The article was published and can be downloaded from the journal Studia UBB Sociologia in an Open Access regime, 2023, Vol 68, issue 1, 25-73.
The article examines how deindustrialization as economic restructuring and housing regime changes evolved interconnectedly in Romania during the Great Transformation from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism. This article also explores how they acted as conditions for the emergence of a real-estate-development-driven housing regime (REDD-HR) alongside other factors. The analysis is from the perspective of the geographical political economy on the variegated pathways of these phenomena across borders and secondary statistical data collected by two research projects conducted in Romania in the past two years. In the Eastern semiperiphery of global capitalism or a country of the GlobalEasts with a socialist legacy, after 1990, the state restructured the economy by privatizing industry and public housing. During state socialism, the housing regime supported industrialization-based urbanization, whereas deindustrialization-cum-privatization in emerging capitalism facilitated the appearance of real estate development. On the one hand, the article enriches studies on deindustrialization by highlighting the role of housing in the transformation of industrial relations; on the other hand, the paper revisits housing studies by analyzing deindustrialization as a process with an impact on the changing housing regime. Altogether,deindustrialization-cum-privatization and the changing housing sector are analyzed as prerequisites of the REDD-HR.
Keywords: deindustrialization, housing, real estate development, Romania, semiperiphery, capitalism
The article resulted from research conducted under the PRECWORK and REDURB projects between 2021-2023.