The South-Eastern Europe: Four Cities initiative (SEE:4C) integrates a diverse corpus of materials, producing a multidimensional and layered research. From archival documents to testimonies, from drawing plans and maps to diagrams, from theoretical frameworks to empirical data obtained through fieldwork, the readings on Belgrade, Podgorica, Skopje, and Tirana come together to construct a rich, albeit fragmented, study of these four cities and the complex processes behind them.

Despite the obvious distinctions between Tirana and the former Yugoslav cities of Belgrade, Podgorica, and Skopje, these four cities share many fundamental features. Firstly, they are capitals of states outside the European Union, despite sitting at the heart of Mediterranean Europe. It is no coincidence that the TNE-DeSK project identified South East Europe (SEE) as a strategic area. Secondly, all four have undergone the transition to a market economy through processes marked by comparable trajectories. Two consequences stand out in particular: the sudden fragmentation of housing ownership and the parallel weakening of urban governance and public intervention by post-socialist governments. Privatization and land restitution laws introduced in the early to mid-1990s produced deep, often traumatic transformations. These shifts accelerated dynamics that, while new to these locations, are familiar in Western Europe. Today, mechanisms of rent extraction and speculative appropriation —capturing surplus value socially produced through public space quality, cultural capital, and mixité— are evident in all of them, as in any other European metropolitan area.

However, these cities appear to sustain specific forms of resistance to the pervasive logic of the real estate market. Certain existing features —such as the continuity of ground-level spaces and open-space systems, circulation, and typological variability— are not easily subsumed under privatization logic and thus make these cases all the more enlightening.