The Housing Question at the Juncture of Spatial Planning and Housing Policies. A View on Romania's Political Economy Regime Changes

In the realm of housing and planning studies, the correlation between housing policies and spatial planning is seldom discussed, let alone their interconnected roles in political economy regime changes. Furthermore, a Marxist approach to the housing question is conspicuously absent from analyses placed in the context of Central and Eastern Europe. This article seeks to fill this gap by examining how planning and housing, as two constitutive factors of political economy and their linkages, facilitated the transformation of state socialism to neoliberal capitalism in Romania. The analysis was conducted using data from two research projects, which comprised statistics, legislation, development strategies, and interviews with representatives of city halls and real estate actors. After discussing the contribution of this article to the existing literature on housing and spatial planning, the second section describes how the alteration of planning and housing policies in Romania served as factors that enabled political economy transformations. In the third section, the changes at the local level are discussed, particularly in a second-tier city with regional importance. Finally, the conclusion provides a synthetic description of the interconnected conversions of spatial planning and housing policies in Romania, demonstrating the relevance of this case to the understanding of political economy regime switches through the housing question.