Modeling Post-Socialist Urbanization – The Case of Budapest

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is the specific syndrome of Budapest's post-socialist urban development, planning, and governance between 1990 and 2010. Everyday experience offers a large number of seemingly disjointed and unsystematic micro-phenomena characterizing this period’s urbanization. The starting point of the research is the observation that these phenomena are systematically related and form a pattern. The hypothesis is that their coexistence is not random but has to do with systematic background factors that can describe both interrelations between the different phenomena and the nexus between historical legacies, characteristics of the systemic transformation in 1989-1990, and the production of space following it. This hypothesis leads to the construction of a model consisting of three explanatory blocks: the Socialist Urban Legacy, the Decentralization, and Kulturkampf Narratives. Each of these blocks establishes links between particular historical background conditions and the syndrome of Budapest’s recent urbanization. The model as a whole helps to explain the way different micro-phenomena point towards convergent outcomes that can be described as urban development generated by market forces and private demand, accompanied by the absence of coherent visions on how the city should evolve. Furthermore, the model’s level of abstraction allows it to provide apparatus for future comparative studies of post-socialist urbanization in East Central Europe and elsewhere as its three building blocks represent general regularities characteristic of the socialist system and of the transition from this system to capitalist democracy.