Racialized Housing and Proletarization Policies as Internal Socialist Contradictions: Roma Relocations Between 1975-1989 in Baia Mare, Romania

Abstract

The emergence of the ghetto as an urban social formation is regularly conveyed as a specific neoliberal capitalist product. Based on interviews with inhabitants and policymakers and archival data covering more than two decades, this article brings another dimension to the debates on ghetto formation. It traces the urban spatial politics of managing and containing Roma communities in the Romanian NW city of Baia Mare from the late 1970s until 1989. To this aim, it uncovers the debates and decisions regarding the last stages of socialist urban systematization focused on Hatvan, a Roma neighbourhood, and the subsequent relocation projects. Initially, the socialist administration aimed to assimilate the Roma population into the working class. However, a peculiar segregationist policy followed the failed experiment of expropriation and rehousing into low-quality apartments. In the early 1980s, authorities relocated most Roma in the newly built Vasile Alecsandri district to four new specifically designed apartment buildings nearby. The four blocks on Arieșului Street lacked central heating to prevent the accumulation of arrears – a materialization of the decade-long austerity policies. Other urban Roma were funnelled there as well, thus revealing the racialization policies assembled at the local level. Just before 1990, Arieșului was abandoned, and many people decided to relocate in what became Craica, a ghetto that is still in existence today.