PROFESSUR FÜR ARCHITEKTUR
UND STÄDTEBAU —
PROF. KEES CHRISTIAANSE

FORSCHUNG

PATTERNS OF POST-SOCIALIST URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Patterns of Post-Socialist Urban Development: The Case of Budapest

The subject of this research is the specific symptom-group of Budapest's post-socialist urban development and planning between 1990 and 2010. The project aims to show that the Hungarian state and its city governments have lost most of their elbow-room in the two decades following the transition to democracy. A large number of various reasons are responsible for this, outstanding among them being the shortages of financial, human and institutional resources, and a conspicuous lack of that kind of ideological consensus between different political and cultural actors that would have been necessary for forming a shared idea of how the city should evolve. Thus, except for infrastructural developments mostly financed by cohesion funds of the European Union, hardly any large scale, purely public projects have been realized. Some other circumstances, such as overshot privatization and decentralization, also contributed to the general outcome that could be described as private investors finding themselves in a key role and with expanded latitude. Post-socialist transformation of the city went on without being governed by rigorous communal design, driven by market forces and private demand. In this context it is crucial to understand the structure and outcome of development projects realized in Public Private Partnership between the municipality and private investors, and the role these have been playing in the city's transformation. These are projects where the city government aimed at using private capital and demand as means of what it identified as ideas of the common good. However, manoeuvring between the different interests and along the blurry and, at times, even contradictory decision making mechanisms and scopes of authority and competence has often resulted in unintended consequences. Furthermore, the shift towards PPP projects resulted in experts, such as sociologists and planners, losing much of their influence, as politicians and local governments have seen these as one of their very few chances of proving what developments they can provide their locality with, hoping to meet public expectations and popular taste rather than the demands of professionals. In this sense, these developments also mirror norms and expectations of the society, or at least how politicians of the time have seen them.

keywords: Budapest; post-socialist; urban development; urban planning; Public Private Partnership; 1990-2010;

researcher: Daniel Kiss

2010-2013; supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation