1 - this is a pre-publication draft version - Living on the edge: the ambiguities of squatting and urban development in Bucharest Ioana Florea and Mihail Dumitriu Practices of informal and illegal habitation were interwoven with the development of Bucharest as a city throughout the last two centuries. This chapter discusses different types of informal/illegal dwelling identified in the Romanian capital, the complex socio- economic and political conditions leading to practices of illegal occupation, the different laws, norms and stigmas regulating the status of such practices and the identities of occupants. The case study of Bucharest offers possible answers to three questions: what are the links between squatting and urban development; what are the functions of squatting in the city; what are the characteristics of the squatting processes that grant them such functions. As the largest city in the country, Bucharest represents a special case, exhibiting the widest diversity of urban housing practices. 1 Processes of informal/illegal dwelling unfold as modes of living, being and inhabiting on the edge – the edge of the city, the edge between human rights and property rights, between being tolerated and being evicted, between being labelled as homeless, criminal, and being labelled as rightful occupant. The stories of squatting in Bucharest – across the pre-war, post-war, dictatorship, and post-socialist periods – illustrate the fluidity of this form of living, being, inhabiting on the edge. Moreover, the processes of living, being, inhabiting on the edge are embedded in power relations that are not only encrypted in laws, but also in everyday social relations and symbolic interactions. Urban sociologist Herbert Gans highlighted the positive uses of poverty for the wider society and especially for more affluent stakeholders: “poverty […] makes possible the existence or expansion of respectable professions and occupations, for example, 1 Rural areas in Romania are marked by different practices of squatting, developed through different socio- economic mechanisms.