The project examines waterfront development in selected Baltic and Black Sea port cities, addressing a gap in urban studies research in Central and Eastern Europe and beyond the concept of a post-socialist transition.

The project focuses on waterfront development in Baltic and Black Sea port cities. The international literature has tended to address urban change in Central and Eastern Europe from the perspective of post-socialist transition, and less so from that of policy mobility in relation to regional change. This project addresses this gap by (1) focusing on Gdańsk and Constanța, two major regional hubs and the largest ports of Poland and Romania, respectively (2) highlighting the discourses around selected waterfront development projects in these two port cities and (3) situating them in a context of international policy transfer and regional adaptation to rupture. Employing multi-sited ethnographic methodologies, interviews and discourse analysis, the project builds on the theoretical framework of policy mobilities to unpack the ways with which stakeholders and coalitions of actors address the question of a good urban life in theory and practice, the region-based knowledge diffusion and, perhaps, insights into emerging notions of territoriality.