Maintaining spatial and social order: the role of housing development in governing urban margins

Abstract

This paper investigates processes of spatially ordered marginality of Roma in a former industrial town in Hungary. The analysis focuses on local poverty governance tactics and practices that aim to maintain social and spatial order through the regulation and selective displacement of Roma within the city. These practices of controlling Roma marginality are clear manifestations of the spatialization and racialization of poverty and I argue that spatial containment constitutes a new mode of poverty governance that aims to temper local tensions and cement local power. Moreover, these local policies reflect continuity from socialist era practices in terms of governing Roma marginality through disciplining and displacement. In the present context, EU-funded urban rehabilitation projects represent a vital local resource. While ostensibly targeting social integration, the local government in question has used these resources to promote the mobility of ‘deserving’ vulnerable groups and control ‘undeserving’ marginalized Roma through enclosure. Those who are seen as undeserving are racialized and subject to punitive containment while the ‘deserving’ enjoy material support and a sense of belonging to local society, provided they accept the conditions dictated by local government actors. In this way, the emphasis on individual responsibility masks the structural deficiencies of social housing and related social issues and perpetuates different forms of racism.

Keywords:

• poverty governance
• urban margins
• Roma
• housing development
• street-level bureaucrats‌

Introduction

Urban (re)development is often linked to displacement and different forms of forced mobility in a variety of contexts and spatial scales (Elliott-Cooper, Hubbard, and Lees 2020). Roma communities throughout Europe have been among the most affected by such processes. In the case of Central and East European (CEE) countries, scholars argue that neoliberal social and economic policies have spatialized and racialized poverty (Picker 2017; Vincze 2019), resulting in urban and rural ghettos inhabited mainly by Roma (Ladányi and Szelényi 2006; Szalai and Zentai 2014). Studies from CEE countries provide ample evidence of the gentrification-led displacement of Roma and other impoverished social groups as a result of investment flows into real estate markets and capital accumulation strategies. These new investments have produced marked patterns of socio-spatial polarization and, compared to other European countries, highly uneven housing provision and quality (i.e. Jelinek 2010; Czirfusz et al. 2015; Vincze and Zamfir 2019).

Despite this robust research background, marginalization processes in peripheral CEE cities are less well understood. Many of these localities are economically depressed, distant from market investment flows and not subject to housing gentrification to any large degree (Pósfai and Nagy 2018). And yet, in many of these cities the displacement of Roma families continues apace, suggesting that non-market mechanisms of marginalization play a significant role. Wacquant (2009) has directed attention to the role of public sector actors and their discretionary practices in producing spatial margins, as reflected in procedures, everyday practices and tactics that ensure the control of a given social group over others. At the same time, however, context matters and a deeper analysis of political and social histories of displacement is needed for a better understanding of their embeddedness in the everyday policies and practices of local poverty governance (see Hirsh, Eizenberg, and Jabareen 2020). Welfare systems are also highly contingent upon specific local socioeconomic and cultural contexts, resulting in very different actor constellations and policy preferences (Andreotti, Mingione, and Polizzi 2012). For example, Arbaci (2019) has shown for Southern European countries that national and local housing provision practices work together to specifically promote home ownership and thus marginalize the urban poor.

My research addresses existing gaps in the study of Roma marginalization in CEE through an analysis of spatial interventions that are conditioned by national welfare policies but ultimately shaped and refined by local institutions and street-level bureaucrats to meet local needs and social histories (Andreotti, Mingione, and Polizzi 2012). In doing this, I will analyse local discretionary practices, those negotiation processes that do not just target the regulation of spatially ordered marginality but also challenge it on an everyday basis (Thieme, Lancione, and Rosa 2017). The persistent analysis of the histories of displacement through disciplinary control of local governments (Lancione 2019) allows for a better understanding of the process of displacement as it is embedded in the everyday policies and practices of local poverty governance.

Thus, while acknowledging the process of ghettoization as theorized by Wacquant (2011) and Picker (2017), I draw attention to variations in the urban geographies of marginalized Roma communities (Virág and Váradi 2018; Vincze 2019; Anghel and Alexandrescu 2023) driven by local powerholders and implemented by street-level bureaucrats (see Lipsky 1980; Brodkin 2015). In this specific case, the central issue relates to the intersection of ethnicity and social status (Szalai 2020; Vincze and Zamfir 2019) and I argue that a primary objective of the local government in question is to maintain accepted spatial orders and social and class positions by exercizing control over the mobility of marginalized social groups and the spaces they inhabit. This is manifested in the categorisation and labelling of the population living at the margins as Roma and non-Roma citizens and, in the sense of Gans (1994), the ‘deserving’ versus the ‘undeserving’ poor.

The case study site is a mid-size former mining town that has undergone a process of profound transformation emblematic of multiple economic and social crises and subsequent population loss. The town has a significant marginalized population (Koós 2020) and doesnt receive any investment capital flows, including into the housing stock (Pósfai and Nagy 2018). As a result, EU-funded programmes are for all intents and purposes the only available resource for urban development and housing initiatives (Pósfai and Jelinek 2019). Like other towns and cities the study site is situated at the bottom of the scalar hierarchy and strives for any investment to ‘catch up’ with more developed ones in terms of investment. The urban development projects promise growth and further capital investment while displacing or making ‘invisible’ marginalized groups (see Vilenica et al. 2021). The question is how poverty governance, as a local public policy remit, functions under such conditions and, more specifically, how poverty governance interacts with policies targeted at neighbourhood regeneration and aimed at improving the housing situation of the marginalized.

The empirical findings of the research show that local authorities reorganize urban space through implementing various development programmes with two specific objectives in mind. On the one hand, through producing and reproducing segregated places within the town they maintain social and symbolic borders between a declining lower-middle class and the marginalized Roma. On the other hand, through development and public works programmes the local government privileges those seen as deserving of support. ‘Deserving’ groups are provided not only with affordable social housing and livelihoods. Moreover, they are symbolically and spatially distinguished from undesirable persons, thereby promoting their sense of security and the promise of belonging to local society but expecting them to accept the obligations prescribed by local actors. Following Goldberg (2015), Powell and Van Baar (2019) refer to this process as the ‘racism of exploitation’, when Roma people were ‘racialized within the society to guarantee that they have a place in it, even though they frequently have to live in highly precarious conditions’ (Powell and Van Baar 2019, 93). The way that local government has sustained control over deprived territories and populations has created different forms of segregated places ranging between mixed ethnic neighbourhoods to the controlled spaces of the ghetto (Marcuse 1997; Wacquant 2011) within which local authorities can filter and circulate marginalized families according to their perceived deservingness and maintain their precarious situation or insecure home, even for those who are living in social housing in a mixed ethnic neighbourhood.

Discussion proceeds as follows. In the first section I will provide a conceptual framework that highlights the ways in which the reproduction of spatial margins and poverty governance is embedded within welfare regimes and constituted in the practices of local actors. This conceptual approach is subsequently developed in the case study which focuses on the socio-spatial processes and institutional arrangements that condition the room for manoeuvre of local government in managing Roma marginality. My perspective is historical in scope; I analyze local government practices as part of a long-term process of displacing Roma families, producing as well as reproducing urban margins through a series of development programmes and the housing policies of local government.

Understanding the governance of urban margins: some theoretical considerations

The point of departure for this study is an understanding of spatially ordered marginality as a product of broader socio-economic processes and governance mechanisms that reproduce social inequalities as well as socio-political and cultural preferences that inform policy decisions. Consequently, the (re)production of spatial margins is embedded in a multi-scalar process conditioned by the features of the given welfare state and local political and economic contexts. It is also rooted in governance traditions and the social histories of local society (Arbaci 2019). I thus analyze the (re)production of urban margins as the ‘spatial technologies of displacement and destitution’ (Vincze 2019, 73) which are ‘produced and persist in relation to the particular roles of the state, access to urban services and labour market, and everyday habitation of the city’ (Thieme, Lancione, and Rosa 2017, 129) That is, I analyze spatial margins and their (re)production from a structural perspective while also focusing on governance mechanisms that operate between the national and local state as well as between the local state and the various local groups.

Seim (2017, 451) has stated that the socio-spatial regulation of marginalized groups is ‘less concerned with eradicating poverty and more concerned with maintaining the poor by processing them into docile and industrious subjects’. Instead of banishing the unwanted poor, neoliberal poverty governance contains and controls them through ghettoization, operating as a ‘joint action of the punitive welfare-turned-workfare and a diligent and belligerent penal bureaucracy’ (Wacquant 2009, 290). This form of poverty governance represents an important shift in how public policies govern social marginality. As part of the management of marginality, previous modes of social control have been complemented by paternalist approaches to welfare provision in areas such as public housing and social assistance (Baker, Evans, and Hennigan 2020). Moreover, the state has extended its capacity through privatization, outsourcing and collaborating with third-sector organizations and market actors (Soss, Fording, and Schram 2011). As a result, local poverty governance involves complementary practices that include, among others, controlling, containment and care through charitable sustenance and welfare assistance (Baker, Evans, and Hennigan 2020; Evans and DeVerteuil 2018). As Evans and DeVerteuil (2018, 308) indicate, local-level poverty governance is achieved through ‘a mixture of caring, curing and controlling institutions’. These institutions are operated jointly by the state and local powerholders as a means to maintain social order by regulating and controlling marginality through spatial containment.

In implementing poverty governance policies and development programmes, the daily interactions and encounters of street-level bureaucrats with needy persons are highly relevant (Lipsky 1980). Street-level bureaucrats operate as an interface between the government and individuals and mediate policy formation and broader social and political dynamics. These relationships are particularly important when formal policy is ambiguous, involves multiple (even conflicting) objectives and street-level practitioners can exercise discretion in their work (Lipsky 1980; Brodkin 2012). However, such discretionary decisions can significantly impact their clients’ lives through their interactions. Studies based on ethnographic research illuminate how social status and ethnicity are negotiated at the street level, which may be understood as part of a broader political dynamic of status construction (and reconstruction) (Brodkin 2012; 2015).

The emphasis on individual responsibility of marginalized people in the decisions of street-level bureaucrats renders invisible the social problem of the marginalized people and the structural conditions that reproduce inequalities. (Wacquant 2009). Powell and Van Baar (2019) have linked the categorization of marginalized people as ‘useful’ or ‘harmful’, or in other words ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’, to their (in)visibility and stigmatization. They follow Golberg's (2015) typology and emphasize that racism can take different forms, ranging from racism of exploitation to racism of exclusion. Racist forms of exploitation occur when racialized individuals are seen as useful, that is, as ‘deserving’ members of society, who contribute to improving their situation. In this case, they are still racialized within society and made invisible. Conversely, those who are less powerful and more marginalized are often seen as undeserving and their racial characteristics are emphasized. This type of racism is expulsive in nature, as it deploys control and forced displacement.

The Hungarian context

The spatial segregation of Roma in Hungary has long historical roots, and it has been constituted through various social, development and poverty governance policies. Indeed, the spatial segregation and racialization of Roma are not new phenomena in CEE countries. Comparative studies describe the various patterns of marginalized Roma neighbourhoods according to the prevalence and strength of their social and spatial exclusion and reflect the various levels of heterogeneity and stratification as well as the geographical and linguistic positions Roma occupy in different CEE countries (i.e. Szalai and Zentai 2014; Berescu 2019). These processes are always embedded in various pathways of welfare and housing transformation as well as policies that have targeted Roma communities (Berescu, Petrovic, and Teller 2013).

In the 1970s, two-thirds of Roma lived in segregated ‘Gypsy colonies’ situated at the edge of settlements or on the outskirts of cities in Hungary (Kemény 1976). Large-scale Roma neighbourhood programmes implemented between 1965 and 1985 sought to transform this situation and still determine the spatial distribution of Roma families within localities (Berey 1990). Three waves of cross-sectional research on the housing conditions of the Roma highlight a controversial process. While the housing conditions of Roma have significantly improved over the last four decades, and the number of colonies and informal settlements has radically decreased, the spatial segregation of Roma has further intensified (Kemény and Janky 2004), and the patterns of spatial exclusion have changed. The decades-long displacement of Roma, in parallel with the elimination of their settlements on the outskirts of cities/villages, have made it possible for the state and its institutions to control and discipline Roma communities. In retrospect, we can argue that policies targeted at Roma communities were always interconnected with development processes and the perception of Roma as a ‘security problem’ (see Van Baar 2017). While securitization exposes the Roma to eviction and displacement, development has contributed less to poverty alleviation and more to their governance and the maintenance of social order, often serving to govern poverty through segregation (van Baar 2018).

In the semi-peripheries of Europe, CEE countries followed diverse paths of welfare restructuring during the 1990s (Bohle and Greskovits 2012). In Hungary, the embedded neo-liberal welfare regime was transformed into a punitive workfare state after the economic crisis of 2008 (Szikra 2014; Vidra 2018). This transformation resulted in a massive restructuring of welfare regimes, drastic cuts in social spending and the rolling out of large-scale punitive workfare programmes (Szikra 2014; Ferge 2017). Instead of helping ameliorate poverty and decrease social polarization, these measures have solidified the boundaries between the ‘losers of transformation’ (people experiencing poverty trapped and controlled by welfare institutions) and those who are successfully accommodated within liberal market processes. Thus, as Szalai (2013) has stated, a bifurcated welfare system has emerged with two distinct subsystems for poor and wealthier families. This system was reinforced after 2010 with a reverse redistribution system (Szikra 2018) which provides tax allowances and other subsidies to middle-class families while eroding benefits and allowances for low-income families. In this punitive and bifurcated welfare regime, the narrative and institutional separation between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ people (Gans 1994) and the castigation of ‘undeservingness’ and ‘welfare-dependency’ is associated with a paternalist neoliberal poverty governance that seeks to shape people into ‘good’ citizens (Soss, Fording and Schram 2011), this again paving the way for the continuing racialization of poverty and blaming of unemployed Roma for their social position (Vidra 2018).

Hungary’s social housing policy is embedded within and should be analysed in relation to this bifurcated welfare system. Pósfai and Jelinek (2019) discuss housing policy interventions and their embeddedness within this system that provides different housing tracks for social groups. One has promoted homeownership since the 1980s (Misetics 2017), forcing the middle class to accept mortgage debts with state subsidies. Marginalized social groups are on the other track, with many living in their own houses in poverty with eroded housing maintenance benefits, and the luckier ones in residualized social housing (Hegedüs 2013). That is, ‘the potential users of social housing have been divided into vulnerable groups that compete for housing crumbs’ (Vilenica et al. 2021, 6). Social housing is usually situated in dilapidated and segregated parts of localities that have been a target of EU-funded territorial investment since the mid-2000s.

The Hungarian government was, in fact, the first among the CEE countries to officially commit to providing resources for improving segregated Roma neighbourhoods and creating social housing in 2002 (Méreiné-Berki, Málovics, and Creţan 2021). However, the policy measures contradicted this commitment and the national housing policies that promoted homeownership. Throughout the last three decades, there was only one attempt to increase public housing. Between 2000 and 2005 the so-called State Supported Rental Housing Programme was introduced, which aimed to encourage local governments to build, purchase or renovate public housing with state subsidies. Thus, the allocated budget was dwarfed by other housing subsidies that targeted homeownership of middle-class families and added roughly 5–8% of public housing (Czirfusz and Jelinek 2021). After 2012, the national government linked social housing investments to the EU-funded development programmes aimed at upgrading or eliminating segregated neighbourhoods. While these developmental programmes left ample space for manoeuvres for local implementers to decide on relocation policies and distribute vulnerable families between different neighbourhoods (Keller and Virág 2021) or even displace them (Havasi 2018), the scarce resources were not sufficient to restructure the homeownership rate (Hegedüs et al. 2016). However, in line with other experiences (Bolt, Phillips, and Van Kempen 2010; Cortese et al. 2014), these interventions—not only in Hungary but in other CEE countries as well—have often been at odds with local development visions and intentions and have instead often led to the displacement and stigmatization of vulnerable social groups. Moreover, these measures have had perverse effects on poverty governance; they made a false promise to Roma communities that they would ‘catch up’ with the more developed communities in improving neighbourhoods, but they have instead promoted segregation to contain social and racial tensions (Van Baar 2017; Vincze 2019; Virág and Jelinek 2019).

Methodology and data collection

Qualitative data were collected as a part of a four-year research project entitled ‘Governing urban marginality in shrinking cities’ and carried out in four localities. between 2016–2020, The research was supported by the Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office (NKFIH). The case study selection was based on a secondary analysis of the national censuses and supplementary statistical databases. The research team collected empirical data at the local level through anthropological fieldwork and employing methods including semi-structured qualitative interviews, focus groups, and the collection and analysis of secondary data. We operated as a research group with joint fieldwork and shared interviews and field notes (Jelinek and Virág 2020).

As part of investigating poverty governance, the local level (town) was conceived as a Strategic Action Field (SAF) shaped by different territorial and institutional arrangements and actor perspectives embedded in specific power relations. Here reference is made to Fligstein and McAdam (2012, 9), who define a SAF as ‘a constructed mesolevel social order in which actors (who can be individual or collective) are attuned to and interact with one another based on shared (which is not to say consensual) understandings about the purposes of the field, relationships to others in the field (including who has power and why), and the rules governing legitimate action in the field’. In this way, we examined the practices and discourses of actors connected to poverty governance and how these actors interpret, justify, and give meaning to their experiences. Based on interviews with actors with different social positions we also identified tensions and conflicts between different perspectives and approaches regarding our research concerns.

The case study work relied on long-term fieldwork and allowed us to track the changes within the locality. During fieldwork several dozen interviews were conducted with leaders and street-level bureaucrats of local public institutions (kindergartens, schools, and a cultural centre), local councillors and members of the Roma minority self-government, the project managers and social workers of different development programmes, and employees of the public works programme.¹ The interviews were complemented by participant observations completed during public events and in relation to the everyday work of institutions.

Qualitative data collection during fieldwork focused on the formal and informal practices, experiences, and negotiations needed to establish and maintain a trust-based relationship with local powerholders and street-level bureaucrats. The foundation of these trust-based relations was ensured from the very beginning when we guaranteed the anonymity of the locality in the research. This was of great importance to local leaders due to the current political situation in Hungary.

Changing conditions of governing marginality—the case study

From the racialized outskirt to the neighbourhood of urban decay. The changing socio-spatial position of Roma

The town can be considered a typical product of global industrialization tendencies after World War II. Its population in 1949 remained below 6,000, even after nearby villages were annexed. The forced and planned development of a mine and associated industries later attracted a growing number of workers to the town from various parts of the country. As a result, the number of residents increased to 23,000 by 1960 and 30,000 by 1980.

The towns spatial structure is determined by the densely built urban centre constructed in the 1960s and the former workers’ colonies that were built close to the industrial plants around the town. The welfare policy traditions of industrial firms, such as the provision of housing in the form of workers’ colonies, can be traced back to the end of the 19th century (Nagy 2012). A significant part of the town was built during socialism; apartments of various sizes, quality, and spatial locations were built for workers who moved there from various areas of the country and received them as quasi-welfare provisions. The apartments were provided and maintained by the factory and later by the local government and were allocated according to the workers’ positions within the factory. Unskilled workers at the bottom of the factory hierarchy typically received very basic housing in districts further away from the town centre—in general, barracks, and temporary structures built for construction workers in the 1960s. In contrast, skilled workers were provided with modern prefabricated apartments in the town centre. Thus, in the socialist period, the housing allocation process increased rather than decreased social inequality, favouring higher-income and more influential social groups 
(Szelényi 1983).

Within this social and spatial order, Roma workers occupied the lowest position. Even in the 1960s, most lived in the racialized, informal Roma settlement outside the town, located ‘in the forest’ with approximately one thousand inhabitants. Rather than the romantic image of the Roma family and community life as portrayed in the interviewees’ narratives, this was an informal settlement where Roma families had lived for decades, and where further precarious families who arrived from the countryside could only find accommodation. In line with the Roma development policy of the socialist regime (Berey 1990), this settlement was gradually eliminated from the end of the 1960s onwards, and most families were relocated closer to their workplaces. Also, their tenant status in the local housing system was formalized. Thus, with this relocation, the previously informal and racialized housing position became a formal tenancy of the local housing system. Since the workers’ colonies to where Roma families were displaced were far away from the city centre and urban amenities, whoever was able to move to the city did so; thus, after a while, only the lowest-status families remained there. In parallel with this selective migration, the colonies and their inhabitants were stigmatized, thereby connecting poverty, Roma ethnicity, and the deteriorating built environment. Thus, these former workers’ colonies were transformed into racialized Roma colonies in public discourse and perceptions.

During the labour shortages of the 1960s, the majority of able-bodied workers, both Roma and non-Roma, were employed in the mines with no regard to ethnicity. Due to their generally lower levels of educational attainment, Roma men were typically employed as unskilled workers in unhealthy, often dangerous physical circumstances. In the mines, reliability and disciplined work determined everyday relations, which after a while—even if only temporarily and connected only to the workplace—sometimes prevailed over ethnic categories. Underground, the role of Roma ethnicity was not accentuated and did not reflect the segregation that existed on the surface.

At our case study site, the gradual closure of the mine and related industries at the end of the 1990s was accompanied by the recultivation of the former mining area, including the buildings in the workers’ colonies. This meant that the buildings were demolished, and the local government, as the owner of the social housing in the workers’ colonies, was obliged to provide social housing for their tenants in other parts of town. As one former town leader summarized, ‘As a municipality, we are dealing with the burdens of that which once created the city’s prosperity’. The local government had to provide social housing only to families with legal rental contracts; families with suspended rent contracts due to arrears or those living informally had to find their own housing, often resulting in moving away from the town. The relocation process of the families with legal rent contracts was coordinated and managed by the social affairs department of the municipality and relied on the knowledge and experience of a church-based organization that had engaged in pastoral and voluntary social work with the families in the Roma colony for years. The social affairs department used this knowledge to decide who would move to which part of the town, i.e. who should be moved to the margins of the town and who deserved a better quality apartment in the town centre. Despite the strictly controlled mobility of the Roma families, their appearance in the town centre was a living event in the interview narratives with citizens and local stakeholders, most of whom connected the decay of the town and the town centre with this act of relocation.

‘This was a local political decision — that they brought them from the outskirts to the city, although they were fine there. They went to collect mushrooms; they had animals; they had their own community norms; they were fine there.’ (municipal expert)

The phenomenon of the relocation of territorial stigma helps us understand the existence of ‘disreputable places’ and the practices through which power relations are (re)produced. In our case, the territorial stigma previously associated with the colony was relocated to the town centre and upset the decades-long spatial order of the town based on the socio-spatial enclosure and the control of Roma.

The situation in the decaying inner part of town is complicated by demographic change. Since the peak of the urban population in the 1980s, the number of residents of the town has been constantly decreasing, approximately returning to the level it was in the 1960s. This pessimistic situation can be explained by decades-long outmigration that affects almost every family, which started in the 1980s with the selective outmigration of well-to-do, educated, younger people and the everyday experience of international labour migration that increased after the economic crisis in 2008. Due to the decades-long population loss, the large housing estates in the city centre that were built during the socialist era for middle-class, skilled workers of large industrial plants and the intelligentsia working in the communal institutions of the town emptied out, reinforcing the feeling of a ‘ghost’ neighbourhood. To mitigate the effect of demographic shrinkage, the local government applied for state funds to transform an empty local school into social housing.² Unfortunately, the designated school building in the town centre was in the neighbourhood where the Roma families had been relocated a few years before, and which had a deteriorating reputation. Therefore, only impoverished families were willing to move to these social housing flats, which increased the concentration of impoverished, mainly Roma families, and established the largest marginalized neighbourhood (with around 800 inhabitants) in the town centre. Recently, this part of the town has become highly stigmatized but situationally ethnicized—it is typically associated with a deviant and criminal lifestyle: ‘Only those stayed there who really had nowhere else to go.’ (social worker)

Re-establishing the socio-spatial order: everyday practices of local government

After the local election in 2010, the leadership of the local authority changed, and the new local government had to deal with the socioeconomic consequences of the 2008 global economic crisis that affected not only the poorest and least educated social groups but also the local middle class (Branyiczki and Gábos 2019). Indebted families previously pushed into homeownership are trapped in the frozen local housing market, and more and more people are seeking social housing or other housing support. Meanwhile, the consequences of the failures of the previous government’s spatial policy upended the decades-long socio-spatial order of the town and some segregated neighbourhoods at the edge of the town became increasingly dilapidated and in need of urgent spatial intervention.

The local government has limited room for manoeuvre to tackle this complex social issue. On the one hand, the local government is dependent on the global and domestic economic environment and actors; on the other hand, local governance practices are embedded in the domestic institutional environment and conditioned by the recent recentralization and institutional reshuffling of public policymaking and development policies (Keller and Virág 2021). The recentralization process has dried up local government budgets, especially in peripheral settings (as in our case), where the local government has little to no tax income (Jelinek 2020). Since 2010, only two dedicated public sector resources have been available to this peripheral, financially bereft local municipality for tackling social issues. One of these is the centrally financed but locally administered public work programme (Szikra 2014; Vidra 2018) that has emerged as a key instrument of poverty governance. This programme, which often operates in terms of punitive workfare, facilitates control over marginalized groups and serves the national government’s goal of restoring threatened social hierarchies in peripheral regions (Szombati 2018). The other source of support comes from EU-funded development programmes for social inclusion, such as urban regeneration and neighbourhood renewal interventions that potentially provide opportunities for families living in segregated neighbourhoods (Pósfai and Jelinek 2019; Keller and Virág 2021). Lacking alternative resources, the local government has sought involvement in as many neighbourhood development interventions as possible.

Reshaping segregated places through urban development projects

The local authority has decades of experience reshaping the urban space by eliminating slums caused by dangerous housing conditions and relocating residents to other neighbourhoods using various urban development instruments for a range of purposes. Within this highly controlled mobility process, the amount and spatial position of municipality-owned social housing is of great importance.³

After 2010, a new series of urban rehabilitation programmes financed by an EU framework programme allowed the local government to reshape the city structure and re-establish the former spatial and social order. While at the national level, municipalities were reluctant to participate in urban regeneration programmes aimed at targeted upgrading or eliminating segregated neighbourhoods and constructing social housing (Hegedüs et al. 2016), the case study municipality participated in all such tenders. As a result, the city obtained about 70 new municipal housing units outside of the segregated neighbourhoods. Moreover, it secured funding to refurbish the municipal housing stock concentrated in segregated neighbourhoods.

The city has been actively involved in these development programmes for several reasons. The grant schemes associated with these development programmes were formulated on the national level using a one-size-fits-all methodology. Fortunately, the available funding was commensurate with the size of the segregated neighbourhoods within the town, which were scattered throughout the city and had populations of only a few hundred. Moreover, for financially challenged local governments, these transfers created the possibility to fiscally back out from supporting people affected by housing poverty (Pósfai and Jelinek 2019) and temporally finance the missing social services (Keller and Virág 2021). Uncommonly, despite considerable opposition within the town, the leadership was politically committed to doing something about the uninhabitable housing and slum areas within the city. This commitment was reinforced by the fact that the town's leadership could draw on previous experience with settlement programmes and the deep embeddedness and local knowledge of social workers and development professionals working in different institutions.

The new leadership had to handle two different issues concerning the segregated neighbourhood. On the one hand, as a consequence of the previous local government relocation policy, the largest marginalized neighbourhood in the town centre had become a source of disappointment to local dwellers, causing daily tension due to the existence of different status groups living close to each other. On the other hand, due to their physical conditions, some segregated neighbourhoods had become uninhabitable and needed to be demolished.

The relocation policy of the previous local leadership established the largest marginalized neighbourhood in the town centre, with around 800 inhabitants. The municipality owns a substantial proportion of the apartments concentrated on these streets. However, it does not have enough resources or equipment for its maintenance or refurbishment or to deal with a problem of this size. Thus, the physical condition of the apartments is constantly declining. ‘To terminate L. street just to see another L. street created somewhere else would be greatly irresponsible. L. street has to be lifted up—from the end of the street to the start of the street. This has to be the goal.’ (municipal leader) Thus, the local municipality is aware of the consequences of displacement; the aim is to make the area more governable by combining elements of welfare provisions like extensive social assistance and community work and reducing criminal activity by managing the neighbourhood and its inhabitants and ‘civilising’ everyday life through the distribution of social services and resources, including public work (Baker et al., 2020; Evans and DeVerteuil 2018). This approach fits with the new poverty governance defined at the national level aimed at containing social problems and making neighbourhoods liveable through social and communal services and by preparing and selecting ‘deserving’ inhabitants for relocation. This ‘catching up’ policy promises gradual inclusion for the deserving, who gradually join in with their ‘developed’ fellow citizens, and containment and control of the undeserving (see van Baar, 2018).

The segregated neighbourhoods in the worst physical condition consist of a former workers’ colony and the barracks next to it—both are situated on the periphery of the town and are inhabited by poor Roma and non-Roma families. ‘That is the worst place … . [T]hose barracks [have been] there since 1951. They were built temporarily during the construction [works] when the housing estate was built.’ (social worker) The local government decided to demolish this uncontrolled, criminalized colony, however, the inhabitants ‘were not allowed to move to the town because the town voted against that’ (social worker).

In fact, at the time of its elimination, the colony was in such a bad shape that only ‘miserable’ people lived there. Some families with legal rental contracts in the colony found temporary housing elsewhere in the town. Therefore, the local government decided that some families with a legal connection to the neighbourhood could be involved in the development programme and that it would offer them housing provisions. The aim of the local government was twofold: to eliminate the colony as an uncontrolled criminal space and to support deserving families living in housing needs within the town. This decision gave the local municipality wide room for manoeuvre to support deserving families selected at the discretion of social workers (see later).

Therefore, the municipality refurbished apartments in a part of the colony and moved the most problematic families there. This has now become the ‘penal colony’ of the town and is equipped with police surveillance cameras in order to ‘preserve' the refurbished apartments and the public spaces and monitor the residents’ mobility and activity. This part of the colony is very far from the town's centre and institutions and thus invisible to the residents. For the families who live there, social workers from charity organizations and the police represent the only connections to the town's institutions. Thus, the local government needs to produce and maintain this place of relegation (Wacquant 2011), where the ‘miserable’ people are contained and controlled.

Due to the government’s decision, many families were either relocated to other segregated areas or into social housing units acquired by the municipality in various areas of the town. Moreover, the highly controlled movement of families drove the ‘deserving’ poor living in the largest, stigmatized neighbourhood to move into non-segregated neighbourhoods. According to a project leader we interviewed:

‘First, [we moved people] to L. Street because we owned apartments there. There was rotation then because people wanted to move from there; the ‘righteous’ people did not want to live in an environment like that anymore, so apartments were vacated, and there went most of them. The rest of them were settled in different spots in the town where we could buy apartments at that time. ‘

The local authority’s options for purchasing flats were constrained by the fact that only low-priced, ‘sustainable’ ones could be considered, restricting the choice to only certain areas within the city. This has presented a great opportunity for those who were able to sell their apartments in a frozen property market. However, the creation of dozens of new social housing units with new tenants from segregated areas has raised concerns about neighbourhood decay among those who stayed. For the new tenants, however, it presents an opportunity to leave segregated areas and distinguish themselves symbolically and spatially from undeserving and ‘non-desirable’ groups. However, this comes at the cost of losing most of their social ties and the sense of belonging due to the displacement (Elliott-Cooper, Hubbard, and Lees 2020) Thus, eliminating and upgrading segregated neighbourhoods is an example of how marginalization is reproduced through the enclosure and controlled movement. The displacement of social housing tenants within the town is understood as highly controlled mobility through which the local government can filter families with housing needs according to their deservingness (see, for example Marcuse 1985 and Anghel and Alexandrescu, 2023).

Framing housing policy in line with the new poverty governance

The local government has attempted to address several interlinked housing issues since 2010. These include reducing rent arrears that have accumulated over decades, restructuring tenancy contracts and the allocation mechanisms of social housing, and improving and continuously maintaining the physical condition of social housing. The reframed local housing policy must also create an institutional frame for the development project aimed at reshaping segregated neighbourhoods defined at the national level. This involved ambiguous policy elements, such as controlling and disciplining the marginalized through community social work and investment in social housing (Keller and Virág 2021).

The local government introduced the new housing policy in 2012 in line with the punitive and disciplinary approach to poverty governance espoused by the national government. The primary tool for achieving this was changing more and more open-ended long-term housing contracts into fixed-term contracts, which gives the municipality flexibility but creates insecurity for tenants. According to the new regulations, in the event of late payment of rent or utility costs, the local government has the right to change the social housing contract to a fixed-term one without any explanation. Families with fixed-term social housing contracts are not offered any kind of long-term housing solutions when their contract expires; the local government extends their contract year-by-year, and they must leave their apartment without any compensation if the local government does not extend their contract. The explanation of the housing department leader expresses the local understanding of poverty governance:

‘It’s a local principle of social politics that we understand housing regulations from the perspective of expectations about people in need. (…) We can keep pretty serious control over them; we can make them feel that they have something to lose, and therefore, we can create some kind of discipline in the city. But we also show them opportunities: those who have been renting an apartment for three years and don’t have any arrears can get an apartment in a better place.’

Many families only have fixed-term contracts, in most cases for one year, and these can be terminated if any of a number of ‘irregularities’ are identified—such as the ‘non-intended’ use of apartments. This also means that families often face rent hikes and harassment by local authorities—for example, regular checking of the condition of apartments and how often they are being cleaned.

‘The flats are constantly being visited and inspected. It's random. In their tenancy contracts, they are obliged to let us in, without unnecessary disturbance to the tenant. It's also in the ordinance. Not only do we have the right, but we also have the obligation; it's our property.’ (housing maintenance officer)

Similarly, authorities regularly visit non-paying tenants, personally inquire about their payments, and set up an instalment system if necessary. This expectation is even more pronounced for those employed by the municipality, typically in public works programmes; the social housing maintainer and the public works are operated by the same municipality company so that, by informal agreement, people working on the public works programme and living in social rental housing have their rent immediately deducted from their salaries. The increasing focus of local government on preserving the condition of municipality-owned apartments and reducing rent and utility cost arrears has transformed municipality leaders and housing maintenance officers into landlords who behave and operate according to market rules.

Using all these means, the local government can get rid of ‘undeserving’, ‘undesirable’ or otherwise 'problematic' families and displace them to allotment garden areas⁴ or alternatively offer them temporary housing solutions in strictly controlled social institutions. However, the local government does not often terminate housing contracts and order evictions because they are aware that such families are liable to remain in their town. Large-scale informal settlements in allotment garden areas, invisible and uncontrolled by local authorities (see Havasi, 2018), pose a greater risk (in terms of escalating social issues) than keeping families in social housing. Therefore, the local municipality maintains or even produces small-size, low-comfort social housing on the margins of the town, which is reserved for the ‘undeserving’ poor and thus becomes controllable by the institutions of the municipality. As one municipal official said, ‘We banished them there; no, we moved them out.’

As we have seen, the decisions of municipal leaders and their implementation are based on deep local knowledge and the embeddedness of the street-level bureaucrats working in the field and their daily encounters with marginalized families (Lipsky 1980). Access to various forms of social housing and other social institutions and services depends on the discretionary decisions taken by street-level bureaucrats working in different institutions. They constantly collect and share information on marginalized families among each other, even informally, and build their collective knowledge of them and thus contribute to the construction of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor. The accountability of their discretionary decisions is based on this horizontal and negotiated deep knowledge; but this consideration of marginalized families as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ of social services, including social housing, reinforces the hierarchical, paternalistic relations between the street-level bureaucrats and their clients and maintains existing power relations.

Discussion and conclusions

This paper has provided an analysis of how local government actors have maintained spatial order in the face of demographic change and economic restructuring in a former industrial and peripheral town. In this case, the local government employed a decades-long strategy of reshaping urban space to maintain pre-existing social and class positions by exercizing control over the marginalized population and their local mobility. These local government tactics and practices constitute new poverty governance methods that deviate significantly from neoliberal modes of paternalistic poverty governance. Two significant patterns can be identified. In spatially peripheralized, economically deserted places in Hungary, like the case study town, local governments and their institutions are often almost the only actors available and capable of managing marginality. Furthermore, since local authorities depend on resources provided by central government, the mutual interest in securing financial support creates strong local interconnections based on personal relations. Moreover, there is a strong dependency between local governmental actors and beneficiaries. This chain of clientelist dependencies serves to cement power at both state and local levels. The elected Roma minority self-government is part of this chain of dependency, being vulnerable to the allocation of state and development resources, which explains the lack of voice of the marginalized in the narratives. The agents and interests of those marginalized who are considered deserving and therefore involved in development programmes and social housing are transmitted to the local decision-makers through the street-level bureaucrats.

The current regime has created the tools needed to temper local tensions, albeit with ambiguous objectives, and shifted the responsibility for redefining and reconciling conflicting policy objectives to the local level during their implementation. Thus, the state provides various resources and opportunities with which local governments exploit their room for manoeuvre to exercise discretionary powers and regulate the socio-spatial order. These developmental programmes fail to create a more just housing policy environment locally; partly because of their inadequate and irregular funding and partly because of the insufficient commitment of the state, which is reflected not only in reverse redistribution but also in the absence of rent regulation and housing rights. The developmental programmes have become part of local poverty governance, and the social housing investments and connected social services provide a means for the local government to regulate the social and spatial mobility of vulnerable groups. They contain and discipline those who are seen as undeserving and privilege those seen as deserving of support, providing them with material protection and a sense of belonging to local society, but expecting them to accept the obligations prescribed by local actors. Thus, the local governmental actors in the competition for ‘housing crumbs’ privileged those who are seen as deserving and loyal to the ruling elite.

The historical analysis of displacement highlights that the marginality of Roma is influenced by the institutional legacy of the socialist period. The socialist welfare regime, based on the legal obligation to work, provided resources for local governments to eliminate Roma neighbourhoods. Local governments had the right to decide on relocation policies and distribute Roma families between different neighbourhoods, this way keeping most Roma families far from town centres. Thus, through these development-related endeavours, local governments could maintain the socio-spatial order within the town. What has happened since 2010 may be interpreted as the countereffect of the social policies of the ‘post-socialist’ liberal welfare regime combined with the pervasive influence of socialist-era policies. The punitive and restricted welfare provisions have been complemented locally with the housing provisions of local governments, based on the discretionary decisions of street-level bureaucrats who defined the deservingness. The construction of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ is based on street-level bureaucrats’ daily encounters and experiences with their clients, strong horizontal relations and knowledge transfer between street-level bureaucrats working in different institutions. The emphasis on individual responsibility in decision-making masks the structural deficiencies of social housing and related social issues and perpetuates different forms of racism, ranging from exploitation to expulsion manifested in urban margins.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office: [Grant Number 119465].

Notes on contributors

Tünde Virág

Tünde Virág is at HUN-REN Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Budapest. Tünde Virág is also at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 All the direct quotes reported in the paper come from audio-recorded interviews with full consent from the participant and with the guarantee of the anonymity of both the person and the locality.

2 The housing construction program was implemented between 2000 and 2004 and involved giving grants of up to 75% of the total investment cost to local governments (see Czirfusz and Jelinek 2021).

3 According to the Central Statistical Office, in 2019, only 2.6% of the housing stock was owned by local authorities in Hungary. In contrast, in this town the share of municipal housing is 5.2%, and 98% of the 568 units are social housing.

4 Moving individuals to allotment gardens is today one of the most significant, statistically identifiable forms of displacement, not only in our case study town but in many other settlements throughout the country (Vigvári and Gagyi 2018; Havasi 2018; Czirfusz and Jelinek 2021).