ArticlePDF Available

Caring for the endurance of a collective struggle

July 2019
Dialogues in Human Geography 9(2):216-219

DOI:10.1177/2043820619850362

Authors:

Polytechnic University of Turin

This paper is part of a review Forum of my film A Inceput Ploaia/It Started Raining, on forced evictions in Romania, organized and published by Dialogues in Human Geography. All contributions can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/dhga/9/2

Nicoleta writing a blog post on my laptop, January 2015 (Photo by Michele Lancione).

…

Figures - uploaded by Michele Lancione

Content may be subject to copyright.

Content uploaded by Michele Lancione

Content may be subject to copyright.

Author response

Caring for the endurance

of a collective struggle

Michele Lancione

University of Sheffield, UK

When I arrived in Vulturilor Street for the first time,

I didn’t know anything of restitutions, anything of

video making, and very little about the fight for the

right to housing in Romania or Eastern Europe.

I landed in Bucharest with the idea of exploring a

specific set of issues – to do with homelessness

and drug use (see Lancione, 2019, for an initial

account) – but quite immediately I found myself

dealing with something rather different and unex-

pected. By serendipity, my body was projected into

the aftermath of a massive eviction: right at the edge

of a new resistance-in-the-making.Duringthose

early days, in mid-September 2014, I still had no

idea of what drove me to return to Vulturilor.

I simply kept going back there, every late afternoon,

either alone or with some friends from Carusel, a

local NGO, to help with the distribution of food or

second-hand clothes. However, I lacked a clear

sense of direction. Compared to the local grass-

roots activists of the Common Front for the Right

to Housing (FCDL), who were engaged in organiz-

ing the resistance camp in its politics and direct

actions, I was out-of-place. I was attracted to the

community’s uncanny resistance, but at the end of

the day, I did not know what to do. No one really

needed me there. The help I provided was limited,

the camera I always carried with me almost useless

and my Westernized persona (male, White, PhD-

carrying ethnographer) was insignificant.

Perhaps thanks to my ethnographic sensibility –

which essentially pushes me to hang around inter-

esting affections as much as Maliq’s ‘gypsy driver’

hangs onto the street – I persisted in showing up at

the camp, entertaining kids, bringing new friends

home to do their washing, as well as taking and

sharing pictures. By being there, I became somehow

part of the scenery and of its uncanny atmosphere,

and finally, one day of November 2014, something

powerful happened. Nicoleta Vis¸an, a working

mother who emerged as the informal leader of the

community’s resistance, approached me and said

she wanted to talk. More or less, this is how the

conversation unfolded

Nicoleta: You took many pictures, from the

beginning, right?

Me: Yes, I have a lot!

Nicoleta: And you have also video as well?

Me: Some, but I can make more.

Nicoleta: Here things are not moving. All it’s

the same. And we need people to

know. We need the media to know.

We need to create some noise, or

nothing will change!

Me: What do you have in mind, Nico?

Nicoleta: I don’t know. Why don’t you put

these pictures online? Why don’t you

send them to the media, the TV?

Me: Because they won’t publish them.

They are not interested in this stuff.

Corresponding author:

Michele Lancione, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, UK.

Email: m.lancione@sheffield.ac.uk

Dialogues in Human Geography

2019, Vol. 9(2) 216–219

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/2043820619850362

journals.sagepub.com/home/dhg

Nicoleta: So let’s do a Facebook page!Let’s do

a page where we write about life here,

and you put your pictures, and we’ll

tell everyone how we are living!

Me: This is a great idea!Let’s do a blog.

Nicoleta: Un jurnal?

Me: Da, un jurnal!

The first blog post was published just a few days

later at www.jurnaldinvulturilor50.org, where it can

still be read. It is because of the blog that I became

more systematic in my recollection of the visual

material that then made it into the film, filtered

through the collaborative approach to editing and

storytelling that I’ve tried to establish with Nicoleta

and the larger community. But Nico’s idea about the

blog did something more profound and important

for me: it gave my presence and my activism a scope

that I hadn’t been able to find on my own. Nicoleta

oriented me in the field of action and, by doing that,

she provided me with a way to be relevant – to be of

use in and for the struggle.

Embracing that proposi-

tion required effort and time, which were scarce

resources as I was simultaneously undertaking a

completely different fieldwork with drug users in

a different part of the city. But despite the stress it

generated and the essential burnout to which it led –

due to over-working and the emotional cost associ-

ated with engaged grass-roots activism – that

engagement is the most important thing that I ever

did as an activist and an ethnographer.

For the community members, myself and many

other comrades, the Vulturilor action-protest

became a ground where a collective transformative

political experience was forged, in everyday meet-

ings, public rallies, bureaucratic entanglements and

mundane chats and coffees’ around the camp’s fire.

During the 2 years of that resistance, and thanks to

that sustained and shared engagement, my way of

thinking and doing politics changed – and for the

better. The camp and its collective subject forced me

to explore and then embrace my anarchist, feminist

and anti-racist ethos in ways previously unknown to

me, by means of dialectical confrontations and col-

lective solidarities that came to define who I am, also

as a scholar, today.

A key element in this whole process was played

by the comrades of the FCDL, of which Nicoleta is

part. When they asked me to join the movement and

contribute to their fight through projects and actions

that still continue today, I realized what being part

of a movement truly means. It is about caring for the

endurance of a collective struggle. Such endurance

is not easy to undertake and it is not accommodat-

ing. It needs to be cultivated in ways that sometimes

require enormous energies and shared efforts. But

its meaning and impact are profound and lasting. I

am grateful to my comrade Ana Vilenica, with

whom I share another horizontally made project (the

newly launched Radical Housing Journal

), for

pointing to the notion of ‘accompliceship’ to

describe the radical nature of the ground upon which

the camp, the online blog, the film and many other

FCDL’s initiatives were (and are) assembled. That

shared orientation, as Ana so poignantly highlights

in her review, is the most important aspect of the

film and of my personal involvement with Vultur-

ilor and with similar struggles in Bucharest and

elsewhere.

To understand the origins of evictions like that of

Vulturilor, one has to dig through a complex history,

which is rendered clear and accessible by the won-

derful scholarship of friends like Chelcea (2006,

2012) and Vincze (2017). In his review of the film,

Liviu clarifies where these evictions are coming

from: it is not simply a matter of privatization but

of racial histories and powerful cultural doxas. As

he so brilliantly explains, it would be a mistake to

essentialize this processastheoutcomeofsome

strange, exotic, Eastern-European backdrop (see

also Popovici and Pop, 2016). What happened in

Vulturilor is no exception, but defines the current

urban condition for the many, globally. As Kather-

ine Brickell reminds us in her contribution to this

debate – and also as shown by her crucial work

(Brickell, 2014; Brickell et al., 2017) – evictions are

a lived and embodied matter defining the experience

of home for millions of urbanites worldwide. This is a

global urban context where displacement becomes

the modality through which the urban itself – and city

life – become assembled, in ways that encompass

usual tales of capitalist accumulation by disposses-

sion. This doesn’t mean that those tales, logics and

Lancione 217

processes aren’t at play, but it means that the experi-

ence and meaning of both evictions and related forms

of resistance are complex matter encompassing racia-

lized histories, patriarchal modalities of homing and

forms of everyday endurance that exceeds narratives

of annihilation or accounts pivoted around mere resi-

lience. As AbdouMaliq Simone shows in his scholar-

ship (Simone, 2004, 2018), it is only in paying

attention to the everyday (un)makings of dwelling

that one is be able to grasp what it means to live in

the displaced and displacing city, and what that por-

tends for the contemporary urban.

These notions already made sense to my scholar

self before going back to Romania, but I was able to

access them in full only through the lessons that I’ve

learned on the grounds of Vulturilor: by seeing what

the (un)making of home means when it is lived and

felt; by grasping the affective charge that can spark

from mundane acts of resistance; as well as by appre-

ciating how all these processes have genealogies that

cannot be taken for granted but need to be understood

contextually in order to be contested. The academic

work that I was able to produce through my involve-

ment with the community of Vulturilor (Lancione,

2017b, 2018) is fundamentally indebted to their fight

and to what I’ve exchanged with my FCDL com-

rades. In a sense, that work, the blog, the film, the

dozens of community screenings that we have been

organizing across Europe,

and the book that we are

now producing with the support of the Antipode

Foundation,

are not separated from the sharing of

the food on the pavement, or the long conversations

within the shacks, or on the open air of the street

(Figure 1). All together they form an ‘accomplice-

ship’, as Ana puts it, which takes different individual

forms and intensities, but in its collective expression

remains true to its shared politics.

That politics is the ‘undercommons’ that I would

like to occupy more and more in my academic prac-

tice (Moten and Harney, 2004), exploiting its privi-

leges and adapting them to the issue at stake. This

does not mean to diminish the importance of the

academic practice in itself but to truly embrace and

cultivate it as a political and intellectual praxis. The

latter is not an institutional given. Being a ‘public

intellectual’, in this sense, is more than simply

‘bringing the research back to the public’. If one is

serious about the academic work as a political and

intellectual praxis, being a public intellectual is

about the constitution of the public through the

research engagement: it is about, in other words, the

use of intellectual labour and privileges to work

with others in the making of a shared ground of

action, a public domain of struggle. In that making,

Figure 1. Nicoleta writing a blog post on my laptop, January 2015 (Photo by Michele Lancione).

218 Dialogues in Human Geography 9(2)

the academic needs to allow for his/her displace-

ment: as much as the struggle is transformative for

the other, it needs to be for oneself and related insti-

tutional backing. I am thankful to my comrades and

to the work of colleagues like Ana, Katherine, Liviu

and Maliq for providing a constant source of inspira-

tion to move this whole assemblage forward.

Notes

1. Account reconstructed from my diary entry of that day.

2. I discuss some of this in Lancione (2017a).

3. A new open-source, peer-reviewed, collectively man-

aged journal available at www.radicalhousingjournal.

org.

4. A constantly updated list is available at www.

ainceputploaia.com, where the film can also be seen.

5. Info at https://antipodefoundation.org/scholar-

activist-project-awards/201718-recipients/sapa-

1718-lancione/.

References

Brickell K (2014) ‘The Whole World Is Watching’: inti-

mate geopolitics of forced eviction and women’s acti-

vism in Cambodia. Annals of the Association of

American Geographers 104: 1256–1272.

Brickell K, Fernandez Arrigoitia M and Vasudevan A (eds)

(2017) Geographies of Forced Eviction. Dispossesion,

Violence, Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chelcea L (2006) Marginal groups in central places:

gentrification, property rights and post-socialist primi-

tive accumulation (Bucharest, Romania). In: Enyedi G

and Kova´cs Z (eds), Social Changes and Social Sus-

tainability in Historical Urban Centres: The Case of

Central Europe. Pecs: Centre for Regional Studies of

Hungarian Academy of Science, pp. 127–146.

Chelcea L (2012) The ‘housing question’ and the

state-socialist answer: city, class and state remaking

in 1950s Bucharest. International Journal of Urban

and Regional Research 36: 281–296.

Lancione M (2017a) Micropolitical entanglements: posi-

tioning and matter. Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space 35: 574–578.

Lancione M (2017b) Revitalising the uncanny: challen-

ging inertia in the struggle against forced evictions.

Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35:

1012–1032.

Lancione M (2018) The politics of embodied precarity.

Roma people and the fight for the right to housing in

Bucharest, Romania. Geoforum. DOI: 10.1016/j.geo-

forum.2018.09.008

Lancione M (2019) Weird exoskeletons: propositional

politics and the making of home in underground

Bucharest. International Journal of Urban and

Regional Research 43: 535–550.

Moten F and Harney S (2004) The University and the

Undercommons. Social Text 22: 101–115.

Popovici V and Pop O (2016) From over here, in the

periphery: a decolonial method for Romanian cultural

and political discourses. Lefteast. Available at http://

www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/from-over-here-in-the-

periphery-a-decolonial-method-for-romania/

Simone A (2004) For the City yet to Come. Changing

African Life in Four Cities. Durham: Duke University

Press.

Simone A (2018) Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endur-

ance in an Urban South. Cambridge: Polity press.

Vincze E (2017) The ideology of economic liberalism and

the politics of housing in Romania. Studia Universita-

tis Babes¸ -Bolyai Studia Europaea 62: 29–54.

Lancione 219

Victim, broker, activist, fixer: Surviving dispossession in working class Lahore

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2021

Recent debates in urban geography and anthropology have urged a rethinking of ‘marginal’ groups, viewing them not only as intimately connected to the state and its power, but also as offering a lens into alternate modes of dwelling, endurance and political change. We reflect upon the conceptual possibilities of such forms of endurance by examining how those residing in urban margins utilise, enable and inhabit connections to centres of power when faced with dispossession. Focusing on evictions that took place in Lahore (Pakistan) between 2015 and 2017, to acquire land for the Orange Line Metro Train, we follow the actions and narrations of one interlocutor, as he confronted the loss of his home. Unravelling how survival at the margins depends upon tactility and a continuous shifting between roles and modes of actions, we highlight the unique and particular ways in which evictions are lived and embodied. Including such shifting modes of negotiating in conceptualisations of the ‘political’ in the Global South does indeed offer potentialities, but we urge caution in over-reading into these possibilities. Shape-shifting and movement in embodied roles allows for a certain kind of thriving in precarity but rarely allows inhabitants – as they so aspire – to override it altogether.

Housing Movements and Care: Rethinking the Political Imaginaries of Housing

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2023

Care is a practice and form of labour making human survival and flourishing possible. This Symposium explores the place and work of care within housing movements, asking how care operates as a politics, an ethics, and a set of practices through which tenants survive—and ultimately seek to transform—the structural violence of capitalist housing systems. Situated in US cities with abiding associations with Blackness and indigeneity, papers in the Symposium examine housing movements that take care as the starting point. As we discuss in this introduction to the Symposium, in such movements, care operates as connective tissue across households and modes of difference; challenges relations of racial capitalism and settler colonialism that underlie dominant understandings of who deserves and can demand care; and drives calls for public care and experiments with non‐propertised forms of ownership. Housing systems are care infrastructures, making housing movements a vital place for care work.

Tenant Trouble: Resisting Precarity in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, 1968–1974

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Alexander Vasudevan

At the heart of this article is a detailed reconstruction of the complex history of activism in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The satellite estate on the outskirts of West Berlin was the largest housing project in West Germany in the 1960s and, for many residents, a space of increasing marginality and insecurity. During the same period, the neighborhood became a new “front” for student activists, who collaborated with local residents on a series of grassroots community initiatives. The article retraces the new forms of political action that brought students and residents together in the Märkisches Viertel while highlighting the different ways in which residents made sense of their own precarity. In so doing, the article seeks to recenter our understanding of precarity as a geographically grounded process rooted in long-standing patterns of exploitation, displacement, and vulnerability. It also connects a renewed interest in the everyday political geographies of activism, solidarity, and resistance with a historico-geographical commitment to the archive as a theoretically generative space. At stake here, as the article concludes, is a commitment to advancing our understanding of critical pedagogies and the challenges that accompany the development of emancipatory modes of geographical practice.

Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene

Book

Mar 2021

Edward Huijbens

This book explores the development and significance of an Earth-oriented progressive approach to fostering global wellbeing and inclusive societies in an era of climate change and uncertainty. Developing Earthly Attachments in the Anthropocene examines the ways in which the Earth has become a source of political, social, and cultural theory in times of global climate change. The book explains how the Earth contributes to the creation of a regenerative culture, drawing examples from the Netherlands and Iceland. These examples offer understandings of how legacies of non-respectful exploitative practices culminating in the rapid post-war growth of global consumption have resulted in impacts on the ecosystem, highlighting the challenges of living with planet Earth. The book familiarizes readers with the implied agencies of the Earth which become evident in our reliance on the carbon economy - a factor of modern-day globalized capitalism responsible for global environmental change and emergency. It also suggests ways to inspire and develop new ways of spatial sense making for those seeking earthly attachments. Offering novel theoretical and practical insights for politically active people, this book will appeal to those involved in local and national policy making processes. It will also be of interest to academics and students of geography, political science, and environmental sciences.

Changing mindsets

Chapter

Full-text available

Mar 2021

Edward Huijbens

Housing struggles in Romania and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE)

Article

Full-text available

May 2020

In this conversation we reflect on the struggle for housing in the country and in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), on the Western economic and State power on the East, on grassroot organising and more.

Weird Exoskeletons: Propositional Politics and the Making of Home in Underground Bucharest

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2018

Michele Lancione

The article explores the politics of life underground in Bucharest, Romania. It focuses on a tunnel passing under Bucharest's central train station, where a community of drug users and so‐called ‘homeless’ have made a long‐standing home, using a space that many others considered uninhabitable. Relying on extensive ethnographic observations and interviews undertaken within the tunnels, the article traces and illustrates the socio‐material entanglements characterizing life underground. It frames this assemblage of bodies, veins, syringes, substances and various relationships of power and affect, as a ‘propositional politics’ of home and life at the margins. Such a politics speaks of drug addiction and extreme marginalization, but also of a sense of belonging, reciprocal trust and care. In tracing such a politics, the article does not aim to romanticize the status of home in the underground or to treat it as the marginal antithesis of normative homeliness, but to reveal the ways in which an affirmative, self‐grounding politics of home emerges from the immanence of tunnel life within the fabric of the city. As such, the article contributes to debates around homing practices in conditions of uninhabitability and proposes a radical approach to the politics of life at the margins in the contemporary urban.

The Ideology of Economic Liberalism and the Politics of Housing in Romania

Article

Full-text available

Sep 2017

Eniko Vincze

The privatization of housing (linked to the privatization of means of production), respectively the creation of a new private housing fund, have been crucial for the emergence of capitalist property regime and market economy in Romania. The state withdrew from its position as a developer (of housing stock, but not only), however it did not remain passive, contrary, it assumed a central role in the creation of the (housing) market through modifying legislation and creating new institutions that administered this process. The article is addressing how the ideology of economic liberalism is working through housing politics as a core medium of the transformation of really existing socialism into neoliberal capitalism. In particular, it describes how - through privatization - this ideology creates material effects in the housing sector, i.e. accumulation on the one side and dispossession on the other side of the class structure. Moreover, the article insists that the housing stock’s privatization after 1990 happened in relation with the housing politics of state socialism, which allowed the existence of three types of property on housing. The creation of a new private housing fund was tied to post-socialist primitive accumulation resulted from the privatization of state enterprises and from the investment of profit obtained in the due process into real estate businesses. After some introductory ideas about ideologies and housing politics, the article discusses the privatization of housing and the creation of the private housing stock as central pillars of capitalist political economy. The description of some features of housing production and personal ownership of dwellings in state socialism is followed by an account on the promotion of privatization after 1990 by local-nationaltransnational actors using the example of the city of Cluj. The last chapter of the article concludes on the process of transformation of state socialism into neoliberal capitalism through the politics of housing sustained by the ideology of economic liberalism.

Micropolitical entanglements: Positioning and matter

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2017

Michele Lancione

Revitalising the uncanny: Challenging inertia in the struggle against forced evictions

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2017

Michele Lancione

Following the case of 100 Roma people evicted from their home in the centre of Bucharest in September 2014, the article looks at evictions and practices of resistance from the ground-up, without assuming a-priori what a politics of resistance may look like in Bucharest or elsewhere. The aim is to understand eviction and resistance as part of the same continuum of home unmaking-remaking, and to fully take into account the role of non-humans and urban atmospheres in the process. In this sense, the article analyses the case of Bucharest through two, interconnected, affective atmospheric: that of uncanniness, which allowed for the resistant Roma body to articulate its demands; and that of inertia, which emerged from the imbrication of home-less people’s street life and gradually rendered resistance more difficult to assemble. Paying attention to these post-human entanglements, the article critically contributes to academic and non-academic debates on occupation, displacement and urban activism, with the aim to strengthen our capacity to imagine alternative strategies of resistance.

The politics of embodied urban precarity: Roma people and the fight for housing in Bucharest, Romania

Article

Sep 2018
GEOFORUM

Michele Lancione

The paper provides a nuanced reading of the ways in which conditions of precarity arising from forced evictions are ‘made’ and ‘unmade’ in their unfolding, offering a way to appreciate their performative politics. Grounded in an activist ethnography of evictions against Roma people in Bucharest, Romania, the work provides a reading of urban precarity as not only an embodied product, but also a producer of the urban political. It advances an innovative methodology to investigate the politics of urban precarity, which focuses around four intersecting processes: the historical pre-makings of precarity; the discursive and material displacement of its in-making; embodied resistance as a form of un-making; and authoritarian responses as its re-making. Through its theoretical and methodological insights, the paper contributes to scholarship interested in a critical understanding of embodiment, politics, and urban precarity beyond the analysed case.

Geographies of Forced Eviction: Dispossession, Violence, Resistance

Book

Jan 2017

This book offers a close look at forced evictions, drawing on empirical studies and conceptual frameworks from both the Global North and South. It draws attention to arenas where multiple logics of urban dispossession, violence and insecurity are manifest, and where wider socio-economic, political and legal struggles converge. The authors highlight the need to apply emotional and affective registers of dispossession and insecurity to the socio-political and financial economies driving forced evictions across geographic scales. The chapters each consider the distinct urban logics of precarious housing or involuntary displacements that stretch across London, Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai and Colombo. A timely addition to existing literature on urban studies, this collection will be of great interest to policy makers and scholars of human geography, development studies, and sociology.

“The Whole World Is Watching”: Intimate Geopolitics of Forced Eviction and Women's Activism in Cambodia

Article

Nov 2014

Katherine Brickell

Through fourteen in-depth interviews1 conducted in February 2013 with women from Boeung Kak Lake—a high-profile community under threat in Phnom Penh—this article argues that the occurrence of, and activism against, forced eviction is an embodiment of “intimate geopolitics.” The article demonstrates the manifold relationship that forced eviction reflects and ferments between homes, bodies, the nation-state, and the geopolitical transformation of Southeast Asia. Forced eviction is framed as a geopolitical issue, one that leads to innermost incursions into everyday life, one that has spurred on active citizenship and collective action evidencing the injustices of dispossession to diverse audiences, and one that has rendered female activists’ intimate relationships further vulnerable. In doing so, it charts how Boeung Kak Lake women have rewritten the political script in Cambodia by publicly contesting the inevitability accorded to human rights abuses in the post-genocide country.

The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses

Article

Jun 2004
Soc Text

Social Text 22.2 (2004) 101-115 "To the university I'll steal, and there I'll steal," to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university, into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of what Jacques Derrida calls the onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with and thereby erased by it. It is not teaching then that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as...

The Housing Question' and the State-Socialist Answer: City, Class and State Remaking in 1950s Bucharest

Article

Mar 2012

Liviu Chelcea

Housing nationalization as a solution to urban inequalities has a long history in European social thought. This article describes housing nationalization in a state‐socialist context. Using a political economy perspective and relying on recently released archival material about housing in 1950s Romania, I argue that nationalization may be regarded as a special type of urban process. Nationalization raised the occupancy rate and intensified the usage of existing housing, desegregated centrally located neighborhoods, turned some residential space into office space for state institutions, facilitated the degradation of the existing housing stock and gradually produced a socialist gentry. Aside from similarities with other state‐socialist nationalizations from the same period, Romanian nationalization resembled the housing policies of other statist regimes. The data also suggest that, even in the context of revolutionary change, the state is a sum of multiple, often diverging projects, rather than a coherent actor. Résumé Nationaliser le logement pour résoudre les inégalités urbaines n'est pas une solution nouvelle dans la pensée sociale européenne. Cette option est décrite ici dans le contexte du socialisme d'État. Adoptant l'angle de l'économie politique et s'appuyant sur des archives récemment rendues publiques concernant le logement en Roumanie dans les années 1950, cette étude affirme qu'on peut considérer la nationalisation comme un type particulier de processus urbain. Elle a élevé le taux d'occupation et intensifié l'usage de l'habitat disponible, atténué la ségrégation dans les quartiers centraux, transformé une partie de l'espace résidentiel en espace de bureaux pour des institutions étatiques, facilité la dégradation du parc de logements existant, et généré peu à peu une aristocratie socialiste. Hormis des similitudes avec les nationalisations dans d'autres États socialistes à la même époque, la démarche roumaine a ressemblé aux politiques publiques appliquées au logement dans des régimes étatiques différents. Les données suggèrent aussi que, même dans le contexte d'un changement révolutionnaire, l'État est un agrégat de projets multiples, souvent divergents, et non un acteur homogène.

For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

Article