Homeownership, mobility, and home: A relational housing study of Argentine Ludar and Romanian Rudari

Abstract

This article examines the community-led housing practices of two related Boyash-Roma communities in Argentina and Romania. The Argentinean case introduces the story of the Ludar in the Greater Buenos Aires Region, a Romanian-speaking sub-group of the Roma, who likely arrived here between 1880 and 1900. Throughout Argentina, most of the Ludar are involved in street vending. The second case concerns the Roma communities of the Rudari from Vâlcea County in Romania, who travel to Sweden primarily to beg. Although the cases seem unrelated, they demonstrate how close engagement with Roma and their socioeconomic mobility allows experimental comparisons of informality and urban development in various parts of world. While their mobile earning strategies are contested by authorities, they enable many to secure a feeling of belonging in a post-crisis context, characterised by rampant racism, greatly restricted welfare provision and increasingly constrained mobility. The newly emerging homes are understood as spaces of hope and dignity and the coping strategies as processes meant to unmake precarity. In this way, the article contributes to an emerging scholarship of Roma resistance, while informing broader contestations of urban marginality.