The study of poverty and its urban manifestations gains more and more importance in the transition period. Due to the official constraints regarding the choice of the workplace and the residence duduring state-socialism, phenomena of residential segregation were much seldom in Romania than in Western societies. After 1989, a considerable proportion of the houses stock became suddenly private poverty; consequently, the housing market started to function as a real market, after the rules of demand and offer. In the same time, the social and economic changes led to a general decay of the living standards and to an increase of the number of those living under the poverty line. The joint effects of the impoverishment of the population, the precarious social protection, and the liberalization of the housing market became manifest in the accentuation of residential segregation. Poverty cannot be treated any longer only as a statistically circumscribed category, it ought to be analyzed in relation with the local segregational phenomena, paying attention to territorial aspects as well. In her present work, Pásztor Gyöngyi investigates how the segregation process took place in Cluj, determining the appearance of slum areas.

Full text (in Hungarian)