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Working Status in Deprived Urban Areas and Their Greater Economic Role

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Racialized Labour in Romania

Part of the book series: Neighborhoods, Communities, and Urban Marginality ((NCUM))

Abstract

Petrovici analyses the social and economic profiles of the population living in the deprived areas and differentiates between three broad categories. First, the former socialist working class and their children, who could not escape from the city in the 1990s during the urban-to-rural return migration. Second, a segment of better-off, qualified Roma workers who gradually lost employment in an economically restructuring city. Third, qualified Roma workers coming from other towns in search of new jobs. These areas are integrated in the urban economy and convey an important labour pool for unskilled manual work in the new, globalized production facilities, for raw materials extraction in waste management cycles (e.g. iron, plastic) needed in the booming industries, as well as lower-grade services for the greater working class.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The 2011 Census had an open question on ethnicity which was coded subsequently in categories. There were 19 Roma-related self-identification categories in the Census. Based on the self-identification in 58 census tracks pertaining to the 20 studied locations, I have lumped together as Roma the following categories (ethnic denominators in Romanian original): rom, țigan, țigan de mătase, spoitor, pletos, gabor, ursar, căldărar, rudar, lăieș. In the neighbourhood of Obor from Călărași there were 265 self-identified Turks. Based on our ethnographic material and their area of residence in the city, I have indexed them as Roma for this research.

  2. 2.

    These concepts have an important pre-war history. The communes (comune) became rural administrative units in the second half of the nineteenth century (Law 394/31 March 1864), as a measure used by Al. I. Cuza to create reasonable spatial divisions for taxing purposes. There was a constant effort to reduce the huge number of villages during the entire twentieth century, and one of the most productive concepts, put forward by the interwar Gusti School, was that of a “communal centre”, a cluster of social services provided by the state and amenities (pipelines, sewages, electricity) around which the villagers were incentivized to spatially regroup. This became a major concept during communism when members of the Gusti school, such as Henri H. Stahl and Miron Constantinescu, became responsible for the planning process in the post-1948 Communist government. The urban zone was also an important concept of the interwar Gusti School as part of the developmentalist concepts that prescribed how urban growth could benefit from its specific rural hinterland, with specific localized resources (Constantinescu 1966; Rostás 2000; Stahl 1975).

  3. 3.

    The ethnographical material suggests that Roma from Călărași have migrated abroad on a significant scale after 2002, especially those from the Livada neighbourhood. I could not corroborate this piece of data with the census data. Observations and interviews suggest that in none of the investigated locations this type of migration had a similar scale.

  4. 4.

    There are some notable differences from this pattern. Some of the populations lived in relatively compact Roma areas are those who were evicted from rural areas by the majority. A telling example is the case of some of the families in the “Pork City” informal settlement in Miercurea Ciuc, who were chased away from nearby villages by the Szekler (Hungarian) majority. Or some “corturari” families in the Pata Rât area at the outskirts of Cluj-Napoca, who came from the villages of the present-day metropolitan area, where they had lived for some generations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sociology Department, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Norbert Petrovici

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  1. Norbert Petrovici
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of European Studies Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Enikő Vincze

  2. Department of Sociology, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Norbert Petrovici

  3. Department of Sociology, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

    Cristina Raț

  4. School of Social Policy, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Giovanni Picker

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Petrovici, N. (2019). Working Status in Deprived Urban Areas and Their Greater Economic Role. In: Vincze, E., Petrovici, N., Raț, C., Picker, G. (eds) Racialized Labour in Romania. Neighborhoods, Communities, and Urban Marginality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76273-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76273-9_2

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