Discourses and practices of the smart city in Central Eastern Europe: insights from Hungary’s ‘big’ cities

Abstract

This paper intends to fill a gap in critical smart city scholarship regarding the Central Eastern European (CEE) context. To this end, smart city understandings and practices in Hungary's five (noncapital) major cities are examined through a discourse-analytical focus on relevant municipal planning documents, existing interventions and key actors' interpretations. The paper concludes that although smart city building in Hungary in many ways aligns with trends in the Global North and South, there are also notable differences that need to be contextualized in the country's historically shaped trajectory of urban (policy) development, especially its post-socialist institutional path-dependencies.

The spatial development of peripheralisation: The case of smart city projects in Romania

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“…The governance of smart cities and urban smart city projects in CEE cities is an under‐researched topic (McElroy, 2020; Nicula et al, 2022; Sikora‐Fernandez, 2018; Varro & Szalai, 2022). Taking the case of the Roma people from the outskirts of the city of Cluj‐Napoca (Romania's third‐largest city), Erin McElroy (2020) claims that the Roma have suffered a double dispossession, in which not only have ‘digital nomads’ indulged technocapitalist fantasies by appropriating Roma identity, but also the Roma have been evicted to make way for the coming of Western digital nomads and IT companies.…”

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From climate policy pioneers to climate policy leaders? The examples of the eastern German cities of Potsdam and Rostock

“…Moreover, there is not only a lack of research on the climate governance of mid-sized cities but also on post-socialist cities (Ferenčuhová 2020). Existing studies on post-socialist cities have rather focused on somewhat related topics such as green spaces (Badiu et al 2019;Csomós et al 2021), sustainability (Svirčić Gotovac and Kerbler 2019), or smart cities (Sikora-Fernandez 2018;Varró and Szalai 2021). Moreover, there is also a lack of studies on the regions (Länder) of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).…”