No abstract

Scholars have raised concerns about the social costs of the transition from state socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, and geographers are particularly interested in the spatial expressions and implications of these costs, including apparently increasing residential segregation. Applying a range of segregation measures to 1992 and 2002 census data, this contribution studies socio-occupational residential segregation in Bucharest. The conclusion is that Bucharest was relatively socio-spatially mixed at both times; in fact, a modest, yet fully legible, decreasing overall trend is observable. This is at odds with many popular assumptions of the past 20 years.

Our understanding of gentrification outside of the Anglo-Saxon core is relatively undeveloped. In order to contribute to a more de-centered approach, we ask who are the gentrifiers and how do they change central city neighbourhoods in a post-socialist context? The answers are explored through a mixed-methods approach, using both quantitative and qualitative data: construction permits analysis, census tract data, field trips, and interviews with tenants, former owners, and real estate agents. Findings indicate that gentrifiers vary in nature. They include state tenants, former owners, marginal gentrifiers, political capitalists, and institutional investors. Through their actions, central neighbourhoods have gained younger, more educated, and smaller households. Beyond this case study, we emphasize the usefulness of rent gap theories, the need to study displaced households, and the potential of property rights to enrich theories of gentrification.

Housing nationalization as a solution to urban inequalities has a long history in European social thought. This article describes housing nationalization in a state-socialist context. Using a political economy perspective and relying on recently released archival material about housing in 1950s Romania, I argue that nationalization may be regarded as a special type of urban process. Nationalization raised the occupancy rate and intensified the usage of existing housing, desegregated centrally located neighborhoods, turned some residential space into office space for state institutions, facilitated the degradation of the existing housing stock and gradually produced a socialist gentry. Aside from similarities with other state-socialist nationalizations from the same period, Romanian nationalization resembled the housing policies of other statist regimes. The data also suggest that, even in the context of revolutionary change, the state is a sum of multiple, often diverging projects, rather than a coherent actor.

Housing estates built during the post-World War II decades in many countries have followed diverging trajectories. These include maintenance and repair, demolition, 'doing nothing,' and demolition with mixed-usage replacements. Drawing on empirical and historical material from Bucharest, Romania, a city in which 80% of the housing stock consists of socialist era housing estates, we argue that such housing continues to be viable and is even enjoying a minor renaissance, mainly through the financial efforts of residents and, occasionally, through the allocation of a certain amount of public funds. The empirical analysis illustrates that it is neither the mass character of such housing, nor its high-rise nature that creates the problems and negative image often associated with housing estates elsewhere in the world. Rather, we outline seven challenges faced by such estates: ageing of their structure and resident population, networked connectivity, energy efficiency, densification, urban planning that favours real estate agents, neglect of housing policies and housing rights, and condominium governance. The housing estates and their problems are so much a part of everyday normality in Bucharest that the local administration tends to take them for granted and has not placed them on the public agenda despite the inevitability of their structural decay at some time in the future. More than anything else, the state and the owners need to gather data in order to preempt future emergencies or continuing physical decay of this valuable housing stock.