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Up to 30 ­percent of the country’s housing stock was nationalized during socialism, but less than 2 ­percent of housing is public ­today.130 This means that the very concept of social housing has been gentrified out of the public imaginary—­but not for all. Upon restitution, many evictees advocate …

­There has been more attention allocated to the strange properties of property itself throughout transition, which admittedly has been, as Katherine Verdery marks, contentious, to say the least. In the mid-1990s, past ­communist leaders known as the nomenklatura became what she describes as “entrep…

Most work conducted in ­these firms is far from glamorous, and involves monotonous and repetitive tasks. Less technical work is increasingly sourced not from tech schools, but from liberal arts programs. But even this work is considered desirable. Per Mateescu, “Slaving away on the night shift at t…

Romania’s portrayal as both safe and exotic, as freed from its aberrant past and yet not fully Western, continues to appeal to nomadic fantasy. During the winter of 2018, I sat down in a fancy coffee shop with a German digital nomad, Fabian, who founded a geospatial data firm in 2007 in Cluj, which…

Yet nonetheless, just as Orientalist tales emerged from the heart of Western empires, so too do digital nomad fantasies of ­today. In digital nomad Daniel Kay’s self-­reflection, “Digital nomads are unintentional pawns in a new wave of economic imperialism.”34 This fantasy embodies Silicon Valley i…