Authoritarian Governmentality and the Racialization of Citizenship: Rethinking Housing Policy in Postwar Hungary

In this article, we approach Hungarian housing policies toward Roma as analytics of government, outlining the conditions under which successive housing policies were developed, implemented, and transformed. We ask what these spatial interventions reveal about the intersection of authoritarian modes of rule with racialization in Hungary. We deploy a flexible framework for understanding authoritarian governmentality as a persistent political rationality across state formations, most often directed at marginalized and racialized populations. Focused empirically on Budapest, the article traces, through successive housing regimes, authoritarian governmentality materializing in administrative practices, spatial logics, and classificatory regimes that have rendered Roma visible as internal threats, objects of intervention, and targets of spatial containment. We demonstrate that contemporary authoritarianism often builds on established practices of racialized exclusion, targeted welfare, and coerced inclusion, deploying techniques that have long been embedded in state strategies for managing marginalized populations. The relevance for geographers and geography lies largely in the focus on housing and housing policy, which constitute fundamental objects of geographical inquiry insofar as they actively produce the spatial organization of social life and mediate relations between the state, markets, and citizens.