Racial Cities: The Formation and Governance of Stigmatized ‘Gypsy Areas’ in Urban Europe

Formed in Central and Eastern Europe between the 1950s and the 1960s and mushrooming somewhat later in Western Europe, stigmatized and segregated ‘Gypsy areas’ constitute a particularly heuristic angle to examine the changing faces of urban marginality governance over the last forty years. During this time their number has swelled and they have increasingly been subject to disciplining and repressive forms of governance, often making headlines in Europe and beyond. In this talk I will propose an overview of my ethnographic and historical research focusing on the urban governance of these areas. Through a discussion of the post-WWII history of spatial segregation in Europe, and specifically in Italy and Romania, I will show that stigmatized ‘Gypsy areas’ emerged as one of the products of national and urban governance practices, of which the main regulatory mechanism has been formed by locally driven intersections of neoliberal doctrines of population governance and the working of ‘the racial state’. I will conclusively argue that Europe is facing a major change in the ways its marginalized urban dwellers are governed, a change that increasingly questions the very foundations of Europe as a tolerant and inclusive community.

Giovanni Picker is an urban sociologist and anthropologist specializing in the post-WWII history of racial segregation. Besides his interests in stigmatized ‘Gypsy areas’, he is working on informality and urban confinement across the Global South and the Global North. After receiving his PhD in Urban Studies from Milan-Bicocca University, Giovanni was a postdoctoral fellow at ISPMN in Cluj-Napoca, a visiting fellow at the Centre for Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol and a postdoctoral fellow in Sociology at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. His latest publications include ‘Abnormalising minorities: The state and expert knowledge addressing the Roma in Italy’ (Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power), and “Țiganu-i țigan”. Verbal Icons and Urban Marginality in a post-Socialist European City (Civilisations. Revue internationaled’anthropologie e des sciences humaines). He is currently working on a book project provisionally entitled Governance and the Spatial Segregation of Roma in Urban Europe.