What is a City?

: Social science studies have not often looked at the links between broad dynamics of social closure and everyday local idioms of difference in post-socialist Europe. In this article I give a theoretical and empirical contribution to research on the links between “cultural intimacy” and urban marginality in times of massive neoliberal restructuring in the region. Drawing on fieldwork in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) I ethnographically investigate the everyday working of two verbal icons indexing peculiar characterizations of Roma, and I discuss the multiple ways through which they contribute to informing policy making, and ultimately to perpetuating the conditions of social marginality and segregation under which a significant number of Romani families live. Civil servants and the workers of a periphery neighbourhood articulate those icons in different ways, yet similarly constructing a space of cultural intimacy that functions both as a vector of exclusion of Roma from the ethno-moral boundaries of the nation, and, creatively, as a type of sociality securing a certain distance from the EU gaze and its discourse of tolerance.