In the study social and housing indicators from the 1990 and 2001 censuses were selected and compared. The main aim of the study was to analyse the changing levels of residential segregation in the city, the geographical pattern and dynamics of residential mobility within the urban region, and the question of investment and disinvestment in the building, and not least the housing stock.

In the empirical part of the presentation the issues of urban up-grading (gentrification) and down-grading (ghettoisation) processes are demonstrated and examined on specific case studies. Social and environmental impacts of running rehabilitation programmes are also investigated. At the end of the paper a general model is introduced in which was tryed to summarize the lessons of post-socialist urban transition.

Budapest as the capital city of Hungary and a major hub of international business corporations is a rapidly transforming city. The transformation process was launched by the political and economic changes of the early 1990s. The different zones of the urban region were affected differently by the transformation, which is market-led and generates both up- and downgrading processes in the city. There are two major areas where upward processes are most evident in metropolitan Budapest: the central business district and the suburbs.

Neighbourhoods lying between these two dynamic zones reveal some more controversial development. In most of the inner urban residential neighbourhoods that were severely neglected during the communist era a further decline can be observed. In some of these neighbourhoods physical deterioration is accompanied by extreme forms of social segregation and social exclusion. Only a limited number of neighbourhoods provide examples for upward trajectory, these are mostly the core areas of urban rehabilitation actions. Neighbourhoods affected by rehabilitation programmes are going through rapid population change, the old and less affluent population is being displaced in a gentrification process that resembles very much the western cities. The biggest challenge for the future development of the city is caused by the high rise housing estates. These large scale monotonous housing estates are becoming more and more the shelter of the urban underclass.

Geopraphical Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Hungary
http://www.mta.hu/index.php?id=406&type=0
Mr Zoltán Kovács

10/05/2006

Mr Zoltán Kovács

research

Urban Policy > Housing > Housing policy

Housing market, Collective housing