Description
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.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Foreword by Éric Fassin
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Inside segregation
1. Nodes
Colony: segregation rationales
Metropole: from sedentarization to segregation
Conclusion: toward an ethnography of nodes
2. Displacement
Displacing the hygiene threat
Racist order, racial icons
Conclusion: evicted from diversity
3. Omission
Governing an "ethnic bomb"
"Racism is not a problem"
Conclusion: racism and neoliberal doxa
4. Containment
Colonial genesis
Containing the outlandish
Conclusion: a spatio- racial political technology
5. Cohesion
Background
Segregating cohesion
Conclusion: racially structured cohesion
6. Correspondences
Assembling nodes
Colonial past, neoliberal present: depoliticization and racelessness
Conclusion: defining racial cities
7. Conclusion: Beyond segregation?
For the European city yet to come
Urban research and practice
Archives
References
Index
