romani families in consultations with a local think tank in the early 1990s, which provided first-​hand data for drafting the second regional law but nevertheless kept the hyperculturalized idiom of

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nomadism introduced by the previous law. From these considerations, it may be concluded that until race and racism become a priority in political agendas on marginalized groups, especially stigmatized minorities, it will be difficult to move beyond segregation. Due to the very political constitution of race, adopting self-​declared apolitical and merely “technical” measures seem unable to go beyond segregation. The political sources for a move from technicalities to politics, a move which is epistemic prior to institutional, may come from a critical reading of colonial experiences and the global history of anti-​colonial and decolonial social struggles; from anti-​apartheid and anti-​Jim Crow strategies; as well as from a redirection of leftist projects across Europe. When it comes to racism, and conterminously sexism, classism and ageism, several projects of the left fail to take a firm progressive stance. Rather, discourses and actions often oscillate between benevolent (often paternalistic) tolerance and inflexibility about the legal responsibility of the racially deemed. Rarely the power differential articulated through class between the racially deemed and the majority becomes the core of the debate. And indeed, programs often labeled “cultural” or “multicultural” are often designed by the self-​ascribed “raceless” majority in the hope that “minorities” will get along. The problem, therefore, remains.

Archives This perspective leads me to propose an endeavor that during my research I have come to consider somewhat fundamental for thinking through while practicing anti-​racism and anti-​segregation: the making of archives documenting various forms of exclusions and expulsions. I view an archive, following Hall (2001, 89), “not [as] an inert museum of dead works, but [as] a ‘living archive,’ whose construction must be seen as an ongoing, never-​completed project.” I especially refer to those “living archives” that would capture the ongoing subtleties of racelessness, its silences as well as its loud (albeit rarely so) claims for necessity, neutral naturality and its overarching self-​fulfilling prophecies. Understanding these subtleties and showcasing their capillary diffusion, popularity and complex mechanisms is what I have learned is a compelling need. By documenting multiple situated mechanisms, dynamics and histories concerning one single phenomenon, this book, as I indicated in the Introduction, aims to become one such archive. In assonance with Stoler (2009), who delved into different archives in order to uncover and deconstruct the racial and sexual anxieties underpinning colonial rule in the Dutch Indies, one type of archive I refer to here are constructive mémoires of colonialism for directing today’s politics of anti-​racism. Indeed, such archives seem to best embody the perspective of this book –​the continuous circulations and borrowings between colony and metropole and their presence and impact in today’s Europe. There seems to be a growing sense, in post-​2008-​crisis Europe, of the necessity to go beyond Eurocentric

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perspectives on several issues, especially migration and asylum. One example of such archives is the recently launched Italian project Immaginari Postcoloniali (“Postcolonial Archives”), an “affective” archive of family objects relating to the colonial past, with the aim of connecting the colonial past with the current European presence of people from former colonies: “We are here because you were there” could be the epigraph of the entire project (Small 2009). Archivi Postcoloniali will host objects –​in print, sculpture and many other forms –​that speak of Italian colonialism in any way. After being photographed or scanned, the objects will be displayed online along with the family stories, ties and affective values that they embody, connecting in this way private and public spheres across generations and political eras. These archives will then serve as platforms for artists, scholars and students to develop projects of different sorts, such as contributing to education curricula and academic knowledge as well as to exhibitions. Why, then, not make Archivi Postcoloniali a transnational and possibly transurban project? Another example is the series of organized city tours of the signs of European colonial domination that are left on today’s urban spaces, for instance in Amsterdam and Berlin. In Amsterdam, the “Black Heritage Tour” takes participants through the city, both by bus and on foot, exposing and explaining the often-​overlooked signs that speak of the Dutch empire –​ for example, the black faces cast in buildings’ façades, or the houses of former colonial traders. In Berlin, the Postkoloniale Stadtfuehrung combines the awareness of the colonial past, as visible in the city’s landscape, with the current struggle to change the names of streets that were named after state colonial authorities. In the “African Neighborhood” (Afrikanische Viertel) in the district of Wedding, the tours combine historical information about Germany’s domination in West Africa –​in particular, the experimentations of the first concentration camps in Hereroland (present-​day Namibia, see Chapter 1) –​with explanations as to why certain street names have to go. Swakopmunderstrasse, for example, is a street named after a West African town, Sakopmund, where a number of concentration camps, where the Herero were kept, operated from 1904 to 1908. Here again, opening up this initiative to establishing networks of postcolonial urban tours may be one way of engaging in practice, by contributing to the redesigning of European cities. This book has sought to be another such archive, the politics of which seeks to decenter urban Europe while centering race and its effects on urban partitioning and life. The perspective that this book has held for such an endeavor revolves around urbanity as a pivotal dimension of modernity. Through a series of historical and ethnographic approximations, the discussion has shown how European racial urbanities inhabit the way in which segregating arrangements and dynamics are secured and rendered neutral, spatially and culturally; the way housing and planning policy –​more comprehensively, dwelling –​is rendered self-​evident and, in its immediately tangible, visible

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nature, necessary; and finally, the way material and virtual connectivities are established, turned into “common goods,” and their infrastructural materiality celebrated. Uncovering these multiple urban dynamics means looking at them as sites in which urban racial divides are made not only tangible, but also durable. Materiality, spatiality and visibility –​mutually interlinked and occurring simultaneously –​constitute perhaps the very kernel of the dominant form of urban modernity. Since such a form is historically a quintessentially European product, multiple efforts are needed for excavating what this production has suppressed and is still able to suppress; for organizing this material in archives; and for making these archives not only publicly available, but also relevant for current and future politics. European urbanities need to reimagine and reshape themselves, and recognizing “racial cities” –​a possibly disquieting expression for some, especially in Europe; a relieving trope for others, in Europe and beyond –​can be a powerful starting point.

Notes 1 On informality in Pescara, see Picker (2016); on informality in Montreuil, see Picker (2017). 2 I refer here to the tendency toward “allochronism” as explained by Fabian (1983). 3 As Powell (2012) demonstrates, in the “Gypsy camp” in the UK, the only missing element of Wacquant’s analytic of the ghetto is exactly “parallel institutions.” My research in Florence (in Turin too, see Picker and Roccheggiani 2014) confirms this finding, which is the reason why I consider “the Gypsy camp” as more heuristically linked to colonial camps for civilians than to the Jewish ghetto. Similar to Powell (2012), Clough Marinaro (2015), drawing on Wacquant’s theory, suggests that Italian urban camps for Romani people can be viewed as “neo-​ghettos” –​encapsulating urban devices which resemble sixteenth-​century Jewish ghettos but lack the issue of internal solidarity.

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166 References Picker, Giovanni. 2012. “Territori postcoloniali ai limiti. I campi per rom in Italia e Francia tra doxa e storia,” in E. Ceva and A. E. Galeotti (eds), Lo spazio del rispetto. Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 194–​216. Picker, Giovanni. 2011. “Welcome ‘in’: Left-​wing Tuscany and Romani Migrants (1987–​2007),” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16 (5): 620–​670. Picker, Giovanni. 2010. “Nomads’ Land? Political Cultures and Nationalist Stances vis-​ à-​vis Roma in Italy,” in M. Rövid and M. Stewart (eds), Multidisciplinary Approaches to Romany Studies. Budapest: Central European University Press, 211–​227. Picker, Giovanni and Silvia Pasquetti. 2015. “Durable Camps: The State, The Urban, The Everyday,” City 19 (5): 681–​688. Picker, Giovanni, Margaret Greenfields and David Smith. 2015. “Colonial Refractions: The Gypsy Camp as a Spatio-​Racial Political Technology,” City 19 (5): 741–​752. Picker, Giovanni and Gabriele Roccheggiani. 2014. “Abnormalising Minorities: The State and Expert Knowledge Addressing the Roma in Italy,” Identities:  Global Studies in Culture and Power 21 (2): 185–​201. Pistilli, Carlo. 1966. “Gli Zingari d’Abruzzo,” Lacio Drom 3: 15–​18. Plésiat, Mathieu. 2010. Les Tsiganes. Paris: L’Harmattan. Pogány, István. 2004. The Roma Café: Human Rights and the Plight of the Romani People. London: Pluto Press. Powell, Ryan. 2012. “Loïc Wacquant’s ‘Ghetto’ and Ethnic Minority Segregation in the UK: The Neglected Case of Gypsy-​Travellers,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 37 (1): 115–​134. Préteceille, Edmond. 2009. “Has Ethno-​Racial Segregation Increased in the Greater Paris Metropolitan Area?” Revue française de sociologie 3 (50): 489–​520. Rabinow, Paul. 1989. French Modern:  Norms and Forms of the Social Environment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rahola, Federico. 2003. “La forme-​camp. Pour une généalogie des lieux de transit et d’internement du présent,” Cultures & Conflits 68: 31–​50. Regione Toscana. 1987. Proposta di legge 175 concernente Interventi per la tutela dell’etnia ‘rom’. Presentata alla Presidenza del Consiglio Regionale della Toscana in data 10.4.1987 [Typescript]. Reitani, Giuseppe. 1986. “Politica territoriale e urbanistica in Tripolitania, 1920–​ 1940,” in A. Mioni (ed.), Urbanistica fascista: Ricerche e saggi sulle città e il territorio e sulle politiche urbane in Italia tra le due guerre. Milan:  Franco Angeli, 219–​234. Robinson, Jennifer. 2016. “Thinking Cities Through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics For A More Global Urban Studies,” Progress In Human Geography 40 (1): 3–​29. Robinson, Jennifer. 2006. Ordinary Cities:  Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge. Roccheggiani, Gabriele. 2013. Come Spighe Tra Granaio E Campo. Lineamenti filosofici-​politici della “questione rom” in Italia. Fano: Aras Edizioni. Ross, Andrew. 2011. “Nothing Gained by Overcrowding: The History and Politics of Urban Population Control,” in Sophie Watson and Gary Bridge (eds), The Blackwell Companion to the City. Oxford: Blackwell, 169–​178. Roy, Ananya. 2011a. “Conclusion:  Postcolonial Urbanism,” in Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (eds), Worlding Cities. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-​Blackwell. Roy, Ananya. 2011b. “Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism,” International Journal Of Urban And Regional Research 35 (2): 223–​238.

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References 167 Said, Edward W. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Samara, Tony Roshan. 2011. Cape Town After Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and its Discontents. New York: New Press. Shahar, Shulamith. 2007. “Religious Minorities, Vagabonds and Gypsies in Early Modern Europe,” in Roni Stauber and Raphael Vago (eds), The Roma: A Minority in Europe. Historical, Political and Social Perspectives. Budapest: Central European University Press. Shore, Cris and Susan Wright. 2011. “Conceptualising Policy: Technologies of Governance and the Politics of Visibility,” in Cris Shore, Susan Wright and Davide Però (eds), Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Sibley, David. 1998. “The Racialization of Space in British Cities,” Sounding 10, Autumn: 119–​127. Sigona, Nando. 2014. “Campzenship: Reimagining the Camp as a Social and Political Space,” Citizenship Studies 19 (1): 1–​15. Simon, Patrick. 2002. “When De-​ segregation Produces Stigmatization. Ethnic Minorities and Urban Policies in France,” in Marco Martinello and B. Piquard (eds), Diversity and the City. Bilbao: University of Deusto, 61–​94. Small, Stephen. 2009. “Introduction: The Empire Strikes Back,” in Darlene Clark Hine, Trica Danielle Keaton and Stephen Small (eds), Black Europe and the African Diaspora. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, xxiii–​xxxviii. Smith, David M. 1996. “The Socialist City,” in Gregory D. Andrusz, Michael Harloe and Iván Szelényi (eds), Cities After Socialism. Oxford: Blackwell, 70–​99. Smith, David M. and Margaret Greenfields. 2013. Gypsies and Travellers in Housing: The Decline of Nomadism. Bristol: The Policy Press. Sokolová, Vera. 2005. “Planned Parenthood behind the Curtain:  Population Policy and Sterilization of Romani Women in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1972–​1989,” The Anthropology of East Europe Review 23 (1), (Spring 2005): 79–​98. Steinmetz, George. 2008. “The Colonial State As A  Social Field:  Ethnographic Capital And Native Policy In The German Overseas Empire Before 1914,” American Sociological Review 73 (4): 589–​612. Stewart, Michael. 2010. “Introduction,” in Michael Stewart and Márton Rövid (eds), Multidisciplinary Approaches to Romany Studies. Budapest:  Central European University Press, 1–​12. Stewart, Michael. 1997. The Time Of The Gypsies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1997. Race and the Education of Desire. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1989. “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31 (1): 134–​161. Szalai, Julia and Viola Zentai (eds). 2014. Faces and Causes of Roma Marginalization in Local Contexts: Hungary, Romania, Serbia. Budapest: Center for Policy Studies, Central European University.

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Index

1960 Caravan Sites and Control Development Act 108, 110 1968 Caravan Sites Act 37, 110, 112–​14, 116, 130 1972 Sterilization Law 37 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 111, 122 Abruzzo 68–​71, 101, 133 activism 151 actually existing neoliberalism 42–​3 Addis Ababa xi, 16, 21, 24, 27–​9, 45, 82, 102, 120, 124–​8, 130–​1, 133 Africa x, 1, 10, 27–​9, 31, 34, 38, 86, 91, 106, 125, 127–​9, 132–​3, 148, 150, 154 Afrikanische Viertel 154 Algeria x, 1, 25 ambivalence 38, 42, 85, 89–​90, 96, 102, 104, 117, 134, 144 anti-​racism 142, 151, 153 archives 16, 18, 93, 153–​5 Babes Bolyai University 54 Badoglio 28 banlieues 6, 92 beaux arts movement 25 Belgrade 65 Bohemians 32 Bosnian War 94 Britain 6, 27, 30–​1, 37, 108–​9, 120, 130; see also United Kingdom (UK) Buenos Aires 45 Bulgaria x, 13, 91 camps for civilians: campi nomadi 85, 102, 133, 152; camps xi, 2, 15, 17, 19, 28, 36, 38, 45, 82, 84–​94, 96–​7, 101–​4, 106, 109–​13, 115–​19, 121–​2,

126–​7, 129–​31, 133, 135–​6, 139, 148, 152, 154–​5; campsites 112, 117, 131; halting sites 39, 87–​8, 90, 109; villages d’insertion 84, 91, 97, 100, 102, 105, 148 Cape Vagrancy Ordinance 31 Casablanca 24, 30 CCTV cameras 97, 116 CIDAMEN 106 citées de transit 105 citizenship 7, 33, 52, 70, 87, 97–​8, 101, 105, 129, 148–​9, 151 civilization 9, 24, 28, 33, 41, 50, 55, 61, 64, 78, 82, 102, 127–​8, 132 Cluj-​Napoca 1, 17, 44, 48–​67, 124, 132–​3, 135, 152 cohesion xii, 4, 14, 17, 39, 103, 107–​24, 130–​1, 143 Colonia noua 53–​4; see also Pata Rât colony: colonial ideology 29, 125, 127; colonial urbanism 23, 25, 45; colonialism x, 7, 13, 16, 22, 29, 41–​2, 60, 125, 128, 133, 138, 148, 153–​4; colonies 9, 14, 21, 23, 32–​5, 40, 45, 47, 55, 89, 91, 134, 137, 140, 154 color-​blind 97–​8 comparison 5–​6, 27, 66, 112, 125 confinement 101 Conrad, Joseph 38 containment xii, 4, 17, 76, 84–​107, 118, 120, 124, 126–​31, 133 cordon sanitaire 25–​6 criminalization 17, 19, 31–​2, 35, 39, 49, 69, 82, 108, 111, 114, 117, 148 Croatia 94 cultural difference xi, 8, 134 cultural preservation 24–​5, 29, 125, 133

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cultural protection 29, 103, 126, 133–​4, 139 culture 33, 42, 60, 82, 110, 127 Czech Republic 13 Davenport, Charles 33–​4 depoliticization 18, 125–​6, 134–​7, 144, 147, 150–​1 displacement xii, 4, 17, 48–​68, 84, 101, 107, 124, 132–​3, 148 Eastern Europe 5–​7, 33, 44, 50, 68, 119, 126, 134, 137, 139, 148 education 7, 31, 37, 41, 49, 51, 59, 64, 72, 88–​9, 93, 100, 105, 132, 145, 154 ethnography 17, 43, 149 eugenics 34, 64 Europe x–​xii, 2–​7, 10–​13, 15–​18, 20–​6, 31–​40, 43–​6, 48, 50, 55, 60–​1, 64–​5, 68, 75, 83–​8, 90, 102–​104, 106–​7, 109–​10, 115, 119, 121, 124–​6, 129, 134–​5, 137–​41, 143–​55 European cities 6–​8, 14, 16, 18, 30, 39–​ 40, 44, 48–​9, 64–​5, 82, 84, 103, 106, 124–​6, 132, 134, 141–​3, 146–​51, 154 European Commission 131 European Union (EU) x, 50, 68, 119 everyday racism x, 13 expert knowledge 32–​3, 36, 46, 87, 90–​1, 96, 102, 104, 115, 126–​7, 136–​7, 139 Fanon, Franz 39, 47–​48, 87 Fascism 45, 105 Fascist politics, 16, 21, 27–​9, 34–​6, 38, 45, 82, 85, 90, 103, 127 Fez 24–​6 Fischer, Eugen 34 Florence xi, 15, 17, 44, 65, 84–​5, 92–​7, 106, 124, 126–​7, 129, 131, 133–​5, 139, 152, 155 foyer migrants 91 France x–​xi, 17, 25, 27, 35–​6, 41, 44, 46, 64, 67, 84, 87–​91, 96–​8, 100, 102–​3, 105, 118, 129, 136 “full blooded Gypsies” 108; see also Gypsy Lore Society gender 8–​10, 49, 113, 121, 132, 149 Germany 25, 36, 46, 95, 104, 106, 154 ghetto 10, 150, 155 Global North 9, 148 Global South 9, 148 Gobineau, Arthur de 32

Goldberg, David Theo 2, 4, 10, 19, 65, 68, 75, 137, 144–​6 governance 1–​2, 13–​15, 17, 21, 37, 43–​6, 61, 70, 80–​1, 85–​6, 92, 96, 102–​6, 112–​13, 117, 120, 125, 127, 129, 133, 140, 144, 147–​8, 151–​2 Grellman, Heinrich 32 Guidi, Ignazio 27, 127 Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment 116 Gypsy camp 17, 19, 37–​8, 46, 65, 84–​5, 87, 96, 101–​4, 106, 112–​16, 118–​19, 129, 131, 150, 155 Gypsy Lore Society 32 “Gypsy neighborhood” 62, 68, 71, 75, 80, 84, 131, 148; see also territorial stigmatization hegemony 29, 125, 133 Herrmann, Antal 33 Herzfeld, Michael 66–​7 Hitler, Adolf x Hungarian 13, 33, 64 hygiene 1, 17, 23, 26–​9, 54–​6, 63–​4, 108, 118, 120, 125, 128, 130–​3, 136, 143, 152 icons 49, 56, 62–​3, 132 imperialism 32 inclusion 14, 18, 26, 76, 81, 89–​90, 97, 102, 105, 109, 119, 122, 151 injustice 36, 136, 143, 151 integration xi, 6, 14, 17, 22, 37, 59, 71, 73–​4, 76, 85, 87, 98–​100, 102–​3, 126–​7, 135, 151 International Federation of Eugenic Organizations 34 International Monetary Fund 42 Italy xi, 17, 27, 36, 44–​6, 64, 68–​71, 84–​5, 87–​8, 90, 92, 96, 101–​6, 118, 127, 136, 152 Jamaica 23 Joseph II, Emperor 33 justice 101, 103, 117, 146, 150 Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics 34; see also Fischer, Eugen Khoikhoi 31 Košice 2 Kosovo 82–​3, 94 Kosovo Force (KFOR) 82

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172 Index Lacio drom. Bimestrale di studi zingari 90 Latin America 45 liberalism 13, 27, 42, 47, 134 local segregating mechanisms 4, 6–​7, 16–​18, 20, 40, 43–​4, 48, 92, 120, 124–​6, 139–​40, 142, 151 Lombroso Cesare, 32 London 27, 29, 128 Lyautey 24–​5, 28 Libya 28, 104 Maria Theresa, Empress 33 Maitrise d’oeuvre urbaine et sociale (MOUS) 97–​100, 102 Madrid 2 Manchester 27, 29, 103, 107, 113, 116, 119 Marrast, Joseph 41 Medina 25, 48, 127 mentalitate 60–​1, 63 Metropole xi, 4, 9, 11, 14–​16, 18–​21, 23–​4, 29–​2, 34–​5, 40, 43–​4, 46–​8, 56, 66, 84–​7, 103–​4, 125, 128–​9, 137, 139–​41, 153 migrants xii, 91, 98–​9, 101, 105–​6, 136 migration 8, 106, 119, 151, 154 Milan 64, 85 mission civilisatrice 127 Mitrovica 82 mixité sociale 96, 105 Montreuil xi, 16–​17, 44, 84–​5, 91, 96–​9, 103, 106, 124, 128–​9, 136, 155 morality 8–​9, 32, 71, 88, 90, 118, 147 moralization of poverty 31 Morocco 24–​5, 27, 41, 127–​8 Mussolini, Benito 27, 38, 132 National Agency for Roma (ANR) 152 Nazi politics 16, 21, 33–​6, 38, 86, 129 necropolitics 83 neoliberal urbanisms 1 neoliberalism 13–​14, 41–​43, 47, 76, 124, 134–​6, 138 New Delhi xi, 16, 21, 24, 26–​9, 64, 120, 124–​5, 128, 130–​3 nomadism 22, 30–​7, 39–​40, 44, 73, 79, 87–​8, 90, 92–​3, 95–​6, 102–​3, 105–​7, 109–​10, 112, 115, 126–​7, 136, 139, 152–​3 nomads 16, 21, 28, 31, 33–​5, 37–​39, 69, 71, 77, 79, 88–​9, 93, 95, 99, 102, 104, 106, 120–​1, 126–​7, 136–​7, 152 Nuremberg Trials 36

Olmatello 94–​6; see also campi nomadi omission xii, 4, 17, 66, 68–​84, 107, 124, 132–​3, 137, 139, 147 Opera Nomadi 88–​90, 93, 102, 104, 126 Organization for Security and Co-​ operation in Europe (OSCE) 51 Orientalism 7 Paris xii, 25, 30, 46, 85, 96, 105, 148–​9 Pata Rât 1, 51–​3, 55–​6, 63, 132 Perth 23 Pescara xi, 17, 44, 68–​70, 73, 75–​6, 78–​9, 81, 83–​4, 87, 101, 122, 124, 131–​3, 135–​6, 139, 147–​8, 155 physical appearance 11, 23, 26, 78 Poderaccio 96; see also campi nomadi police 1, 16–​17, 32, 46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 70–​2, 74–​7, 80–​1, 83–​4, 88, 96, 111, 121, 131–​2, 135–​6, 152 political technology 46, 101–​2, 136 porrajmos 35, 46, 137 postcolonial urbanism 145, 151 postcolonialism 148 poverty 3, 14–​15, 31–​3, 38–​9, 41, 49–​50, 66, 75, 136–​7, 147 Primo Congresso Nazionale di Urbanistica 28 Prost, Henri 25–​6, 30, 127 public policy 18, 58, 68, 77, 114, 119 Rabat xi, 16, 21, 24–​9, 45, 102, 124–​7, 130–​1, 133 race x–​xii, 2–​5, 7–​13, 15–​16, 18–​19, 23, 26, 28–​9, 32–​6, 43, 46, 61–​2, 65, 76, 79, 81–​2, 84–​5, 88, 90, 103–​4, 110, 112, 118, 124–​7, 129, 131, 134, 137–​47, 149–​51, 153–​4 racelessness 18, 121, 125–​6, 134, 137–​8, 141–​2, 146–​7, 150–​1, 153 racial criminalization 82, 114 racial domination 49, 62, 132, 137, 142 racial state, the 2 racialization 3, 80, 104, 129 racism x, 3–​5, 8, 11–​13, 21, 25, 49, 63, 74–​6, 79, 81–​2, 103, 105, 117–​18, 121, 132, 138–​9, 142, 144, 153 Reagan, Ronald 135 reparations 104, 151 Rio de Janeiro 45 Romania x–​xi, 1, 13, 44, 46, 49–​50, 54, 57, 59–​60, 63–​4, 66–​8, 91, 121, 148, 152

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Rome 2, 7, 19, 28, 85, 106, 141 Salford xi, 17, 44, 103, 107, 112–​20, 122, 124, 130–​1, 133–​5, 139 Sarkozy, Nicolas xi segregation xi–​xii, 1–​30, 36, 40, 43–​45, 48–​9, 51–​2, 55, 61–​6, 68, 76, 78, 80, 83–​4, 101–​3, 106–​7, 110, 113–​14, 116, 118, 120, 124–​31, 133–​4, 139–​55 segregation rationales 8, 16, 18, 21–​2, 29, 40, 43–​4, 64, 102, 120, 124–​6, 128–​30, 133–​4, 145 Shoah 35, 137 Slovakia 13 social class 23, 39, 137 social justice 101, 103, 150 social marginality 58, 68–​70, 72–​4, 99, 136 social policy 41, 70, 72, 88, 91, 103, 107, 119 social services 46, 50, 69, 81, 95, 117, 121, 130 Socialism 32, 43, 49, 63 Sofia 2, 141 South Africa 31, 86, 106, 148, 150 space (urban space) 10–​11, 20, 25, 39, 43, 45, 85, 100, 117, 125, 144, 154 state xi–​xii, 1–​2, 6–​7, 9–​10, 14–​16, 19, 21–​3, 33, 35–​43, 46, 48–​50, 60–​1, 63–​5, 68, 76, 80–​1, 83–​4, 87–​9, 91–​3, 97, 100–​2, 104–​6, 108–​10, 112, 114, 116, 118–​19, 122, 129–​31, 134, 136, 140, 145, 148, 154 stigma 17–​18, 31, 35, 49, 51–​3, 60–​2, 69–​5, 77–​81, 89, 96, 110, 122, 134 Switzerland 25 territorial stigmatization 70, 77, 84, 141, 148 Thatcher, Margaret 41, 67, 114–​18, 135 Thatcherism 114, 118, 122, 130 Travellers 37–​8, 46, 87, 99, 104, 106, 108–​14, 117, 119–​22, 130–​1, 137

Trepça 82 Tripoli 28, 45 Tsiganes 46, 88, 136 Turin 88, 104, 121, 155 United Kingdom (UK) xi, 14, 17, 19, 30, 41, 44, 46, 66, 102–​3, 105, 107–​9, 118–​19, 121–​3, 130–​1, 137, 155; see also Britain unemployment 2, 27, 31, 43, 66, 69, 91 UNESCO Statement on Race 36, 138 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 82 United States x, 5–​6, 10, 19, 23, 71 United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) 82 urban governance 13, 15, 61, 80–​1, 105–​6, 133, 144, 151 URBAN II 68, 70, 72–​4, 76, 80–​1, 83, 135 urban periphery 36, 48, 51, 60, 68, 72, 82, 88, 92, 101, 121 urban studies 147 vagabondage 31 vagrancy 31–​3, 39, 43, 69, 88–​9, 110, 117, 147 Valle, Cesare 27, 127 village modulaire 98 Ville Nouvelle 26, 127 violence 13–​14, 38, 42, 145–​6 Weber, Max 7, 146, 148 Western Europe 3, 5–​6, 33, 36–​40, 43, 46, 64, 84, 87, 134, 139 working classes 32, 39, 41 World War II 14, 21, 44, 65, 85–​6, 88, 102–​5, 108, 111 Yugoslavia 40, 70–​1, 94, 101, 126–​7, 135

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