(Im)mobility Subcontracted: Nesting Hierarchies, Uneven Distributions and the ‘Roma Inclusion’ Projects in Europe

Grill, Jan

doi:10.2478/se-2020-0024

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Alongside these practices of 'resistance through resilience' (Bermann & Clough Marinaro, 2014), scholars have focused on more advantageous strategies that Roma migrant dwellers adopt, particularly when confronted with institutional policies of selective inclusion. Research has shown how Roma-targeted inclusion projects often manipulate the rhetoric of empowerment and cultural recognition as a way to re-educate their beneficiaries and hinder uncontrolled urban development (Grill, 2020). In particular, rather than considering their beneficiaries' capabilities to pursue their own projects, housing insertion initiatives treat them primarily as subjects to be 'repaired' (Manca & Vergnano, 2019).…”

Section: Housing As a Site Of Resistance And Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%

Home, migration, and Roma people in Europe

Piemontese,

Maestri

2023

Handbook on Home and Migration

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With 10-12 million people, the Roma are considered the largest ethnic minority in Europe. It includes various groups commonly known as Gypsies, Travellers, Manouches, Ashkali, Sinti and Boyash, among others, which are often wrongly represented as nomadic. Historically, Roma have faced discrimination and unequal access to fundamental rights, and today 80 per cent of them still live below the poverty threshold and suffer from severe housing deprivation (FRA, 2018).This chapter focuses on Roma migrating from Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to Western Europe. Their international mobility strongly contributed to the Europeanisation of the so-called 'Roma issue' (Vermeersch, 2012), especially after the 2004 and 2007 European Union (EU) eastward enlargement. Roma migration played a crucial role in convincing EU institutions to adopt the EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies. Unfortunately, however, besides inclusion policies, it also prompted a proliferation of restrictive measures, mainly in the form of administrative regulations, voluntary return programmes, begging bans, and forced evictions implicitly aimed at this population: 'exclusive but not explicit' initiatives that both flip and disrupt the 'explicit but not exclusive' approach advocated by European institutions (Piemontese & Magazzini, 2019). In the context of growing concern over the arrival of CEE Roma, advocates and researchers have often focused on the institutional discrimination and racism that relegate Roma migrants to government-sponsored camps, informal settlements, and sub-standard squatted buildings in destination countries. Although we acknowledge the many ways European governments marginalise and discriminate against Roma (Fekete, 2014), we argue that reducing Roma housing to loss and exclusion risks concealing the strategic and creative dimension of residential micro-practices enacted by Roma themselves, who instead mobilise various resources at both national and transnational levels.Given the diversity of the housing situation of Roma in Europe, it would be challenging to give a complete overview. This chapter, therefore, attempts to capture the complexity of the literature on Roma housing by focusing on the following main issues. First, we engage with critical scholarship deconstructing ethnic labels, the discourses on nomadism and Roma exceptionalism, which commonly shape policy approaches and public opinion on Roma populations and mobility. Second, we focus on the different forms of housing segregation in Europe, with specific attention to the spatial device of the camp. Then, we turn to actor-centred perspectives, thoroughly discussing the transnational residential strategies and homemaking practices enacted by Roma migrants themselves. Finally, we reflect on emerging avenues of scholarly and activist research foregrounding intersectionality through feminist perspectives and the nexus with anti-eviction and housing rights movements.

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Section: Housing As a Site Of Resistance And Autonomymentioning

confidence: 99%