Oraşul Viitorului

The label of ‘the Silicon Valley of Europe’, for a Romanian city, implies a
wholesale transplant of technologies and practices that the slogan’s authors
want us to believe will turn Cluj into ‘the city of the future’ – a future
conceived on Western, technocapitalist lines. In this essay, however, we
discover the highly specific socialist and postsocialist histories and entangle-
ments that have underpinned Cluj’s recent development, as well as the costs
that are being exacted. McElroy shows us critical incredulity emerging from
comparisons, between here and there, then and now. But must this process
always be only one-way? What insights would emerge were we to think of
Black, working-class East Palo Alto, say, with its history of segregation,
redlining and predatory lending, now subject to aggressive gentrification
from an influx of young, well-paid tech professionals from across the globe,
as ‘the Cluj of the West’?