Uneven Real Estate Development in Romania at the Intersection of Deindustrialization and Financialization Routledge Critical Studies in Urbanism and the City Series

This book examines the progression of real estate development within the deindustrialization-financialization nexus. It explores the roles it has in semi-peripheral contexts such as Romania, where it overlaps with the process of the transformation of state socialism into neoliberal capitalism, viewed at the intersection of global, national, and local forces.

The book focuses on real estate development in Romania as a product and a driver of capitalism. It contributes to ongoing debates in critical urban theories and Marxist perspectives in urban sociology. Focusing on the under-researched East European region, it decenters social research and fine-tunes the political economy theory about state and economic restructuring. The book contains methodological and theoretical insights that are useful in other contexts beyond Romania and Central and Eastern Europe, especially in other (semi)peripheral emerging markets. The focus of critical inquiry into capitalist transformations adopted in this book can also support political activism. It uncovers the varieties of the deindustrialization-financialization nexus in real estate built on the dismantled pre-1990 socialist industrial plants. The chapters describe the advancement of real estate investments across second and third-tier cities, displaying uneven development and subordinate financialization at the intersection of local and global processes and political and economic actors.

It will be of interest to researchers and students of urban sociology, economic sociology, political economy, human geography, and political geography.

Introduction (Enikő Vincze, Ioana Florea and Manuel B. Aalbers)

Part I. Political Economy Transformations and the Role of Real Estate Development

Chapter One. Global pension fund capitalism lands in Romania: Finance-led real estate and retail development (Manuel B. Aalbers)

Chapter Two. The winding road of privatization: a path for real estate development into former state socialist economies (Enikő Vincze and Ioana Vlad)

Chapter Three. De-risking in a context of uneven development and deindustrialized spaces: the advancement and financialization of real estate as business in Romania (Ioana Florea and Enikő Vincze)

Part II. Territorialized Synergies Between Local Public Administrations, Middle Classes, and Real Estate Actors in Second and Third-Tier Cities

Chapter Four. Putting “the fix” in the “spatial fix”: restructuring class alliances and financialized real estate in the city of Bârlad (Ioana Florea, Livia Pancu and Florin Bobu)

Chapter Five. Coal-based energy urbanization and real estate development in Târgu Jiu (George Iulian Zamfir)

Chapter Six. Spatial planning at the fringes: land fragmentation and sprawling in Bragadiru (Mihail Sandu-Dumitriu)

Chapter Seven. Challenged by real estate-driven development: the urban growth machine in Cluj (Marina Mironica)

Part III. Re-making the City via Urban Governance, Regeneration, and Branding

Chapter Eight. The pressure of inter-urban competition on entrepreneurial governance aspirations: the case of Craiova (Ioana Vlad)

Chapter Nine. Urban regeneration and transnational capital investments in Reșița brownfields: from the “city of fire” to the “boutique city” (Sorin Gog)

Chapter Ten. The political economy of city rebranding: Brașov, from an industrial center to the “El Dorado” of real estate development (Enikő Vincze)

Conclusion (Enikő Vincze and Ioana Florea)

Enikő Vincze is a professor at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. Initiator of the local movement Căși Sociale ACUM!/ Social Housing NOW!, she is also involved in national and international housing justice struggles. In her early career, Enikő published on nationalism, feminism, and the socio-spatial marginalization of impoverished Roma. In the past ten years, she conducted academic and militant research on the spatialization and racialization of socio-economic inequalities, local and global politics of housing, territorial and environmental injustice, urban and real estate development, housing regimes in state socialism and neoliberal capitalism, and uneven development and capitalist transformations in Romania. She co-edited the following volumes published in 2018: Racialized Labour in Romania: Spaces of Marginality at the Periphery of Global Capitalism; The Romani Women’s Movement: Struggles and Debates in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge). Among her articles written in 2023 are "The making of a racialized surplus population. Romania’s labor-housing nexus” (Focaal, 97: 57–72); “Deindustrialization and the real-estate-development-driven housing regime. The case of Romania in global context” (Studia UBB Sociologia, 68, 1: 25–73); “Residualized public housing in Romania: peripheralization of ‘the social’ and the racialization of ‘unhouseables’ ” (IJURR, forthcoming). She acted as the director of the project that inspired the present book.

Ioana Florea is a sociologist working on urban transformations and manifestations of uneven development in Eastern European cities. She has collaborated as a researcher with The Babeș-Bolyai University, The University of Gothenburg, and Södertörn University. Ioana is co-author of the monograph Contemporary Housing Struggles. A Structural Field of Contention Approach (2022). Her recent contributions on housing struggles are published