Posted on

New paper in Antipode: Inhabiting dispossession in the post-socialist city

My new paper in Antipode took years to write. Since the time in which I did the archival and ethnographic research underpinning it much life, death, pandemic, and international moving happened… but I hope I was finally able to give justice to that material.

The paper is open-access at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12821

It builds on my previous research around #race #class #housing #resistance in #Bucharest, and it expands on crucial Romanian scholarship to offer a trans-Atlantic dialogue around the (un)makings of #urban #racialised #dispossession.

I am thankful to my comrades Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire and CARUSEL, to my colleagues and friends Bogdan (Diana Bogdan), Robert and Alina Stoiculescu in Bucharest, to the anonymous reviewers and to the Antipode board.
I am also very much thankful to a number of Romanian scholars to which I am indebted for their friendship and writings, including Liviu Chelcea, Eniko Vincze, Marian Ursan, Veda Popovici, Ioana Florea, George Zamfir, Zamfi Irina, Catalin Berescu, and the quasi-Romanian like myself Erin MC ElRoy!

Thanks also to the Urban studies foundation for supporting part of the archival/ethnographic work and to the ERC for supporting additional research & writing.

Inhabiting Dispossession in the Post-Socialist City: Race, Class, and the Plan, in Bucharest, Romania
Abstract

The paper explores the racialised geography of a series of socialist blocs located in the southern periphery of Bucharest, labelled as a contemporary Romanian “ghetto”. Through extensive ethnographic and archival work, it expands on contemporary Western race-aware urban scholarship, advancing an expansive reading of the “plan” as a key element to account for the endurance of foundational dispossession in the context of Bucharest. The goal is to trace how the social segmentations of “class” and “race” have been diagrammed through discontinuous city-making in the last hundred years, refuting a reading of these complex processes as a matter of evolutionary stages between economic regimes, which ends up reproducing a stereotypical representation of the Eastern “other”. The paper contributes to a situated approach to racial urbanism, offering the basis for a trans-Atlantic dialogue around the makings and unmakings of urban dispossession.

Posted on

New paper around Urban Precarity in Geoforum

The first paper that I thought and wrote since I’ve joined USP and the Urban Institute at Sheffield is out now in Geoforum.  It is called: ‘The politics of embodied urban precarity: Roma people and the fight for housing in Bucharest, Romania’ and it theorises precarity as an embodied affair, grounded in history and producer of the urban political. It builds on the inspiring works of colleagues like Vasudevan, Brickell, Simone, Roy, Chelcea, Vincze and many others. Crucially, it also builds on my experiences with Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire — all the thanks to comrades are in the acknowledgement section. You can download the paper for free on Research Gate.

In its printed version, the paper will be part of a special issue around ‘Precarious urbanism’, edited by Hester Parr, Chris Philo and Ola Söderström. Thanks to them for inviting me to take part to this project!

Here is the abstract:

The politics of embodied urban precarity: Roma people and the fight for housing in Bucharest, Romania

The paper provides a nuanced reading of the ways in which conditions of precarity arising from forced evictions are ‘made’ and ‘unmade’ in their unfolding, offering a way to appreciate their performative politics. Grounded in an activist ethnography of evictions against Roma people in Bucharest, Romania, the work provides a reading of urban precarity as not only an embodied product, but also a producer of the urban political. It advances an innovative methodology to investigate the politics of urban precarity, which focuses around four intersecting processes: the historical pre-makings of precarity; the discursive and material displacement of its in-making; embodied resistance as a form of un-making; and authoritarian responses as its re-making. Through its theoretical and methodological insights, the paper contributes to scholarship interested in a critical understanding of embodiment, politics, and urban precarity beyond the analysed case.

Posted on

New contribution to a forum on minor politics in EPD

I am very happy to be part of this exciting forum around micro politics and the minor, which builds on Cindi Katz’s 1996 ‘Towards Minor Theory‘ published in EPD: Society and Space. The forum was organised by two friends at Oxford, Thomas Jellis and Joe Gerlach, with contributions from Anna Secor and Jess Linz; Cristina Temenos; Caroline Faria; Andrew Barry; Ben Anderson and an inspiring conclusion by Cindi Katz.

My intervention is a short reflection around the (un)making of ethics at the intersection of ethnography and activism at the urban margins. It is related to my work in Romania with evicted people, of which I published here (and made a documentary called ‘A inceput ploaia/It started raining‘).

You can download my paper on this website, at academia.edu or at the EPD: Society and Space webpage.

Posted on

A inceput ploaia, ‘my’ first documentary. Why, when, and how.

For updates, please visit the film website at www.ainceputploaia.com (or simply click on the poster)

A început ploaia is the first documentary about forced evictions in Bucharest, which I written, researched and directed after two years of ethnographic fieldwork, activism and engagement with evicted people in the city.

The film follows the story of the Vulturilor 50 community (100 individuals), whom dwelt on the street of Bucharest from September 2014 to June 2016 in order to fight against the eviction from their home, enacting the longest and most visible protest for housing right in the history of contemporary Romania. The vicissitudes of this community are interpolated with a number of interviews with activists, scholars and politicians, composing a picture that speaks of racial discrimination, homelessness, evictions, but also of grassroots practices of resistance and social change. A început ploaia is the touching testament to the everyday revolution of Roma people fighting forced evictions from the centre of Bucharest, an endeavour made of fragile dwellings, provisional makeshifts and tenuous – but fierce – occupancy of public space.

The story behind the makings of the movie is long and complex. You can read about it here.

If you would like to know more about the movie, including release date and screenings, please proceed to www.ainceputploaia.com. You can follow my brand new production house – A Community Productions – @acommprod or check its website at www.acommunityproductions.com

Here is the trailer of A început ploaia. Share it wherever you’d like!

Posted on

Housing racism on Open Democracy

People right after the eviction III

Open Democracy has published the piece I wrote on Eviction and Housing Racism in Bucharest. The piece narrates the story of the Vulturilor community, which has been living on the street since 1 year following their eviction on the 15th of September 2014.

You can read it here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/michele-lancione/eviction-and-housing-racism-in-bucharest

The same piece was translated into Romanian and published by ‘TOTB’. Available at: http://totb.ro/despre-evacuari-si-rasismul-cotidian-in-bucuresti/ 

To know more about Vulturilor, please read the community’s blog.

Posted on

VICE, Bucharest and myself

Blocks in Alea Livezilor - Copyleft Lancione 2015
Blocks in Alea Livezilor – Copyleft Lancione 2015

Today Max Daly published his piece on Bucharest’s drug issues on VICE US. Max has focused mainly on the condition of Roma drug users – an entanglement of poverty, lack of fundamental rights and stigmatisation that is second to none.

Max and I have been together in Bucharest in June. I am impressed by its ability to write such a powerful piece only after a few days in the city. Let’s hope that this article, together with a recent one appeared on Drug Link, may raise EU’s attention on the matter, and may allow the excellent people (like these ones) working on harm reduction in Romania to receive adequate funding for their work.

You can read the article here: http://www.vice.com/read/romanias-drug-addicted-roma-are-being-left-to-rot-456

– > Max’s piece was translated also in Italian and Romanian.