ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a biopolitical framework allows us to incorporate undertheorized complexities of property ownership patterns present in Budapest, and post-socialist cities in general. To operationalize biopolitics in this case, it shows how gentrification has been driven by interventions into the urban fabric through knowledge gleaned via two statistical categories: komfortfokozat (or comfort level) and Roma as a subset of the Eighth District population. The chapter argues that within a 'super-homeownership' housing regime, the state, and its normative functions, plays a substantial role in gentrification and displacement processes. It traces both of categories through the gentrification of Budapest's Eighth District. The chapter highlights how experts forged problematic conditions of flats and the higher-than-average Roma population that required intervention. Because the home is a key node in the maintenance of the human body, and because the Roma population is taken as the object of management, it argues that displacement and gentrification in the Eighth District are fundamentally biopolitical.
