Elena Ion

Following Romania’s accession to the European Union, Bucharest has witnessed a resurgence of state-led urban development on a scale not seen since the socialist period. EU Structural Funding and public funding financed many of these projects and in the process transformed the dynamics of central and local governance. Through an ethnography of urban planning decision-making, and the challenges mobilized against it, this project examines the emergence of a new regime of urban governance that is reliant on EU and public funding and focused on the procurement of public projects. This project analyzes how this allocative mode of urban governance differs from entrepreneurial modes of governance, which recent scholarship views as the dominant forces shaping urban transformations in Central and East European cities.