Chapter 4 of the volume demonstrates how real estate development advances in a third-tier city in northeastern Romania (Bârlad) as a result of a dialectical move between de-contextualization and re-contextualization.
We trace the local histories of privatization, deindustrialization, and restructuring of class dynamics in the decades after 1990, which contributed to the appearance of a large financialized real estate development (a shopping mall) in this small municipality, on a site of a former bearings factory. The authors show that the (supra-local, de-contextualized) strategy of a financialized foreign investor to erect a retail complex in this town according to its portfolio-expanding interests was made successful by the local aspirations for new consumption models sustained by a large (local, re-contextualizing) class alliance. This chapter contributes to scholarly debates on “spatial fix”es, subordinate financialization of real estate, and the changing role of (semi)peripheries and their reurbanization in the global capitalist system.