Focus ROMI.HR
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Source: Freepik For centuries, Roma people have been pushed to society’s margins, both in terms of engagement in the public space and of geography. Quite often, this marginalization overlaps with poor living conditions, restricted or low-quality access to water, electricity, and gas supply, and, unfortunately, to be exposed to waste. Indeed, many Roma settlements all around Europe are often located in suburbs, next to landfills, or even inside them.
Investigative journalists, human rights activists, as well as a small, yet very active group of scholars, have been debating this issue under a more systematic perspective, studying how this kind of phenomena contributes to fuel discrimination and marginalization of Roma. As one could imagine, this not only impacts on how Roma live, but also how they are perceived by the larger community in which they are supposed to integrate. Indeed, if Roma are forced to live in peripheral, neglected neighbourhoods which are infamously known for their conditions, such a situation will only reinforce unpleasant and even racist beliefs concerning Roma.
This paradigm is what some are trying to counter and, ultimately, replace, to build a more tolerant and respectful society. However, improvement in any respect should necessarily start with the understanding of the issue: only by doing this will the majoritarian group become aware of the problem and feel the urge of countering it as well.
In the field of academia, the process that I have been describing is known as environmental racism. This term has been around in social sciences already for some decades, but - as pointed out in a 2001 report by Ryan Holifield - its meaning is still contested. In general, scholars tend to agree on adopting a broader definition for this term: the idea would be to include not only acts that are intentionally discriminatory, but also “any decision-making processes and distributive patterns that burden minority groups disproportionately” (p. 83). In other words, even those policies that end up having discrimination as a side effect and not as their main scope, should be regarded as racist. Hence, when it comes to Roma people, environmental racism should be considered as one of the many elements that add up to anti-Gypsyism.
Scholars have collected a wide range of examples of practices relating to environmental racism all across Europe. In 2024, the European Environmental Bureau released a report on this topic that discussed the living conditions of Roma in five Western-European countries (Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, and Sweden), which unveiled how deeply marginalized Roma are in many cities, and how their exclusion from cities is the result of a series of phenomena that are decades, if not centuries-long.
In the German city of Heidelberg, for example, Roma houses are in the Industriestrasse area, which has been hosting production plants since 1919. In 1933, the company Henkel operated in the neighbourhood, producing adhesives, sealants, and other goods for the automotive sector. These production processes polluted the soil and groundwater, with long-standing impacts on the life and health of Roma. For instance, the many chemical products used in the plant have been proved to cause increased incidence of lymphoma, leukemia, liver and breast cancers. Unfortunately, throughout the decades, the monitoring of the environmental and medical consequences of these chemical products have not been traced adequately, thus making it almost impossible to know how many Roma may have developed cancer or other medical conditions after having lived in Industriestrasse.
Romania, which hosts a considerably vast Roma minority, also presents a similar scenario. Roma are mainly living in Pata-Rât, a neighbourhood in the suburb of Cluj-Napoca, the second biggest city of the country. As covered by many news stories, including a 2020 article by the Guardian, Pata-Rât hosts more than 2000 Roma, who arrived in four different waves from the 1960s until the early 2010s. Pata-Rât is not only the area where Roma are secluded: it is also a landfill site.
Aside from the extreme poverty Roma are facing in Pata-Rât, additional concern is triggered by the alarming levels of pollution to which they are exposed. An independent study conducted in 2021 and mentioned by PressOne, an online media from Romania, detected excessive levels of many dangerous gases, which may result in serious health repercussions as well as obvious damages to the environment. Additionally, Pata-Rât features the presence of decomposing biodegradable residues which may be set on fire very easily given the presence of methane gas and carbon dioxide (CO2).
The cases presented across Europe show that environmental racism against Roma is both structural and enduring, affecting their health, living conditions, and social standing. While Roma communities are often blamed for polluting, the reality is the opposite: they are the ones most harmed by environmental neglect and exclusion. Forced to live in contaminated, neglected areas, they have to deal with pollution and its long-term consequences. Addressing this injustice requires not only policy intervention but also awareness by the other members of local communities and policymakers. Meaningful inclusion can only begin when these systemic inequities are acknowledged and treated as a critical part of broader discrimination.
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