The most stigmatised area of Budapest, the Eighth District (Józsefváros) has been undergoing significant urban and social change since 1989. However, compared with what rent gap theory would have forecast, gentrification took off relatively late. After a historical narrative of how rent gap in Józsefváros had been produced throughout the 20 th century, we will argue that examining the mechanisms and outcomes of the three dominant dynamics of rescaling urban governance in Hungary-decentralisation without the redistribution of resources in the 1990s; EU accession and Europeanisation of public policies from the 2000s; and recentralisation after 2010-help us understand when, where and how gentrification has been unwinding in Middle-Józsefváros, the most dilapidated area of the Eighth District. The article will present three case studies of local urban regeneration as paradigmatic for the three rescaling dynamics: Corvin Promenade, Magdolna Quarter Programme, and the ongoing Orczy Quarter project. It will show the underlying revanchist policies and discourses in each case. The main aim of the current paper is to illustrate how a scale-sensitive political economic approach can go beyond the mainstream public and political discourse in scrutinising gentrification, through shedding light on structural factors contributing to exclusion, criminalisation, displacement, and othering.
Housing markets can be understood as indicators of the spatial pattern of capital investment under contemporary financial capitalism. We take this point of entry in order to analyze core-periphery relations around the turning point of the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 on the Hungarian housing market. The instance of crisis sheds light on patterns of homogenization and differentiation; the effects of which can be understood by exploring housing market activity on various scales from the European to the local/regional. We argue that these two patterns of uneven development are inextricably linked and result in deepening sociospatial polarization.
In recent decades Hungarian public policy interventions in the domain of housing have shown a strongly dualistic pattern, contributing to the reproduction of socio-spatial unevenness. The authors trace how capital investment in housing is channelled and mediated by public policies, and how these public policies are made dual along the lines of social class. The authors claim that state intervention in Hungary has deepened inequalities in the housing market at various scales—from the European to the neighbourhood. The analysis is based, on the one hand, on qualitative (and, more restrictedly, on quantitative) data related to the strategies of large economic actors of the housing market and, on the other hand, on qualitative research on housing-related public interventions in socio-economically deprived urban areas.
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