Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
4. Towns in Slovakia after 1993
Towns in Slovakia after 1993 While the number of urban inhabitants rose from 2,993,234 to 3,022,106, the population of 46 towns still decreased, which is a sign of considerable changes in just a decade. These towns belong to larger settlements, with an average of 27,183 inhabitants, the capital city included. Of the towns with increasing population 40 have a population of fewer than 10,000 people, 19 have 10-20,000 inhabitants, and 28 more than 20,000. This movement of the population is due to several reasons. First of all, the villages that had been attached to the towns without their approval became independent again. This phenomenon is contradictory because, whereas during the decades of communism the concentration of villages had been more frequent, now separation of villages from towns was more typical (Slavik 2000). The increase in the number of people who moved to towns slowed down because of the termination of state housing construction, which had attracted people and made it possible for them to become inhabitants of towns in a short time. Some industrial sectors, such as arms manufacture, were faced with a crisis due to the changed political and market conditions. The closing down of such factories resulted in a high rate of unemployment, and a portion of the people, looking for a solution for their own situation, moved out of town. However, the reasons for moving from towns have changed considerably. One of the most extreme reasons is that the families that have acquired better living conditions move out of the crowded towns to family houses in the green belt, a village or a small town in its environs where there is quiet and clean air and from where they commute to the nearby city, mostly by car. The other extreme is represented by those who, because of their limited means, cannot afford to cover their living costs in the city, and so try to find cheaper housing in the countryside. A special kind of population movement, typical of the Slovak settlement system, is the strong movement of the population within towns. Attaching the surrounding settlements to a town to make it larger was a method of developing large cities in state party times. Especially after the changes in 1989, the population of the settlements - sometimes relatively far away - that had become parts of a town started to increase suddenly. This was mainly due to the increasingly common construction of one-family houses. Meanwhile, the population of large cities, e.g. that of Bratislava as a whole, was perhaps even decreasing (Slavik-Kožuch-Bačik 2005). The movement of the population can also be influenced by the urban development strategy of their new, elected leaders. In the towns where 92
