Ghettoization

For the past two decades in Italy, Jewish history has emerged as a cen- tral research preoccupation – even as it lags behind the historiography of other countries in this regard. From the standpoint of the relations between ghettoized people and the “ghettoist” Christians – the inventors of the ghetto – new researchs centered on the early modern period and on the moment of reclusion and confinement (16th-19th centuries) represent a case of a major interest and historiographical innova- tion. These are amply cited in the notes of the works that we present here, and to which we have hitherto referred. On the basis of thorough documentary surveys carried out in archives that have been neglected so far in this area and for this period, it is possible to look at the history of the Jewish minority from a new perspective. Indeed, unexpected results emerge to challenge the most common, but incorrect, interpretive paradigm of Jewish separation and insularity.

This issue presents the first set of results of the SPAREX research (www.sparex-ro.eu). This was not an inquiry on Roma, or on ghettos, or on urban structures, and nor even on poverty, but it was a multi-disciplinary contextual investigation on the processes of spatialization and racialization of social exclusion as manifestation of advanced urban marginality produced by
neoliberal regimes. Viewed together with the preliminary conclusions of another ongoing investigation, "Faces and Causes of the Roma Marginalization in Local Settings. Contextual inquiry to the UNDP/World Bank/EC Regional Roma Survey 2011, focusing"on Hungary, Romania, Serbia (in Romania conducted in 25 localities) – whose some preliminary results are also presented in this issue of Studia UBB Sociologia – SPAREX demonstrates that the formation of “Gypsy ghettos” (as instances of Roma marginalization) happens at the crossroads of multi-level
processes that create territorial disparities and uneven developments between and within regions, counties and localities.

The Ghetto Florence was established by Grand Duke Cosimo I in 1570-1571, probably in attempt to appease the Church whose Pope had granted him the dynastic "update" making him Grand Duke. For more than two centuries the ghetto was the epicentre of Florentine Jewish life, an area located in the very heart of the city centre, facing the Old Market and very close to some of the most important religious sites such as the Duomo and the Archbishop's palaces. The aim of this article is to introduce and present the preliminary result of the "Ghetto Mapping Project", a research project aiming at reconstructing the architectural, economic-financial and nonetheless demographic-cultural features of the ghetto of Florence. On the basis of extensive survey of archival documentation it was possible to get the Florentine ghetto to virtual life.

Through slavery. A possible reading of the Roman model for religious alterity between the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries. The essay reflects on the evolution of the Roman attitude toward Mediterranean slavery in the Early Modern period. It especially stresses the conversion of Muslim slaves in Rome. The famous motu proprio by Pope Pius V that ensured freedom to any baptised slave to be able to come to the Capitoline Hill in Rome is the focus of the article. Why did the pope order to give freedom to those slaves acting against both Catholic tradition and established customs? The article argues that the political and theological scenario in the background could offer an explanation. It is important to observe the complexity of the management of alterity in the Papal States and abroad. Slaves, embodied a diversity in a legal perspective; any slave could bring together multiple identities in his inner and mysterious true consciousness. Slaves could come from all over the world and they could be officially Muslims, Jews, Eastern Christians, heretics and Catholics. In addition, everyone could choose to convert or tell a fake narrative about his real origins. To evaluate these stories was one of the central aspects of the management of slavery which was behind the follow different practices in Rome and beyond.

The option of addressing the formation of marginal spaces in this volume in relation to the racialization of labour goes beyond the initial framing of our research based on a spatial approach, which proposed to analyse the social and cultural formation of “Tsigane ghettos” in Romania in a European context. In its early phase of planning, the paradigm of social exclusion informed our research, while we sought to address processes that lie behind the formation of precarious housing areas, such as spatialization and racialization of poverty. No surprise, these territories were predominantly inhabited by persons and groups (self-)identified as Roma and labelled as țigănie. As we moved forward with deciphering the structural processes behind these situations, it became necessary to expand our explicative frame from the spatial exclusion approach towards a more systemic understanding of ghettoization, which depicts how categories of racialized labourers are produced and confined within the marginalized spaces by the capitalist system.
The sites of our empirical research consist of five Romanian cities, all of
them administrative centres of their corresponding counties (Călărași, Cluj-Napoca, Miercurea-Ciuc, Ploiești, and Târgu-Mureș), with diverse histories of urbanization and economic development (as they have been affected differently by deindustrialization), but which share similar patterns of pushing towards the peripheries the impoverished, mostly Roma dwellers who cannot afford housing on the private market. The five cities differ in terms of their ethnic balances between Romanians, Hungarians, and Roma, and also in terms of the diversity of local Roma groups differentiated alongside diverse factors (traditional/spoitori, căldărari, or Gábor versus assimilated Roma, or Hungarian versus Romanian Roma and Turkish versus Romanian Roma) and relations among them. These cities have different economic and social histories, current revenues and wealth, and political agency (public authorities, local politics, and civil society). They are not regarded as a “representative sample” of Romanian cities but as loci of a set of representative processes of capitalist development in Romania that led to the precarization of the working class and the formation of marginal, severely impoverished residential spaces, with inadequate infrastructure and unclear legal status. The chapters rely on quantitative and qualitative data about the five selected cities, including the socio-demographic characteristics of populations living in the twenty urban areas that we have visited, as compared to the general populations of the cities. [...] ... we conducted interviews with NGO representatives, politicians, local authorities, officials from territorial agencies of national
public institutions, social workers, and so on, and, most importantly, [with the persons living in these areas. Some of our interviewees did not
hold positions directly focused on the urban poor or the Roma, but they
played important roles in shaping the economic future of the cities. We
also undertook content analyses of documents on social and housing
policies and, separately, on the media representations of segregated housing areas and their inhabitants.
For each of the five cities, our joint research revealed the existence of
several deprived and marginalized areas, characterized by different scales of exclusion and poverty, and different degrees of their juxtaposition with ethnic enclaves and racialized stigmatization, respectively, by diverse grades of connectedness to the rest of the cities or even by various forms of resistance towards marginalization.  [...]
As space is a fundamental dimension of capital and labour accumulation, our methodology was, from the onset, devised to capture the ways in which localities are produced at the intersection of various forces and, simultaneously, to allow us to see different intersections depending on housing, urban development, social policies, and media discourses. However, our volume is not based on a comparative case methodology in the strict sense of the term. We neither intend to draw comparisons and classifications of locations subtracted from a representative sample of marginalized spaces inhabited by racialized labourers, nor to compare the capitalist development of five Romanian cities. Rather, we investigate processes running across the locations of our fieldwork, processes which display similarities and differences, and which carry the localized influence of more general global processes of unequal development, accumulation by dispossession, labour precarization, and spatial segregation based on class position and racial categorization. This does not mean that our five cities were randomly selected. On the contrary, we purposefully selected cities of comparable sizes that function as administrative centres for their corresponding counties from different historical regions of Romania, and which differ along the lines of those historical, political, economic, and social factors that have explanatory power for the emergence of marginalized and racialized areas at urban peripheries. We construct the micro–macro or local–global linkages through social theory, in a way similar with Burawoy’s (2009) approach of the extended case method. The “cases” that we refer to in our chapters are not geographically determined territories but issue-oriented cases, dimensions of analysis which highlight different aspects of the economically productive role of the interconnectedness between spatial marginality and racialization of
labour for capitalist development. [...]
The theory that transforms our empirical material into “the case of something” is constructed at the intersection of dependency theories, de-proletarization debates, postcolonial and decolonial studies, global anthropologies of labour, theories of postsocialism, and Romani studies.
Following Burawoy’s reflexive ethnography, we aim to adapt our chosen
theories to explain old issues (such as racialization of labour and spatial
marginalization) in new contexts, situated at one of the semi-peripheries
of global capitalism marked by the disentanglement of really existing
socialism and EU integration.
The different chapters of this book complement each other in offering a substantiation of our arguments on different levels that we touch upon. [...]  Correspondingly, our book is divided into two larger parts: the first
part deals with the creation of racialized labour and spaces of marginality, while the second part investigates how invisibility is produced. In the first part, individual chapters identify and describe various dimensions of the racialization of precarious labour and spatial marginalization. Norbert Petrovici analyses the spatiality of capital accumulation and of racialized labour produced by the capitalist political economy, rendered to reside in segregated and relatively homogeneous parts of the cities in terms of ethnicity, education, and occupational status. Enikő Vincze depicts several types of ghettoization or varying patterns of the formation of housing areas that are carved out physically and symbolically from the rest of the built urban environment and within which material destitution overlaps with ethnic seclusion. Cristina Rat explores the pressures to commodify work embedded in “activation” policies, increasingly salient after the neoliberal turn of welfare states and the deregulation of labour. In the second part, each chapter explores a different dimension on which the invisibilization of racialized labour and spaces of marginality occurs. Anca Simionca reveals the kind of imaginaries guiding the development of the city and the labour market, how these visions largely ignore the spatially and socially marginalized categories, and by that directly contribute to their formation and maintenance. Orsolya Vincze investigates to what degree the ideologies used for justifying inequalities are making appeal to the racialization of marginalized spaces and precarious labour, in other words how the moral problem of inequality is made invisible and “absolved” by portraying the disadvantaged as alien and inferior. Cătălin Berescu critically engages with the ways of making use of the typology of
ghettoes by different decision-maker actors in order to naturalize their
existence and thus conceal the political agency behind their constitution.
Thus, each chapter analyses in detail particular instances and processualities (or “cases”) within the broader dynamics of labour racialization and spatial marginalization, and of making them invisible.
We acknowledge that the processes we analyse are not country-specific,
and most importantly, not locality-specific, but they are global processes
of contemporary capitalism. Accordingly, in the concluding chapter,
Giovanni Picker offers a zoom-out from Romania towards other territories across space and time, stretching from the Global North and to the South, and evolving from the colonial history of capitalism towards contemporary neoliberal governance. As such, it highlights similar and divergent patterns of the racialization of labour and the segregation of precarious workers at marginal spaces, and the invisibilization of their lives and labour.

Cette session se propose d’engager une réflexion sur la structure sociale des minorités et sur la relation qu’elles entretiennent avec les espaces urbains où elles habitent, dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire, comparative et de longue durée. Le lien entre minorité, « étrangers » et villes a été au centre d’une série d’études particulièrement fécondes qui, à partir de l’Europe centrale et méridionale, s’est ouverte au versant oriental et méridional du bassin méditerranéen au cours des périodes médiévales et modernes (Bottin, Calabi 1999 ; Kaiser, Moatti 2007 ; Calabi, Christensen 2007 ; González-, Martini, Kaplan 2008 ; Dumons, Hours 2010, Dakhlia, Vincent 2011).
Tout en gardant à l’esprit que le lien entre marginalisation et protection est souvent étroit et impossible à scinder en deux concepts distincts et séparés à l’époque moderne, ce panel se propose d’élargir horizontalement l’enquête à l’ensemble de la Méditerranée et en particulier à l’Empire ottoman et à l’Afrique du Nord et, verticalement, aux mécanismes de fonctionnement internes des communautés singulières dans le but de relever les modalités d’interaction avec l’espace et ses structures. Les études comparatives et diachroniques concernant tout type de minorités, entendues comme groupe en infériorité numérique (et/ou juridique), sont les bienvenues.