The informal faces of the (neo-)ghetto: State confinement, formalization and multidimensional informalities in Italy’s Roma camps

Abstract

This article extends Wacquant’s theorization of how state institutions confine, control and punish racialized poor groups, arguing that a central modality for managing urban marginality occurs through institutional generation of and participation in spheres of informality. Focusing on Italy’s segregation of Roma in ‘neo-ghettos’, this study explores how Roma’s confinement has been produced and modulated through contradictory policies, their ambiguous implementation by meso-level actors, and Roma’s micro-level navigation of ensuing arrangements. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Rome, it traces how ambivalent formalization drives have bifurcated the city’s very diverse Roma populations into two main sociospatial configurations, surveillance-intensive ‘villages’ and unauthorized micro-encampments, producing intertwined informalities in housing and employment that reinforce power inequalities despite Roma’s attempts to exert some agency and autonomy through building social capital within and beyond their communities. Variable informalities thus emerge as a core dimension through which resources and constraints are selectively apportioned as techniques of governmentality implemented by different institutions and actors.