Transitions in Budapest’s Agglomeration 1990–2005

Since the collapse of socialism in Hungary in 1989, political and economic factors increased residential mobility between Budapest and its agglomeration area. Social disparities have become more pronounced not only among the settlements of the agglomeration, but also within them. This paper identifies the different status-dependent paths within the general process of suburbanization using official statistical data, survey and interview analysis. The empirical research was made in 1992 and was repeated in 2002. We argue that higher status groups used the new opportunities to strengthen their status by choosing to move while the poor were forced to move to less advantageous sectors of the agglomeration. These phenomena are the consequences partly of spontaneous factors and partly of state and local government policies. The effects of market forces can be taken as spontaneous factors and they increased western type suburbanization. Several measures taken by states and local governments increased the impact of these factors, helping higher-status groups to move to favorable areas within and around the cities. The same urban and housing policy measures increased the risk of concentrating poverty in certain areas of cities and they resulted in the not-well-known outmigration of lower-status groups. These groups had to move out of the city because it became too expensive for them to live there. Poverty meant that they were unable to find places in high or middle-status suburban areas around the cities and they had to move to more distant, poorer areas of the country.