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Paper Short Abstract:

The paper deals with socialist housing policy and post-socialist transformation and privatization from the specific perspective of a marginalized group of Roma. It traces (dis)continuities of the exclusion of the Roma as a special ethno-social group for whom housing appears to be crucial.

Paper Abstract:

In my contribution, I would like to look at (post-)socialist housing in Czechoslovakia and later in the Czech Republic from the perspective of a marginalized group of Roma. In doing so, I draw on detailed historical and field research of the town of Most located in one of the most important socialist mining region in the Northern Bohemia, and the adjacent Chanov panel housing estate, which was built in the late 1970s mainly for Romani residents. Until then, they had been concentrated in the centre of the old town, which was gradually being liquidated due to lignite mining. In the specific field of socialist housing policy, the Roma may represent a special chapter, and it is relevant to ask to what extent the egalitarian socialist regime ensured equal access to housing for all groups. In their case, how did it fulfil the promise of the right to use the flat as a measure of privatism replacing private ownership. The Chanov housing estate, gradually referred to as a ghetto, is an extreme case of the socialist state's more general approach to the Roma as an ethno-social group that requires special treatment and access, despite its ideological proclamations. The process of transformation and privatization in the early 1990s also affected the then already relatively devastated Chanov, not at the level of individual apartments, but at the level of privatization of public space and services. This was also linked to the resignation to municipal and housing administration, the roots of which can be traced back to the socialist period. The post-socialist transformation of urban settlements with a high proportion of the Romani population began to create a sphere around which more general socio-economic trends were reflected, but in a somewhat different way. Housing remains, as under socialism, the sphere in which differences between the majority society and the Roma minority are created and reproduced.