Urban identity, change and policy in shrinking cities : discourses of policy actors in Brasov, Romania

Abstract

In debating neo-Marxian theorizations of urban governance, institutionalist scholars argue that national states and political values and traditions significantly shape the governing of cities (Pierre, 1999). Nonetheless, institutionalist perspectives on urban governance overemphasize tradition as underpinning political values and in association with state agency and focus prevalently on sectorial frameworks of governance, leading to the underexploring of a value-based account of decentralization. Shrinking and post-socialist cities both provide unique opportunities to address these limitations, with the former illustrating tradition, values and a strained state-dominated governance context as precluding effective policy (Bernt, 2009; Pallagst, 2009) and the latter evidencing orientation toward change and away from state-led policy as key urban governance features (Kronenberg, 2015).

The present thesis aims to capitalize on these opportunities to address said limitations by looking at how political values underpin accounts of urban identity, change and policy in a post-socialist shrinking city. Drawing on discourse analysis of fifteen semi-structured interviews with policy actors in Brasov, Romania, the thesis finds that discourses on city, change and governance are embedded in a narrative of normative world joining, with change and global geographies legitimizing municipal ambitions for greater autonomy against central government.

Potential contributions to urban governance theorizations related to the world-joining narrative discussed here include proposing an integration of change to path dependency concepts and challenging theses of both a stable central state presence in urban politics and a prevalent supralocal influence on state rescaling. The valuing of change and state-city tensions are then argued as relevant to shrinkage policy and literature, as they underpin growth expectations and the disowning shrinkage to central state. Finally, in advocating for geographical legitimacy as key conceptual descriptor of governance discourses, the thesis demonstrates the relevance of providing a value-based account of decentralization for urban governance theory.