The conclusion of our volume reconnects its three analytical parts by exposing how local, national, and global interfaces triggered the capitalist transformations of Romania, uncovering the varieties of the deindustrialization–financialization nexus in real estate, and describing how real estate investments advanced across second- and third-tier cities.

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The chapter highlights the contributions of the volume to enriching critical urban theories with a political economy perspective on real estate development and opening debates on contemporary capitalism from the standpoint of multi-scalar peripheralization. It reminds us that the book’s methodological and theoretical insights might be useful in other regions beyond Romania and CEE, especially in other (semi)peripheral contexts and emerging markets, understanding the unfolding of global economic restructurings as they territorialize beyond the North-Western core. The research about “great transformations”—that of prior industrial platforms into sites of real estate development and of state socialism into neoliberal capitalism—could also inspire political activism committed to the fight for more just cities and economies beyond our local contexts.

Addressing city branding from a political economy perspective, Chapter 10 of the volume describes the changing role of industry in the economy of Brașov, a second-tier city in central Romania.

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It also reveals the local and foreign actors and the trends of real estate development as a business that is growing upon the regeneration of the city’s old industrial platforms. The chapter concludes that branding Brașov as a new “El Dorado” of real estate development functions as an instrument of urban regeneration, a tool for policymakers to support changes in the capital accumulation regime, and an ideological discourse as a component of the new institutional–political regulation system. This happens while the city and its surroundings continue to offer opportunities for re-industrialization. The chapter engages with wider scholarly debates on urban regeneration and rebranding, enriching them with a view from a second-tier city linked to North-Western capital flows, illustrative of processes that expand in many semi-peripheral territories in the context of nearshoring.

Chapter 9 of the volume explores how brownfields in a third-tier city in the Western Development Region of Romania (Reșița) became an important issue due to both deindustrialization and new investments.

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The author examines the role of the entrepreneurial local administration in encouraging large residential and retail real estate development in a locality that seems unlikely to attract big investors. This happens when the neoliberal national framework enforces the local state to cope with administrative decentralization and autonomous financing, while the development of city infrastructure depends on attracting and managing European-funded projects and on creating adequate conditions for foreign direct investments. The analysis describes how developers are supported through public infrastructure investments, as the “entrepreneurial” municipality is hoping to make its city appealing to middle class, tourists, and further investors. This chapter is relevant for deindustrialized and impoverished cities worldwide, including in the Global North, advancing inquiries into local state restructuring and strategizing in third-tier cities.

Chapter 8 of the volume analyzes the evolution of urban development aspirations of local actors in a second-tier city from southeast Romania (Craiova) under the influence of inter-urban competition.

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In the context of the general post-socialist turn toward urban entrepreneurialism, the author describes the pressure for “catching-up” under circumstances of increasing local administrative autonomy, where local governance seeks to redefine and improve its competitive advantages. Acknowledging that the emergence and advancement of neoliberal urban governance in a post-socialist context reflect global processes of radically changing post-Fordist societies, the chapter describes how local actors mobilize pre-war and socialist development models in the current effort to regain the city’s national significance and competitiveness. As inter-urban competition forces municipalities into short-term approaches, real estate developments on former industrial sites are seen as desirable and healthy for the local economy. The analysis contributes to scholarly debates on state restructuring under the pressure of “catching-up” narratives in the late capitalist period, reflecting processes across global peripheries

Chapter 7 of the volume takes a close look at the urban growth machine of Cluj-Napoca, emerging as a post-industrial “model city” based on economic restructuring toward high-value-added service sectors and investments in real estate.

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The local governing structures that unify pluralistic interests in the city under the umbrella of growth politics, the transnational consultants and local or foreign investors and developers, and members of a creative class are the main actors of this neoliberal “success” story. They are also the winners of the local growth that transforms the city into a site for exceptional investments. The chapter highlights a few examples of urban regeneration projects on industrial sites and identifies the contradictions of a city trapped between the need to appear successful and the loss of affordability for the residents. The city’s cautionary tale reveals inquiries on “model cities” worldwide, especially in emerging economies, and raises awareness about the need for a progressive and equitable urban development that reassesses growth potential.

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.

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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.

Chapter 5 of the volume focuses on the capital of Gorj County from the South-West Oltenia Development Region, contrasting with the other cities studied in our book.

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While in most of them, the integration of industrial platforms in real estate development cycles has increased after the financial crisis—and, in some of these localities, started even earlier—it has only just begun in Târgu Jiu. Among the factors that explain this situation is the continuous existence on its territory of the regional command center of open coal mining and the specific land-use policies of local public administration. This chapter illustrates the tensions and the common ground between industrial and real-estate-led development paths, which is part of a larger debate in the post-pandemic context of nearshoring. By describing how and why the recent urban transformation in Târgu Jiu, sprinkled with residential developments, is a function of deurbanization and reurbanization of coal-based energy production, the author proposes to rethink the shrinking cities approach.

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.

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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.