Roma Camps Research Articles

Places 'out-of-place'

In the frantic drive where the city extends into the world, and the world takes shape within the cities through migratory processes, we witness a multiplication of hybridisations, co-existences and conflicts. This gives way to kaleidoscopic landscapes in which, however, two polarities can be recognised: exclusivity and exclusion. It is the city of the rich and the city of the poor (Secchi 2013) that becomes more complex with ‘certain bodies [and] out of place’ multiplying the topographies of the other. This article, part of a PhD dissertation in progress, describes the case of Roma communities, and investigates ‘out-of-place’s’, emblems of urban exclusion generically called ‘Roma camps’, that corrode the idea of order and decorum. It describes, from an urban point of view, the phenomenon of encampment in its specification into a control device or an informal practice. Both such different urban configurations are investigated through a case study: a precise urban transect in the northern area of Naples in which both coexist, the informal settlement of Cupa Perillo and the Village of Solidarity in Secondigliano. This reveals latent conditions finding, in the informal configurations, alternative systems of rules that may suggest new spaces of utility to a project eschewing the narratives of a single history, the one that has produced control devices and urban expulsions.

Pathogenic camps, therapeutic city? Roma, healthcare, and the negotiation of citizenship rights in Rome

While equality in healthcare implementation constitutes one of the precepts of the European Roma inclusion programs, health disparities are still one of the most problematic areas contributing to the marginality of residents in ‘Roma camps’. The implementation of the right to health and access to healthcare services and resources represents a major challenge in their everyday experience. If we consider citizenship as a set of natural and legal rights to be protected as a symbolic and material link between a nation-state and a subject either born there or formally belonging to its national community, healthcare emerges as a technology of government where such rights are challenged, limited, or denied. Based on an ethnographic work on the role of public healthcare in ‘Roma camps’, this contribution focuses on contemporary topographies of health in the city of Rome through the lens of Roma marginalization within its urban spaces. How do camps residents experience the city through their relationship with its healthcare resources? And how does the healthcare system become a powerful tool of exclusion? Healthcare access in an urban context is an illustration of the dialectics of political power, knowledge, and expertise as a crucial factor in the administration of marginalized groups. From this perspective, the analysis focuses on precarity in the urban healthcare landscape, and on what living in a ‘Roma camp’ means in terms of healthcare. Both dimensions interrogate citizenship as a set of rightful entitlements that includes access to state-provided medical services.

Defining problems and struggling to find solutions: Framing Roma people in Italian news websites

This article employs a quantitative content analysis of news stories (N=600) to compare how six websites of Italian national newspapers of different political orientations framed Roma people during the campaign for the 2018 Italian general election and in the six months following the formation of the government coalition between the far-right Northern League party and the Five Star Movement. Drawing from framing theory and, in particular, looking at diagnostic and prognostic frames and sources interviewed and quoted, the article shows that when talking about the Roma community, a clear ideological divide between right-wing and progressive newspapers emerged. In a trend that follows the shifting Italian political landscape, news outlets that are historically considered as centrist gave prominence almost exclusively to stories about the removal of Roma camps, evictions and arrests while neglecting the coverage of programmes that would support and help the Roma community.

The production of informal space: A critical atlas of housing informalities in Italy between public institutions and political strategies

The paper analyses the plurality of urban informal practices that characterize contemporary Italy in the sphere of housing, focusing on its complex connections with a variety of public institutions (e.g. laws, regulations, policies and practices). The paper discusses five cases of urban informality in Italy: the squatting of public housing in Milan; Roma camps in Rome; the borgate romane (large unauthorised neighbourhoods in the capital, which were built in the 1960s and 1970s and which have subsequently undergone a long and complex process of regularization); unauthorised construction, by the middle class, of second homes in coastal areas of Southern Italy; illegal subdivision of agricultural land as a standard mechanism for urban expansion in Casal di Principe, Naples.From these cases emerges a complex picture of hybrid institutions that shape and govern housing informalities. These hybrid institutions are composed of multifaceted networks of actors, policies, practices and rules that exist in tension with each other and contribute to favouring and shaping the production of informal space in different ways (e.g. through their action, inaction and structural features). Against the backdrop of this varied institutional framework, a selective tolerance driven mainly by politically-mediated interests emerges as the distinctive feature of the public approach to housing informality in Italy.The paper aims to develop an innovative research approach to informal housing in Italy by overcoming traditional boundaries between research ‘objects’ and by looking at political uses and forms of institutionalisation that are deployed across housing informalities. By doing so, it also contributes to the literature which analyses informality through the lenses of state theory. Simultaneously, it represents a call for international research to investigate the similarities in the patterns of housing informality – and their multifaceted politics – in Mediterranean welfare states.

Informal healthcare, therapeutic informality: Roma, health, and experiences of citizenship in Rome

Disparities in access to healthcare services and, more generally, in the implementation of the right to health constitute a crucial element in the insecurities of urban life. This contribution revisits ethnographic research carried out in Roma camps in Rome and proposes the theme of therapeutic informality through the lens of the relationship between Roma and healthcare institutions. The paper focuses on three key themes: informal healthcare, healthcare temporalities, and therapeutic informality. These focal points are developed around three questions; firstly, how do economic and housing informalities of particular groups intertwine with informality in the field of healthcare? Secondly, considering the centrality of the theme of temporalities in studies on health issues, how are temporalities imposed by living in a regime of informality related to the temporalities of healthcare? Thirdly, how does informality in the field of healthcare specifically affect the forms of citizenship of Roma community members? The notions of informal healthcare and therapeutic informality are proposed as analytical tools to grasp what is at stake when economic, housing and urban informalities intersect around healthcare issues.

The contentious sovereignties of the camp: Political contention among state and non-state actors in Italian Roma camps

The global proliferation of camps manifests an alarming phenomenon of burgeoning marginalization, and shows that the concept of ‘camp’ is today increasingly crucial to grapple with current changes in the world’s geographies of exclusion and inclusion. Specifically, this article focuses on ‘institutional camps’, i.e. created by government agencies in alleged emergency situations and aims to conceptualize sovereignty over this type of camp. After critically reviewing the ongoing scholarly debate on camp sovereignty, I situate my approach within the work of scholars who see political authority over the camp as comprising a multiplicity of both state and non-state actors. The article contributes to this perspective by drawing on the theory of ‘contentious politics’ advanced by McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001). Through this analytical framework, I suggest construing camp sovereignties as contentious, i.e. inherently constituted by conflicting and ever-evolving power relations that change according to framing strategies, political opportunities, resources and repertoires of action. In order to show the benefits of such approach, the paper focuses on the empirical case of the Italian Roma camps in Rome, through which I show that camp sovereignty is not only fragmented into a multiplicity of actors but is also the result of conflict, compromise, negotiation, and co-optation among actors whose frames, opportunities, resources, and repertoires constantly change over time.

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

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.

The effect of illegal lead processing on blood lead levels in children living in the mining area

Backgraund/Aim. The northern part of Kosovo was one of the largest lead and zinc production industries in Europe. Special attention has been paid to the landfill sites of these metals remained after past industrial activities. The inhabitants of Roma camps in this area are collecting led waste they process by crushing and melting in their shacks in primitively organized working environments. Because of all the aforementioned it was necessary to examine the concentration of blood lead level (BLL) in the children aged less than 6 years inhabiting this area, especially taking care of blood analysis of children living in Roma camps. Methods. The study was conducted in the municipality of Leposavic, Province Kosovo and Metohija, Serbia. Totally 78 subjects participated in the study. All the subjects were divided into two groups: the group I consisting of 42 children who lived in the Romas camp, and the group II with 36 children from a city kindergarten. Based on the mathematical model WRPLOT we found out that both groups of patients were in the low risk zone for industrial contamination exposure. Blood analysis was done according to the protocol provided by ESA Lead Care. Results. The average age of participants in the study was 4.60 ? 1.63 years. The mean BBL in the children from the group 1 was 19.11 ?g/dL and from the group 2 4.87 ?g/dL. There was a statistically significant difference in the mean values of BBL between the groups (U = 39, p < 0.001). All of the children from the group 1 had BBL greater than 5 ?g/dL in comparison to 38.9% of the children from the group 2 (?2 = 35.75, p < 0.001). Conclusion. Although both groups were located outside the zone of direct spread of pollution, the results indicate high concentrations of lead in blood of all the examined children. The concentration was higher in the children who lived in the area in which illegal processing of lead waste took place.

Considerations on the current universal vaccination policy against hepatitis A in Greece after recent outbreaks.

Greece is the only European Union member state that in 2008 included hepatitis A (HAV) vaccine in the routine national childhood immunization program (NCIP). Given that the resources allocated to public health have dramatically decreased since 2008 and that Greece is a low endemicity country for the disease, the benefit from universal vaccination has been questioned. The aim of this paper is to summarize the available epidemiological data of the disease for 1982-2013, and discuss the effects of universal vaccination on disease morbidity. Descriptive analysis, ARIMA modeling and time series intervention analysis were conducted using surveillance data of acute HAV. A decreasing trend of HAV notification rate over the years was identified (p<0.001). However, universal vaccination (~ 80% vaccine coverage of children) had no significant effect on the annual number of reported cases (p = 0.261) and has resulted to a progressive increase of the average age of infection in the general population. The mean age of cases before the inclusion of the vaccine to NCIP (24.1 years, SD = 1.5) was significantly lower than the mean age of cases after 2008 (31.7 years, SD = 2.1) (p<0.001). In the last decade, one third of all reported cases were Roma (a population accounting for 1.5% of the country’s total population) and in 2013 three outbreaks with 16, 9 and 25 Roma cases respectively, were recorded, indicating the decreased effectiveness of the current immunization strategy in this group. Data suggest that universal vaccination may need to be re-considered. Probably a more cost effective approach would be to implement a program that will include: a) vaccination of high risk groups, b) universal vaccination of Roma children and improving conditions at Roma camps, c) education of the population and travel advice, and d) enhancement of the control measures to increase safety of shellfish and other foods.

Securitarian Healing: Roma Mobility and Health Care in Rome

Over the last decade, Roma populations in Europe have been the object of strict securitarian policies. The Rome case is particularly interesting due to the continued shift from securitarian to humanitarian discourses and actions led by local institutions. The specific health care system implemented in the legal and illegal Roma camps was one of the tools used. The ethnographic fieldwork behind this article involved following the daily activities of a mobile medical unit dedicated to Roma camps in Rome and monitoring a health care project led by a nongovernmental organization. This analysis focuses on one particular dimension of precarious forms of Roma citizenship that the health care policies have developed to address Roma issues: the international mobility dynamics relating to health issues, which drive subjects into a forced integration of multiple, incomplete, and fragmentary medical approaches.

Advocacy strategies to defend France's sans-papiers: contradictions and complexities

In the past decade, a number of events in France – from the banlieues riots in 2005 to 2011's burqa ban and the dismantlement of Roma camps by both Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande – have propelled debates around immigration, integration and citizenship to the forefront of French politics. At the intersection of these debates are France's undocumented migrants, known as sans-papiers. This article examines five French organisations' advocacy strategies to defend the rights of sans-papiers. Drawing from interviews with members of the organisations and an analysis of various advocacy materials (reports, petitions, videos, posters, etc.), the article identifies those representations of sans-papiers that appear most prominently in the organisations' communications. Furthermore, it aims to explore the tensions between these representations and those values that are not only propounded by the organisations themselves, but are thought to animate human rights more broadly. In light of these tensions, the article considers the complexity and limited feasibility of ‘doing’ rights in a way that upholds certain values considered central to the human rights framework, particularly equality.