This research proposal focuses on waterfront development in Baltic and Black Sea port cities. Up until recently, international literature has tended to address urban transformation of Eastern Europe from the perspective of post-socialist transition. There exists little research that frames this transformation from the perspective of policy mobilities with transformative material outcomes and in relation to regional change. I suggest a research design that (1) focuses on Gdańsk and Constanța, two major regional hubs and the largest ports of Poland and Romania, respectively (2) highlights the discourses around selected waterfront development projects, and (3) situates them in a context of international policy transfers and regional adaptations to rupture. This research will offer insights to Eastern European urbanism as a dynamic landscape of knowledge transfers that is of interest to international scholarship. For that, I will build on my dissertation and introduce theoretical concepts to analyze four projects, either implemented or currently debated, in the selected two port cities. Employing multi-sited ethnographic methodologies, interviews and discourse analysis, my research 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, region-based knowledge diffusion and, perhaps, insights into emerging notions of territoriality.