The Situacionists’ Debt with the Rroma People

Abstract

In the second half of the 20th century, multiple criticisms were articulated about the Cartesian urbanism of the Modern Movement. The Situationist avant-garde developed its Unitary Urbanism inspired by the territorial expressions of the itinerant European Rroma groups. However, they could not abandon an ethnocentered and primitivist gaze towards the Rroma People, whose pluriverse is still persecuted. The article is based on an existing discussion about this connection and poses an epistemological debt between the situationist utopias and the Rroma People. Through the contrasted reading of various situationist sources and other related authors, it has been possible to identify the meeting points and divergences between the urban proposals of the Situationist International and Rroma territoriality, analyzing them from notions of epistemic extractivism and decolonial criticism. The investigation is completed with the author’s own experience in the struggles of the Rroma population residing in informal settlements in Galicia. Situationist critical urbanism continued to be ethnocentric, patriarchal, and anti-Rroma due, in part, to the historic explanation of urban inequalities along the class-poverty axis. This denial contributed to the extractivist dehumanization of the Rroma, which even today prevents us from building emancipatory urban models that incorporate inferiorized knowledge.