Urban imaginaries in the affective politics of becoming a new town in Romania

The post-2000 urbanisation wave of Eastern Europe, which saw about 470 communes granted township status, has received minimal attention in urban studies. This paper focuses on the key case of Romania where rural-to-urban reclassification, and its reversal, are grassroots-driven and contingent on local referenda. Given this democratic process, we examine the urban imaginaries that have shaped these referenda and their aftermath, and how they relate to questions of place-making, struggle, and resistance. We conceptualise the urban imaginary as a discursive construction and a collective feeling generative of political action. Drawing on a rich array of data, including local residents' opinions and retrospective recollections, media coverage, parliamentary acts and statistical sources, we identify four enduring urban imaginaries that fuelled significant pro-town referenda and continue to shape contentious evaluations of their outcomes. These are: the conceived urban of technocrats; the grand City fantasy rooted in socialist industrial legacies; the modest urban imaginary centred on desire for basic infrastructure; and the urban limbo, a space of stigmatisation marked by the denial of infrastructural citizenship. By framing locals' demands for urban (de)(re)classification as resistance to peripheralisation, dispossession and stigmatisation, we contribute to the academic debate on how the urban is understood when we listen to the marginalised voices inhabiting the blurred rural/urban border, whether in Eastern Europe's new towns, China's urban villages or East Asia's urban extensions. • Focuses on the affective politics of becoming a new town in post-2000 Romania. • Explores the urban imaginaries involved in pro-town referenda and their aftermath. • Defines the urban imaginary as a discursive construction and a collective feeling. • Identifies: the conceived, the grand and the modest urban, and the urban limbo. • These imaginaries act for/against peripheralisation, dispossession and stigmatisation.