Embedded Cities, Excluded Citizens: Governance, Housing, and Rroma Marginality in Post-Socialist Romania

This dissertation examines how local governance conditions social housing policy and the lived experience of Rroma in Romania. Focusing on Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca, it asks: To what extent have European Union housing initiatives improved Rroma access to adequate and affordable housing, and where have they fallen short in practice? The study traces the translation of European housing directives into national legislation and local implementation through comparative ethnography with Rroma residents, local officials, and NGO practitioners engaged in housing policy, combined with observation in NGO and housing-office settings and analysis of national housing laws and city applications. From this evidence, I advance an embedded cities typology paired with a four-mechanism lens that links multilevel policy transfer to the lived politics of belonging. In insulative cities, rigid bureaucracy and institutional fragmentation limit access. In cooperative cities, partnerships with NGOs enable flexibility but rarely deliver structural reform. I evaluate both models through four governance mechanisms—eligibility criteria, bureaucratic discretion, spatial allocation, and NGO substitution—to show how local capacity and political incentives steer administrations toward closure or outward-facing arrangements that outsource responsibility. The analysis identifies a survivalist habitus through which Rroma engage in intra-ethnic boundary work, using distinctions of behavior, housing status, and respectability to secure scarce resources under constant scrutiny. Sector-level eligibility screens in Bucharest and points-based rankings in Cluj reorder the queue differently yet both privilege perceived respectability over greatest need. Housing governance organizes more than shelter; it orders belonging. The dissertation concludes that local governance, more than European policy itself, determines who is included. Decisions about qualification, spatial placement, and institutional responsibility set access to social housing and define the symbolic boundaries of urban citizenship. These findings explain why EU instruments yield uneven inclusion and clarify what would have to change locally to alter that pattern.

Author dc:creator

• Patricia Karina Hajek (23292064)

• Public Administration
• Urban and Regional Planning
• Urban Politics
• Ethnic and Racial Studies
• Public Policy
• European Studies
• Post-Socialist Studies
• Comparative Politics
• Political Science

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright
• Open Access after 2028-01-01

DOI dc:identifier

https://doi.org/10.25417/uic.31451758.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/31451758