Suburbs and Sustainability in Budapest Agglomeration

Abstract

The rapid expanse of the metropolitan belt around Budapest and the tension stemming from increasing traffic and insufficiencies of various infrastructures, plus social and economic issues in the outer areas, have put the sustainability of suburbs at the forefront of professional and public debates with oversimplified and overgeneralized statements. The article, instead, attempts to shed light through a case study of a suburban town on the complexity of sustainability using the framework of Smart Growth, focusing on compactness, commuting, and community, using qualitative and quantitative survey data from 2018 and 2023. The findings prove that the analyzed town is relatively compact regarding ordinary and routine services but relies heavily on the center for more specialized ones. The local community is firmly knit and has no signs of atomization. The commuting patterns reveal a more complex picture where polycentricity contributes to new patterns of spatial connections and increasing car dependency despite the relatively low growth in the number of cars. The results underpin that the sustainability of suburbs may not be generally assessed, and scrutiny must be performed on the town level. Second, the sustainability of suburban areas may be separate from the sustainability of more dense, urbanized areas.