Field Report
Perched on two rows of wooden benches stacked like an improvised podium in the middle of Traian Square, the players of the Fabric Warriors team celebrate their third consecutive football triumph. One step below, their rivals from Amicii Mămăligari are celebrating as well, though with a tad less exuberance. Waves of beer flow over the damp jerseys of the players, mixing with the mud from the natural turf, already compacted after two days of matches played under an intermittent drizzle. Neighborhood children—coming from families of all ethnicities and social conditions—giggle as they kick balls into goals abandoned by adults. On the sidelines, spectators sip pints of beer, pass around small flasks of spirits, laugh, joke, and shiver as they dance to keep warm. All this unfolds under the watchful eyes of neighbors looking down from the windows of dilapidated buildings, protected from the chilly fall weather. In the background, the guttural voice of Gianna Nannini sings “Notti Magiche”, the emblematic anthem of the Coppa del Mondo and the soundtrack of Romania’s great sporting joys of the turbulent 1990s.
Thus concluded the Fabric neighborhood’s mini-football championship on a Sunday evening: a small neighborhood carnival filled with mud, spritzers, football, new friendships, and old rivalries temporarily set aside. Now in its third edition, Football in Traian takes place annually in the central square of the Timișoara neighborhood. For three days, a layer of natural turf is rolled out over the cobblestone paving, transforming the square into a community stadium that invites five-a-side teams to showcase their skills—or, in some cases, their lack thereof. The rules are simple: all players must be amateurs, each team must include at least one resident of the neighborhood, matches are played in two 20-minute halves, and in case of a tie, the game goes straight to seven-meter penalty kicks. And, inevitably, the Fabric Warriors always win—just like in Gary Lineker’s quip: “Football is a simple game: 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes, and at the end, Germany always wins.” //
In October 2024, the tournament brought together 16 teams. Most were composed entirely of men, but there was also an all-women team, Ambasadoarele, and a few mixed teams, such as one representing the German Theater. The players competed first in groups of four and then in knockout stages, fighting for 3D-printed plastic trophies and, more importantly, for bragging rights—the privilege to boast and tease their opponents until the next year’s rematch.
But Football in Traian is about more than goals and trophies. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once analyzed Balinese cockfights as a “philosophical drama,” through which a society’s values are made visible. Such games thus become a method of simulating the social matrix of a community, where participants compete for the social status of themselves and their groups. If the rules, hierarchies, and tensions of an entire culture emerge in Balinese cockfighting rings, then the football matches in Traian may serve as a mirror for the social dynamics of Fabric.
More than just a tournament, the temporary field in the middle of the square becomes a stage where the community’s often contradictory aspirations are performed. It aims to be a meeting space for the diverse and often segregated worlds of a neighborhood undergoing significant social, economic, and urban transformation. At the same time, it serves as an arena where the social divisions of Timișoara—a postsocialist city aspiring to cultural, real estate, and tourism development—are laid bare.
Although my worn-out knees kept me off the field, in the following, I explore this football tournament as a metaphor for coexistence and the contradictions shaping the neighborhood.
But first, I must confess what brought me to the banks of the Bega River.
Since the fall of 2023, I have been traveling periodically from Bucharest, where I live and work, to Timișoara, in the West of the country. The reason: fieldwork. I am part of an international team of anthropologists working on a project titled The Praxis of Coexistence: A Comparative and Inductive Approach to the Challenges of Diversity. Our aim is to understand and compare everyday coexistence in cities such as Birmingham, Istanbul, Marseille, Mostar, Ploiești, Ramla, and Timișoara. What these places have in common is that they are highly diverse, with groups of different religions, ethnicities, and social classes living in proximity—neither loving one another fervently nor hating one another violently, as seen in other parts of the world.
The project starts from a paradox of our times. On the one hand, globalization brings people of different religions, ethnicities, and social classes closer together than ever before, creating unprecedented economic interdependencies. On the other hand, multiculturalism is undergoing a profound crisis. Liberal policies meant to support diversity often fail under the weight of their own contradictions and are rejected by both nativist majorities and, paradoxically, by some minorities they are theoretically designed to protect. Examples abound: Latin American communities supporting anti-immigration policies or Roma musicians enthusiastically performing at far-right politicians’ banquets. Meanwhile, ethno-nationalist conflicts simmer in Europe, the U.S., and India, escalating violently in places like Palestine. It is, admittedly, not multiculturalism’s finest hour.
In this context, Timișoara—with its ethnic and religious diversity, its local narrative of interethnic harmony, and its tensions as a postsocialist city—becomes an ideal research site.
Geographers Lucian Vesalon and Remus Crețan from the West University of Timișoara observed in a 2019 academic article how the city leverages its multiculturalism as an urban branding tool and as an asset for attracting foreign investment. According to a local writer, Timișoara is “a cosmopolitan, open city with exemplary interethnic harmony.” The municipality’s official publication, Monitorul, describes it as “a symbol of freedom and tolerant multiculturalism.”
However, this romanticized and aspirational discourse sometimes contrasts sharply with on-the-ground realities. In the same city of freedom and tolerance, Noua Dreaptă recently organized torchlit marches against the “Gypsy real estate mafia,” racist graffiti stains building walls, and manele—a music genre associated with the Roma minority—were banned in public spaces by a former mayor. Meanwhile, Asian refugees passing through the city on the Balkan migration route reported abuses by law enforcement. Tolerance and intolerance are, at times, two sides of the same complex social reality.
The anthropologist’s work begins where official discourses and myths fueling local pride end. The role of field research is to uncover the everyday social realities experienced by people and communities. In neighborhoods like Fabric, daily life is far more nuanced and filled with contradictions than slogans about perpetual harmony suggest. Here, good neighborly relations are not a given but the result of complex processes of confrontation, avoidance, and negotiation.
For these reasons, I spent the summer and fall of 2024 in Fabric as a guest of Casa Toffler, a local organization that hosts Social Fabric, a local organization that hosts Social Fabric, an artist research residency program. Before delving deeper into how sporting events like Football in Traian can serve as opportunities for negotiation, we must first clarify the roots of coexistence and tensions in the neighborhood. This requires quite a bit of social history.
Fabric Today: Gentrification and Separation
Until recently considered one of Timișoara’s problematic neighborhoods, Fabric has, in recent years, begun to change, rediscovered and gradually reclaimed by a new class of residents who once avoided it. Something about its “beyond the center” atmosphere—close enough, yet still on the margins—is resonating with middle-class residents: architects and IT specialists drawn to the aesthetic of historic buildings and spacious apartments with high ceilings, corporate professionals attracted by the proximity to ISHO – a large scale development complex mixing habitation, commerce and office spaces –, and young families who prefer the chic decay of Traian’s ruins to alienating suburban developments or the tourist-saturated city center.
Sociologists label this type of urban transformation as “gentrification.” In essence, a working-class neighborhood begins to attract wealthier, middle-class residents who bring investments, cultural events, aesthetic changes, major demographic transformations, and new social tensions. The process is well known: the influx of financially better-off residents transforms not only the architecture but also the social fabric of the neighborhood. Where the late socialist proletariat and the population marginalized by post-communist transition once lived, there are now artisanal bars, specialty coffee shops, and “concept” stores catering to the new residents.
Traian Square, the neighborhood’s epicenter, today offers a visual map of this social and spatial polarization. On the right side, there is a craft brewery, a fusion bistro with a neo-Romanian menu, and a coffee shop where the coffee comes with a CV and is measured in grams. On the left side, there is a cheap, popular bar hosting skilled chess players and hopeful slot machine enthusiasts, a dusty library with few patrons, and Apicola honey stores seemingly from another world. As one visitor observed, on the right are “the bourgeois,” and on the left, “the old residents of the neighborhood.” Two worlds that share the same square but rarely meet. The population of Traian Square is like a chemical solution in suspension, whose components mix temporarily but inevitably settle and separate.
This process is far from organic. Gentrification does not arise solely from people’s spontaneous enthusiasm or the invisible hand of the real estate market but also from the very visible hand of state policies and well-calculated administrative measures. In Timișoara, this includes post-socialist restitutions that turned public housing into private commodities, campaigns against “social problems” like begging, which political scientist Manuel Mireanu documented in his analysis of denunciation as a form of civic behavior in Timișoara, or the eviction of those without legal residency that “domesticated” public space. Selective renovations favor owners with sufficient bureaucratic know-how to access funds. Under the promise of urban regeneration, the local administration invites investors to buy and transform. The problem is that regeneration, in this equation, often excludes the neighborhood’s original population.
Fabric’s gentrification is part of a global phenomenon. London experienced it in Islington, New York in Brooklyn, Berlin in Neukölln, Marseille in Noailles, and Bucharest on Calea Călărașilor. Everywhere, the effects are ambivalent: neglected neighborhoods are revitalized and revalued, and property values rise; yet those who cannot adapt to the accelerated pace of change are pushed to the margins, such as tenants whose incomes struggle to keep up with rising rents and increasingly prohibitive costs of daily life. During a public consultation on the municipal administration’s plans for the neighborhood’s future, one Traian Square resident rightly observed: “All of this is for us, the middle class, but what happens to everyone else?” This resident feared, among other things, that prioritizing the needs of new residents would generate long-term social resentment.
Such a warning, if history and comparisons with other places teach us anything, is worth taking seriously. In Barcelona, for example, graffiti in certain neighborhoods threaten invading tourists with lynching. In Tophane, Istanbul, gentrification brought the resident Muslim population and secular newcomers into dangerous proximity, resulting in violent attacks on artists drinking alcohol in public, violating the conservative cultural values of longtime residents. The recipe for coexistence remains uncertain almost everywhere. What is certain, however, is that different communities have a range of local resources, from neighborly relations, traditions, and rituals to violence or legal enforcement. Or, for that matter, sports.
Football and Coexistence
Football in Traian represents a symbolic revival of the matches once played between married men and unmarried young men of the neighborhood, a tradition that began in the 1930s. The event is intended as a community resource for strengthening local identity, fostering neighborly relations, and encouraging multicultural dialogue. In the words of the organizers—an eclectic group of architects, artists, and landscape designers—“football is just a pretext to give a voice to the people living in the Fabric neighborhood. It is a celebration of neighbors, residents, and friends of the neighborhood, in an embrace of social and cultural diversity.”
The tournament thus reconfigures the unwritten rule of coexistence in Fabric: avoiding the Other. In interviews conducted in the city, the idea of “everyone minding their own business” frequently surfaced as a local recipe for ethnic and social coexistence. Studies by Remus Crețan and Ryan Powell describe a similar phenomenon: Roma in Timișoara – even the most advantaged, avoid public spaces out of fear of stigmatization, while the majority of residents steer clear of Roma-inhabited areas. A comparable form of mutual distancing between groups was evident during the 2024 European Championship, when two strategically placed LED screens on the sides of an advertising van in Traian Square allowed spectators to remain “each at their own steps”—on opposite sides of the square while watching Romania defeating Slovakia.
On the other hand, live football creates different dynamics. It’s an entirely different feeling to see the neighborhood’s tough players and skilled ball handlers pushing and shoving on the field, exchanging kicks, and then shaking hands with corporate professionals dressed in spotless, branded gear. In such masculine contexts, humor and self-irony become tools for social integration. “To be teased is to be accepted,” wrote Geertz about Balinese cockfights, and in Traian, there was plenty of “acceptance.” A memorable example was Mircea, a rather portly player mockingly encouraged by teammates and spectators to “put his body into it,” who fiercely scored in overtime and then immediately left the field like the well-padded Ronaldo “Il Fenomeno” Nazario at the end of his career.
The tournament also served as a symbolic form of resistance to the labels imposed on Fabric from the outside. The trophy awarded to the winners was a replica of the statue of the god Mercury from the eponymous palace in Traian Square, but with an adjusted anatomical detail: the raised hand now made a defiant middle finger gesture. It was a gesture of defiance aimed at the neighborhood’s detractors, akin to how Marseille residents adopted the rat as a local symbol to irritate their critics. The tournament’s music continued this subversive aesthetic: not the tame highbrow jazz of downtown festivals, but a playlist dominated by Algerian raï, Egyptian chaabi, Palestinian dabke, alongside unexpected hits by Roma manele singers like Ionuț Cercel and Tzancă Uraganu.
While it brought people together, the tournament also exposed the divisions within the neighborhood. During the final match, an elderly passerby asked who was playing, and the spectators on the left side of the square promptly replied, “our guys against theirs.” The curious onlooker needed no further explanation about who “theirs” were. At the same time, the presence of Roma residents was relatively discreet: older Roma watched the matches from a distance, standing on the sidewalk beyond the tram tracks, while Roma children participated in secondary roles, such as retrieving stray balls by climbing the fence of the public toilet in the square.
Football in Traian became an arena where both the community’s aspirations and the social divisions of a neighborhood with a history and present combining diversity and inequality came to light. Beyond the undeniable entertainment of amateur football played in a public square, such events bring face-to-face groups of people who would normally prefer to keep their distance. This separation is often reinforced by social and urban policies that do not actively encourage social contact. In a context where official plans for Fabric’s future fail to adequately consider the neighborhood’s historical population, the victory of the local team, Fabric Warriors, signifies that the fight for the soul of the neighborhood continues—at least symbolically.
The Beginnings of Fabric: Diversity and Inequality
Fabric is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Timișoara, and its history reflects both multicultural diversity and the dynamics of social stratification that have defined the city over time. Established in the mid-18th century after the de-fortification of Habsburg Timișoara’s Citadel, the neighborhood developed an industrial profile, as its name suggests (from Ger. Fabrik, factory). Factories and workshops producing beer, textiles, leather goods, sweets, and even heavy-duty industrial chains took root here, making Fabric both a workspace and a residential area for much of the city’s population. By the late 19th century, according to a study by Timișoara geographer Roxana Ilisei, Fabric housed more than half the city’s residents, boasting remarkable ethnic diversity even for a city on the empire’s periphery. Two-thirds of the city’s Romanians lived here, along with 65% of its Serbs, over half its Germans, 40% of its Hungarians, and the entire Roma population, alongside smaller communities of Jews, Czechs, Armenians, Italians, and Greeks.
However, diversity is not synonymous with equality. Fabric has always been socio-economically and ethnically stratified. Mihaela Șerban, a professor at Ramapo College in New Jersey specializing in the legal regime of property in Timișoara, highlights that at the beginning of the 20th century, the vast majority of the city’s buildings were modest single-story houses, and only 13% of the total had two or more levels and were owned by wealthy families. Taller and more spacious buildings, as well as industrial properties, were primarily owned by citizens of German and Jewish descent, while Romanians, Hungarians, and Serbs typically lived in smaller and simpler properties. The poorest residents—including workers and caretakers—were found in basements or in outbuildings in inner courtyards.
An emblematic example of this social hierarchy is the rental palaces in the Traian Square area, elegant buildings constructed by wealthy industrialists as rental properties. Apartments facing the street were often reserved for owners or higher-status tenants, while smaller apartments in the back of the buildings were allocated to tenants with more modest means. In many cases, this socio-economic stratification also had an ethnic dimension. For instance, in the stories from the volume Die Fabrukler (Stories from Fabric), published in 2007, Timișoara-based writer Dana Gheorghiu illustrates such tensions through her semi-fictional characters: the German-sounding landlady Vanda quarrels with ground-floor tenants and back-courtyard residents—Iuliș, Marcela, and “alde Plăcintă,” whose names suggest Romanian or Hungarian identities—over issues like damp walls, broken pipes, crumbling bricks, and damaged steps.
At the edge of the neighborhood lived the Roma, referred to as “noii bănățeni” (‘new Banat residents’) in the parlance of Austrian colonists, a euphemistic term still used by some locals in Timișoara. From the earliest years of their presence in Fabric, they lived in greater isolation, in a sub-neighborhood built behind the Timișoreana Beer Factory, now known as Lunei. This area contained the smallest and poorest homes, presenting a stark contrast to the palaces of Traian Square and the rest of Fabric and Timișoara.
Fabric in the Socialist and Post-Communist Periods: Decline and Transformation
Major changes to the social and economic structure of Fabric occurred with the rise of communism. The nationalization of industrial properties in 1948, followed in 1950 by another decree which transferred a significant percentage of urban residential properties to the state, profoundly reconfigured the neighborhood’s demographics and social relations. In Timișoara, these measures disproportionately affected Jewish and German property owners, many of whom emigrated, often compelled to relinquish their properties in exchange for the right to leave the country.
A large part of the neighborhood’s housing stock was converted into state-allocated housing, primarily for new residents of Timișoara, many of whom migrated from nearby rural areas or other regions of Romania to take up jobs in the socialist state’s industrial sector. In this context, the state became the largest landlord in the city—a role that proved difficult to manage, especially given that profit was not the administration’s goal. The state’s inability to efficiently maintain a vast housing stock, combined with the limited resources of tenants, accelerated the degradation of Fabric’s built environment by the 1970s.
This degradation, coupled with the lack of modern amenities such as central heating, made apartments in Fabric less attractive than the newly built blocks in neighborhoods like Circumvalațiunii, Șagului, and Lugojului. For instance, a Timișoara resident who grew up in the 1980s in a four-story socialist-era block on the outskirts of the neighborhood recalls how schoolmates sometimes mocked children living in the historic buildings, due to the smell of smoke and soot that clung to their clothes.
The collapse of state socialism further worsened the condition of historic buildings and introduced new social tensions among residents. Post-communist restitution—often controversial—exacerbated interethnic and social tensions between former owners or their heirs (many of whom had emigrated) and state tenants, predominantly ethnic Romanians, who had occupied these properties for decades. Moreover, uncertainty regarding property rights perpetuated and deepened the state of decay: neither the municipality, tenants, nor recent owners consistently invested in renovations, fearing they might lose their homes or that their investments would be wasted.
The postwar history of Fabric recalls anthropologist and historian Emanuela Grama’s description of Bucharest’s Old Town: a process of “planned urban degradation” during socialism, in which old buildings became marginal enclaves where the state housed impoverished tenants in substandard conditions. After 1990, elites in the city’s post-communist administration neglected older neighborhoods. In Fabric, many apartments still owned by the municipality were used as social housing, while others, owned by absentee landlords waiting for their property values to rise, fell into disrepair. Some of these latter properties were occupied by extremely poor Roma families, contributing to a grim image of economic precarity and social marginality. More recently, relatively low rents have also attracted an influx of migrant residents, particularly Southeast Asians who deliver food by bicycle, cook in city restaurants, or work as waste collectors.
During the 2000s and 2010s, Traian Square was frequently portrayed in local and national media in pejorative terms. Descriptions like “The Square of Sorrows,” “The Square of Horror,” or “one of the saddest places in Timișoara” reflected the state of building decay and the economic difficulties of its residents, in stark contrast to the city center squares, where Vienna Secession-style buildings had been renovated in bright colors, and gourmet restaurants and gelaterias catered to tourists—even receiving praise from New York Times journalists.
In such narratives, popular in Timișoara’s cultural circles, which contrast the vibrant center with the desolate periphery, contradictory definitions of multiculturalism and diversity emerge. On one hand, there is a “good,” “Western” diversity, rooted in the coexistence of Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, and Serbs, inspired by nostalgia for a romanticized imperial past. On the other hand, there is a “bad” diversity, associated with migrant workers, Roma, and, more recently, migrants—a Balkanism that the city’s elites prefer to repudiate.
A relevant example comes from The Guide to Timișoara, a mini-monograph of the city highlighting the Hungarian community’s contribution. Author Delesega Gyula begins with the proclamation, “Timișoara is ours. Mine, yours, his. Everyone’s and each of ours.” Yet, in the chapter dedicated to Fabric, he notes that the population relocated to new block neighborhoods “today has little in common with Fabric” and criticizes that “after 1990, wealthy Gypsies (sic!) built their massive, provocative, overly ornate palaces here, which integrate nowhere in the ambient.” This fragment suggests that, like Beirut and Sarajevo analyzed by urbanist Gruia Bădescu, Timișoara’s cosmopolitanism, though celebrated in rhetoric and often demonstrated in practice, nonetheless involves the exclusion of certain social categories.