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.
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.