A Janus-Faced Institution of Ethnoracial Closure

Intersections. Eejsp_vol2_no1

“…Moreover, Whether the Roma have voluntarily decided to settle in Bufa is difficult to assess, given that no other alternative was available for them at the time when they initially moved there. We argue that this form of constraint corresponds to Wacquant's (2011) understanding of the involuntary nature of an urban space characterized by marginality. The isolation of this area from the town is a strong element of constraint and confinement, which eventually restricts access to opportunities: there is no public transportation to Bufa and the inhabitants here have difficult access to public utilities.…”

“…Aiud is a small sized town with 22,876 inhabitants, out of which, according to the 2011 Census, 4.06 percent declared themselves as Roma. The empirical material displayed in this article, which describes the historical constitution and recent developments of two residential spaces from this town (locally named Bufa and Poligon), illustrates how are ghettoization (Wacquant, 2011) and reduction to bare life (Agamben, 1998) shaping the condition of the inhabitants of these housing areas founded under different political regimes. Bufa exemplifies a trend of the formation of a Roma-only settlement as a result of economic in-country migration of an extended Roma family and the growth of the settlement that they established on the periphery of Aiud during socialist industrialization and urbanization, as well as the tendencies of impoverishment and stigmatization that they are running through during current de-industrialization, privatization and retrenchment of state from its social roles.…”

“…Drawing on Wacquant's (2011) approach towards urban marginality, we suggest addressing the analytical potential of the term ghettoization for describing the processes that our settlements are subjected to. He defines the ghetto as 'a bounded urban ward, a web of group-specific institutions and a cultural and cognitive constellation (values, mind-set, or mentality) entailing the socio-moral isolation of a stigmatized category as well as the systematic truncation of the life space and life chances of its members' (p. 1).…”

“…Less impoverished compared to the Roma from Poligon, some of those of Roma minority ethnicity from Bufa are positively appreciated by local authorities' representatives. The reason for this is precisely the institutional parallelism, as described by Wacquant (2011), meaning that the Roma from Bufa have somehow substituted state support services with their own informal support networks, thus expecting and asking less support from the local authorities, who have failed to answer their needs. Another important element revealed in the narratives was the penalization of informal labour, while offering no other formal employment opportunities or, moreover, while restricting access to formal employment.…”

“…That is justified in the frame of a discourse regarding 'the undeserving Roma', who are to a higher extent perceived as 'outsiders' and pushed even further away than the better-off Roma. Poligon area is the settlement in Aiud which encompasses most visibly the ghetto and camp characteristics as described by both Wacquant (2011) and Agamben (1998). The forced eviction of the Roma from the centrally placed social houses to an empty river bank illustrates discretionary power enforced to exclude a group of people, in the context of arbitrary use of the national and local legal framework.…”