The Exclusion of Worker Families from the City Center of Cluj. Gentrification in a Central-European City

The logic of the top-down modernization in Central Europe & the key role played by actors with cultural capital who are concentrated around state institutions, transformed the centers of these cities. They were under the constant pressure of gentrification from the cultural bourgeoisie. At the time being, the new wave of gentrification is the result of a complex process of connection to the time & space of global fluxes of capitalism, in & with the ruins of socialism. In this case, the term "ruins of socialism" has a very specific meaning: most of the old precommunist towns have been surrounded by the new socialist neighborhoods, having workers as the majority of their residents. Starting with the case of Cluj we are interested with the symbolic locational disparities & in the way in which the socialist & postsocialist epoch created centrality. The spatial dynamic between the socialist neighborhoods & the postsocialist areas is not only an economic one but also a symbolic one. We try to grasp the processes of creating symbolic centrality & the exclusion from these centrality of the socialist working class. Tables, Figures, References.