Informality and the governance of Roma housing through the lens of an NGO

This paper presents a retrospective ethnography of a failed attempt, by Rome's municipal institutions, to implement a formal decision concerning the management of an authorized Roma camp. The study unpacks multiple relations between the various actors involved (Roma families, NGOs and the city authorities involved in the management of the settlements), focusing particularly on the forms of brokerage and micro-negotiations that are located at the edge of formal procedures. I aim to highlight how informal networks have been pivotal in managing, reproducing and eventually shaping the “nomad camps” system in Rome, bringing to the fore the ways in which chains of informal relations produce hidden connections that reshape the role of each of the subjects and the space for claims-making. I thereby provide an anthropological analysis of the means through which the city's camps system has been informally managed for more than thirty years and, with it, the housing rights of Roma.