Closed Spaces, Restricted Places: Marginalisation of Roma in Europe

Roma and Gypsy-travellers are amongst the most marginalised groups in modern European society. This paper uses the experience of Czech Roma in order to examine issues of spatial regulation and exclusion. It seeks to determine the processes by which they are pushed to the edges of society and how these processes are changing as their circumstances, and those of European society as a whole, are altered by processes of globalisation and the dominance of 'common sense' rationality. It examines the spatial forms of regulation that affect them, in the context of the creation of a division between mobile and restricted subjects. Specific examples used are: ghettoisation; racist violence; and restrictions on migration in the form of regional zoning practised by the European Union. The division between mobile and restricted subjects is important in understanding how and why groups that violate the spatial order of modernity and post-modernity are rejected and marginalised. These processes of spatial regulation and exclusion affect other marginalised groups in Europe such as refugees, asylum-seekers and low-wage labour migrants.