Uneven Real Estate Development in Romania at the Intersection of Deindustrialization and Financialization

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.

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, uneven development and capitalist transformations in Romania. She co-edited the 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＂ (forthcoming, IJURR). 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, 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 in Global Urbanism. Knowledge, Power and the City (Routledge, 2021) and Radical Housing: Art, Struggle, Care (2021). Her co-authored articles are published in the Journal of Political Ecology, Radical Housing Journal, Critical Housing Analysis, Voluntas. She has been engaged for more than 15 years in policy- and action-orienting research, co-authoring an unprecedented country report Come Closer. Inclusion and Exclusion of Roma in Present Day Romanian Society (2008). Since 2016, she has been involved as an action-researcher for the Common Front for Housing Rights in Romania, and for the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City.

Manuel B. Aalbers, a human geographer, sociologist and urban planner, a full professor of Geography at KU Leuven, the University of Leuven (Belgium), where he leads a research group on the intersection of real estate, finance, and states, spearheaded by a grant from the European Research Council. Previously, he was at the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University and has been a guest researcher at New York University, the City University of New York, IRS/Leibniz Institute (Germany), the University of Milan-Bicocca and the University of Urbino (Italy). He has published on financialization, redlining, social and financial exclusion, neoliberalism, mortgage markets, the privatization of social housing, neighborhood decline, gentrification, and the Anglo-American hegemony in academic research and writing. He is the author of Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets (2011) and The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach (Routledge, 2016) and the editor of Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets (2012). He is also the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (2010), former editor-in-chief of the geography journal TESG (2019-2023), and has served as the guest editor for ten different journals.