This is an Open Access chapter of the volume Uneven Real Estate Development in Romania at the Intersection of Deindustrialization and Financialization, edited by Enikő Vincze, Ioana Florea, Manuel B. Aalbers (Routledge, first published 2024).

The chapter highlights that, in the wake of the 1990 regime change, Romanian state institutions backed up by European Union regulations supported the creation of the financial market, private banks and investment funds, and implemented a business-friendly fiscal system. After privatization, these measures acted as de-risking strategies necessary for the emergence and financialization of real estate development. The authors discuss the uneven manifestations of financialized real estate in two regional cities, Cluj-Napoca (from the North-West Development Region) and Iași (from the North-East), and reconstruct the different phases and means of collaboration between the state, supra-statal organizations, and capital in its advancement. The analysis contributes to the emerging literature on de-risking as a new regime of accumulation in advanced capitalism. It illustrates how the latter unfolds on the ground across unevenly developed regions, localities, and areas within localities, as resources that were hitherto outside the real estate market, including former industrial sites, have been absorbed into it while gradually integrated with financial markets.

Chapter 2 of the volume analyzes the political economy of privatization in connection with changing industrial relations, showing how these processes acted as the first step in the state’s de-risking of real estate development.

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The authors examine how, under the pressure of international organizations, the Romanian state facilitated primitive capital accumulation through massive privatization programs during the first two decades of capitalist transformations after 1990. We conclude that after its winding road had stabilized, privatization contributed to the emergence of real estate development advancing as capital accumulation through dispossession. Case studies from Brașov (Central Development Region) and Craiova (South-West Oltenia) illustrate how this new business emerged on the ruins of privatized industrial enterprises, while the former industrial platforms could be rented, traded, or used as collateral for bank loans. They also show how the privatization and dismantling of factories opened up vacant lots and buildings in urban areas with good infrastructure for capital investment.

Chapter 1 of the volume puts the issues addressed in our volume in a comparative frame to establish to what extent we are dealing with a global, a European, a CEE, or a uniquely Romanian story.

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The analyzed Romanian cases display a combination of “common trends” (shift to capitalize on land, capital switching to real estate, and entrepreneurial cities) and the rapid shift from socialism to capitalism. In particular, this chapter discusses how financialization, the wall of money, and pension fund capitalism have affected real estate development in Romania. The evolutions of commercial real estate markets in CEE show a finance-supply-driven development, while the shopping centers become not only the face of capitalist transition but also the spatial fix in which institutional capital descends into CEE countries like Romania. The author notes that the “lumpengeography” of deindustrialized land in Romania becomes a reserve space to be redeveloped, a golden opportunity for global pension fund capitalism.

The volume’s Introduction presents the objectives and methodological devices of our analysis and its theoretical frames, discussing the contributions it brings to critical urban studies and urban political economy, especially to the investigation of capitalist advancement in the second- and third-tier cities of global semi-peripheries.

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The authors provide some statistical information about Romania and the selected cities of our fieldwork, placing them in local, regional, and transnational dynamics of uneven development. The introduction gives a brief overview of the volume’s chapters, each revealing key aspects of our common inquiry into the role of real estate development for capitalist advancement in these cities. The research from the background of this volume explored a hitherto almost “uncovered” territory, adding Romania’s case as a contribution to current discussions on privatization, deindustrialization, financialization, de-risking, de-contextualization and re-contextualization in real estate development, urban planning, re-urbanization, growth coalitions, inter-city competition and neoliberal governance, urban regeneration, and (re)branding.