As the battle for talent and people in Central and Eastern Europe heats up, Gdansk, Cluj-Napoca, and Plovdiv — in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria — offer different approaches to shaking off the legacy of decades of Soviet domination. They suggest the future is bright.
The view from the 32nd floor of Gdansk’s Olivia Center is mesmerizing: the Baltic Sea lies before you, ships are lined up in the water, and the cranes of the city’s port are visible to the right, next to the golden dome of the stadium built to host the Euro 2012 soccer tournament.
“When we opened the platform, old people used to come up here and burst into tears, as they had never seen the bay like this,” recounts Jake Jephcott, the manager of Olivia Center.
Gdansk is a Hanseatic port with an old city core of beautiful buildings reconstructed after the destruction of World War II. It was the crucible of protests against communist domination in the 1980s and, in some ways, is a place still caught between the past and the future. Transport between the three cities of Gdansk, Sopot, and Gdynia, with a combined population of 750,000, requires a mess of different tickets; for example, a high-speed train connects to Warsaw in less than two-and-a-half hours.
The Polish port is one of a group of second-tier cities across Central and Eastern Europe that are harbingers of change. They are bright spots on a recently dark map of depopulation, and are turning the tide and growing. Others include Cluj-Napoca, Romania’s second city, and Plovdiv, the second biggest city in Bulgaria.
They have much in common. All three had been losing population since the 1990s and seemed trapped in the past, far from the quality of life that would help rebuild stable communities.
And all of them began growing in the past decade by making concerted efforts through the public and private sectors. They used different methods and connected different dots to climb back. Their experiences are instructive.
To understand where Gdansk and others are coming from, it’s important to go back to 2004, when eight countries, including Poland, simultaneously joined the European Union. The Eastern belt, stuck for decades behind the Iron Curtain, was suddenly at the front of the stage. Three years later, Bulgaria and Romania also won membership.
While this was regarded as a huge achievement for the Union and the countries involved, what was less understood was the effect it would have on their economies. The EU is not an empire, and the enlargement process is voluntary, yet the power of the center is strong.
The economic core sucks in resources and talent, while exporting economic models, and, in the case of the EU, money for cohesion, so the outer regions can keep up.
The immediate effect of the Big Bang was that the periphery started losing people, even though it was getting money. That worsened population losses have been apparent since the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989. There was an enormous transfer of people, first to the UK and then to other Western EU members like Germany.
The mentality and self-image of Central and Eastern Europeans changed, and they increasingly perceived their homelands as places you come from, not places you go to. Returning was always going to be hard.
Alan Alexandrowicz is 54 and has lived in Gdansk all his life, through the military regime of the 1980s, to the total deregulation of the 1990s and the crash of the economy.
“Whole industries in Gdansk, like the shipyard, some chemicals, other production companies, they collapsed,” he said. “Most of them just disappeared. Some were privatized by external investors.”
Many people left, but Alexandrovich chose to stay, working for the mayor’s office, then the regional government, and now as the CFO for the port of Gdansk, the fifth-busiest in the EU in 2023.
He has had a front row view of the dramatic turnaround of a city, which 20 years ago was branded “the backwards window of Poland” by analysts at PwC.
“Each city, even each country, has a time window to do some reforms, to make decisions that have consequences for the future,” he said. “And everything depends on how we act in this time window, where opportunities appear.”
In Gdansk, the window was provided by a strong mayor, a group of private businessmen, and a huge event: Euro 2012.
The soccer championship was crucial. Not just because of the golden stadium, still used today, but because of the huge investment by the national government directed to the city.
It got €500m ($580m) for transport infrastructure, the biggest national funding per capita, which supplemented capital investments by local businesses, including the Olivia center, and encouraged a stable inflow of private capital.
But what Gdansk needed most of all was a new image. While Euro 2012 brought glamor, late mayor Pawel Adamowicz added human touches, declaring the city a “refuge” for newcomers during the refugee crisis of 2014-2015.
This became the “Gdansk model,” under which a migrant council regularly meets with the mayor to track developments and tackle any issues for incoming populations. It worked wonders for the subsequent waves of Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other newcomers; as much as 10% of the city’s population is now foreign-born.
A variation of this model worked in other second-tier cities, too. An initial push from a public or private partner, an event to galvanize local support and investment, and then the use of those as the springboard to create a new image. People move in their heads before they vote with their feet.
The Transylvanian city of Cluj-Napoca was a downtrodden nationalistic hub, with a mayor who openly disrespected more than 20% of the population because they were Hungarians. There was little prospect of foreign investment.
In 2004, Emil Boc, later Romania’s prime minister, was elected mayor and turned to universities to figure out what to do with the city.
“We had about 27 working groups and, with citizens and the administration, they involved about 600 people,” said Professor Calin Hintea, who led the project. The groups covered everything from IT to culture, film, and better treatment and social opportunities for pet owners, then produced a roadmap for the next 10 years.
A strong local network of entrepreneurs benefited from the inflow of capital brought by the new openness. They had learned to work without external help and capital during the nationalistic era and were well placed to make the best of the new age, according to Marius Cristea, a former World Bank analyst in Cluj and founder of the Urbicus consultancy.
Then came the event. Cluj was European Youth Capital in 2015, which reinvigorated a city already bursting with young people, including around 100,000 students. The legacy included a huge festival, the ability to tap into EU-wide networks, and a city that was seen as a new, youthful place, instead of an old, boring, central European backwater.
Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second city, has a similar story after a string of unsuccessful mayors had managed to leave it with no money, substandard services, and failing infrastructure.
Once an agricultural hub at the center of Bulgaria’s best farmland to the southeast of the capital, Sofia, its main function had been stripped away along with socialism’s centralized markets.
Unlike Cluj and Gdansk, its salvation didn’t come from a visionary mayor or a group of local businessmen with wealth enough to fund a new beginning, but from the initiative of one man.
It was Plamen Panchev, a construction manager building a factory for Italian sweet maker Ferrero, who triggered Plovdiv’s renaissance. He hit on a simple model: buying land, attracting investors, building a factory, and helping with documents and services.
The model proved so successful that Plovdiv and the eight municipalities around it now boast about 200 factories making a wide range of products.
Plovdiv’s event came when it won the competition to be Europe’s 2019 Capital of Culture, and the seven years between winning and hosting have been the most creative and innovative in its recent history. It reinvented itself as the cultural and gastro hub of Bulgaria and now attracts more than a million tourists every year, a quarter from abroad.
It is possible to discern the clear outlines of change in all three cities, although official statistics have not always completely caught up. All three are in different places on the decline-reversal timeline, which reflects the different national and local dynamics.
Gdansk, for example, has been growing strongly for more than a decade, and Eurostat has registered a 6% rise in population since 2019. Cluj has also been growing since before the pandemic, at a 0.5% annual rate, and although an overall correction of numbers happened with the census in 2021, it has continued to accelerate, with growth now reaching almost 1.5% for the period 2022-24.
The story is the same for Plovdiv — the last of the three to have turned the page. The city and its three connected municipalities, which form the core of the region, have been growing by 0.5% since 2016 up to the census break, and then kept on growing.
All three cities have capitalized on their opportunities and connected seemingly distant dots.
“The city is like a human being,” said Cluj’s Professor Hintea. “It has a profile. If you understand the profile, you encourage what is good, and you discourage what is bad.”
Ognyan Georgiev is a long-time reporter and editor for the leading Bulgarian business publication Capital, and currently head of SeeNext - the English language news service for Southeast European politics, business, and the economy. He follows regional development, the economy, cities, and European funding. Georgiev is a Robert Bosch Stiftung and Fulbright alumni and spent a year at MIT.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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