Racial Inequalities in Continental European Cities: Expanding Diversity

Since 19th century’s massive processes of urbanisation following industrial development, diversity has unfolded along with socio-economic stratification and inequality. In the current global order, where non-citizens or just-citizens are overrepresented within cheap-labour market niches including low–skilled jobs, a major marker of urban inequalities in the Global North is skin colour, and generally physical appearance. A large body of research has shown how racist assumptions and thinking behind policy and actions keep “others” on worse socio-economic conditions than the (white) majority. Cleaners, taxi drivers and domestic workers across cities of the Global North are just among the most well-known examples of how global economic inequalities materialise in increasingly diversified urban settings. From such a global perspective, this paper questions the virtually complete absence of racial inequalities in the burgeoning diversity scholarship on continental urban Europe, and theoretically expands the concept of diversity to include racial inequalities as constitutive of hyper-diversification processes in this part of the Global North. Drawing on my long-term ethnography (2007-2013) of the housing conditions of Roma in Italian and Romania cities, the paper shows the pivotal role of racial thinking behind state policy and civil society discourses and actions. It historically and ethnographically dissects key economic, political and cultural factors behind residential inequalities between Roma and the majority in Pescara (Italy) and Cluj-Napoca (Romania). It shows how local political economy concerning social housing (Pescara) and land (Cluj) merge with electoral interests, capitalising on the racist everyday and local media discourse on Roma based on racial assuptions and thinking. In order to expand the concept of diversity, the paper theoretically builds on the scholarship highlighting the need to acknowledge racial inequalities in continental Europe (e.g. E. Fassin; D.T. Goldberg; A. Lentin), and complements this literature with an accent on cities as key sites for understanding (and expanding) diversity.