Evictions and Voluntary Returns in Barcelona and Bucharest: Practices of Metropolitan Governance

Abstract

This article is about techniques of exclusion by local governments against Romani people. Tackling the case of people of Romani ethnicity in Barcelona and Bucharest, I explore evictions and voluntary return as practices of segregation within and exclusion from the city. I reflect on the condition of being or becoming Roma in the process of spatial cleansing by interrogating the construction of Roma as an ethnicized mobile minority, a category that is submitted to social and territorial exclusion. Under the pretext of defending the social security and the urban development of cities, the local authorities produce moral panic around the presence of Roma. Portraying them first as vulnerable, then as having a mobile life-style, the authorities justify a range of interventions that eventually push out the Roma habitants and subsequently deny them the right to the city.