Jasmine Arpagian

In recent years, many of Bucharest's residential properties registered as historic landmarks were vacated, which in some instances led to the eviction of families informally occupying these properties. Reasons provided by the municipality included projects to consolidate against seismic risk, rehabilitate for historic preservation, and address concerns about public health. The analysis presented here explores the municipality's official public policy discourse around the practice of squatting historic monuments and the squatters themselves. The dominant discourse homogenizes squatters as criminals and vandals of cultural heritage. Excerpts from field interviews with informal occupants are presented in order to identify discrepancies between lived realities and representations of squatting. Findings from this study provide an alternative interpretation to the dominant discourse around this housing practice, a version that highlights the multidimensional insecurity and social inequalities experienced by squatters.

Housing evictions are understudied from a psychogeographic perspective. With this paper, we use Lauren Berlant's idea of living in ellipses and Donald W. Winnicott's object relations theory of potential spaces to help understand the pushing out, dissociations, leaps and abridgements that categorize housing evictions. There is something impulsive, capricious and fickle about the idiosyncratic and inconsistent violence of evictions. We argue that there is a generative potential for transformation and change through mutual aid, which facilitates Berlant's idea of falling apart without ceasing to exist. With this paper, we highlight what displacement does - its affects - amongst Roma in central Bucharest using an elliptical approach. We argue that although the consequences of evictions are appalling and horrific, there are often opportunities for new associations through mutual aid.

The eviction of families from historically nationalized and recently restituted houses in Romania is tied in complicated ways to postsocialist transitional justice policies. Delayed enactment of restitution legislation and inconsistent application leave families, and neglected houses, in a precarious state. As families remain in place, they create a politics that pushes against dispossession. Evidence of this push comes from a study of Roma families, who are arguably the most marginalized of Romania's low-income peoples. Theoretically, we draw on Butler and Athanasiou's understanding of precarity and dispossession and Askins's emotional citizenry, from which we find a glimmer of hope in the everyday performance of the political among threatened families.