1st Edition
Racial Cities Governance and the Segregation of Romani People in Urban Europe
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
Biography
Giovanni Picker is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham School of Social Policy, UK.
Racial Cities, in its remarkable intersection of diverse strands of thought, demonstrates how the persistence of everyday colonialism roosts in Europe through the ordinary and proliferating segregations based on race continuously reinvented within the problematizing of Gypsy urban areas.
In elaborating the racial complexion of European urban life, Picker emphasizes how the ordering of urban space remains reliant on the way specific territories are constituted to give body and visibility to open-ended threats, on the ways in which the rationales underlying segregations can be dismissed, remade, or rendered self-evident, where political deliberation is substituted by technical considerations, and where unyielding convictions about fundamental differences can silently operate through multiple vernaculars.
AbdouMaliq Simone, Research Professor, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.
Racial Cities sounds a vital alarm over everyday and institutionalized racism and discrimination vis-à-vis Romani people, defined at once as a scourge and threat, in a race-blind Europe. Not only does Giovanni Picker draw needed light to the "organizing logic" and specificity of race, biologized as culture, in neoliberal states from the East to the West, he also illuminates how Romani segregation is a conspicuous lived-reality—hidden in plain sight—that indexes a naturalized and under-analyzed anti-Romism, and thereby a distinct yet familiar race question in Europe. Capturing the nexus between practices of expulsion and disposable confinement, Picker reinforces the fact that space is indeed raced.
Trica Keaton, Associate Professor, Dartmouth College and author of .Muslim Girls and the Other France
