Speaker: Giovanni Picker
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Glasgow University

Moderator: Pawel Lewicki, University of Pittsburgh

This talk builds on Giovanni Picker's three books, one monograph (2017) and two co-edited
volumes (2018 and 2022), which investigate the ways in which various racial structures
shape 21st-Century European cities. In the first part of the talk, Dr. Picker will discuss the
historical canon of Social Science research on European cities, and the canon's silence
regarding colonialism and race.
In the second part of the talk, Dr. Picker will discuss the residential segregation of Romani
people (the Roma) in Europe, as an illustration of the importance of looking at race and
colonial history when researching contemporary European cities. He will focus
on the city of Florence (Italy), where since the mid-1980s hundreds of Yugoslav Romani
families have been forced to live in two peripheral urban camps. In conclusion, Dr. Pickler
will connect the first and the second part by showing heuristic correspondences between
20th-century urban governance in colonized cities, and the 21st-century urban
governance of marginalized and segregated urban Romani communities.