Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing estate... what a sinister term it is! It conjures up ten-storey blocks with patches of burnt-out grass in between. There is an aluminium-walled supermarket here, a wasteland of car-parks, a playground with spherical and space- ship-like jungle gyms there. The wind stirs up swirls of dust and filth among the concrete monstrosities. Since the term has become tainted by the large- scale construction projects of the late Kádár era, today's housing developments are called residential parks. The term itself has not always had such an unpleasant connotation. Housing estates once came in all sorts of styles. Clusters of residential blocks used to serve a particular purpose exceptionally well, and some continue to function perfectly to this day. Most residents of these developments are quite happy to live where they live. It is worth examining the roots of the Hungarian term describing the phenomenon- and within that, the second part of the compound word lakótelep, roughly the equivalent of e&tate in the English expression of the same meaning. The literal sense of the word telep is colony, a word which, besides describing a group of colonisers, denotes a group of people living together in an alien environment on a housing estate developed and maintained with industrial methods. Uniform blocks of labourers’ dwellings were actually called munkáigyar- mat, or a workers’ colony. The Hungarian term for housing estate thus suggests the idea of seclusion and describes a residential quarter standing emphatically apart from the organically-grown neighbourhoods of a given town or city formed over an extended period of time. Such a housing estate then is an assembly of buildings raised fairly quickly in a single project, normally for a specifically- defined group of the population, and in a style aiming at some sort of architectural uniformity. Even a smaller group of detached houses can thus be described as a lakótelep, or housing estate, provided they were built at the same time and in an identical style. One form of housing estate is the model development, introducing buildings and apartments in a contemporary, experimental style. (Such are the housing estates built by the Werkbund association with the participation of prominent architects in Stuttgart, Breslau, Vienna, Zurich and Prague, or the estate of small homes in Napraforgó utca, Budapest.) Coming under the same heading are smaller or larger clusters of houses built for a welfare-related purpose. Examples of this include the i6th-century "Fuggerei" built in Augsburg by the Fugger family, the workers’ villages raised in England by paternalistic industrialists, or the German and Dutch Siedlung-developments of the 1920s. Community and state-financed developments as well as estates built with funds raised by middle-class and workers’ self-help associations also belong here. Depending upon which prospective tenants they were built 5
