Shrinking Cities in Romania: Ilinca Constantinescu

The unique achievement of this work is to have brought together research, theory, and action for the first time to deal with the issue of Romanian shrinking cities. The format of the publication is ambivalent, being at the same time an edited volume and an authored book. Built as a repertoire of arguments and authors that talk to each other at the intersection of disciplines, perspectives, and conventional and unconventional intervention tools, it reads like an edited volume. But then there is the theoretical confidence with which the editor leads the dialogue and her significant auctorial presence, which point to an authored book. Further, this fusion between the rigor of scientific research, the quirkiness of artistic restlessness, and the selflessness of social activism reveals a multi-targeted approach, which makes the book the more difficult to fit into one of the usual disciplinary categories of contemporary Romania.

— Ana Maria Zahariade

This book looks at Romania as a case study nearly thirty years after the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and the Warsaw Pact. In a very short time, political and economic conditions across Eastern Europe changed drastically, with affected countries being confronted with a capitalist market economy. The current globalization model succeeds in stimulating overall economic growth in most nations, but does so at the cost of social and spatial division. The very substantial and precise study of Ilinca Paun Constantinescu and her team and partners provides a deep understanding of these issues by analyzing the shrinking cities phenomenon. And they even go one important step further, by daring to formulate and initiate constructive ways to address these issues and envisioning perspectives for these marginalized places.

— Philipp Oswalt