‘ Parte din Cluj ’: Forging Urban Investability Through Anti‐Social(ist) Transformations

Using the case of an urban regeneration project initiated by globally connected investors on the site of a former state‐owned factory in Romania, this paper aims to bring a threefold contribution to the understanding of investability. First, we argue that the production of investability needs the forging of a de‐risking state, which entails anti‐socialist and anti‐social processes. It requires erasing the risk of (re)turning to or even imagining a socialist political economy regime impeding private profit. Second, we reveal the multifaceted contradiction and, at the same time, mutual reinforcement between de‐contextualised financial infrastructures for profit extraction built/used by globally connected investors and efforts by a multitude of actors to re‐contextualise investment as belonging locally. Third, we use a long‐term perspective on city investability to characterise it as oriented simultaneously towards the future and the past, part of broader – although contested – anti‐social(ist) policies, imaginaries and urban development models.