Large-Scale Restructuring Processes in the Urban Space of Budapest

Abstract

The all-embracing restructuring processes experienced in Hungarian cities, first of all in the capital city Budapest, are generally explained by the “mass privatization” of the previously state – or cooperatively – owned agrarian land, of the state-owned companies and the selling of the public housing stock to the sitting tenants after the political changes. This rough reasoning is completed by the stressing of the unprecedented speed of the conversion of public properties into private hands in contrast to the much slower similar processes in western cities. Even the best part of the Hungarian urban literature abstains from going beyond this level of interpretation. A more generalized argumentation calls the attention upon the effects of globalization that forces cities to meet the “gambling rules” of the world-wide competition among central places, that is, to meet the homogenized expectations of the “world capital” also on local level. These latter views are often overemphasized in popular discussions in Hungary by forgetting that the game has two players: even in the global space the public hand is, can be, in command of strong regulatory tools.