Chapter 6 completes the volume’s main focus on former industrial platforms in relation to real estate development with an analysis of the dismantlement of socialist agricultural cooperatives and the shift from common (productive) to individual (real estate) land use facilitated by property restitution.
The author describes how the changes in the national spatial planning system that opened up planning toward private parties, along with excessive land fragmentation and privatization in rural areas, were necessary for the (re)urbanization of territories in the proximity of Romania’s capital city marked by the trend of sprawling. These results are not simple technical evolutions, but political choices influenced by capital. The land property geography of Bragadiru and similar towns and the financial interests of the investors influenced local urban planning and current spatial morphology. This analysis dialogues with global debates on urban sprawl, offering an insight into the role and transformation of formerly productive state-owned land in such processes.