Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing Estates after 1945
The formula is all very clear. Through condensing the residential areas, the planners created a linear structure, an "urban backbone," which had all the prerequisites of an urban existence-traffic, communal institutions, commerce, catering, and promenades-to one side of it, while on its other side one could get to pristine nature through the parklands between the sub-centres and the educational institutions. Why does this carefully-devised system fail to function properly, then? That it doesn’t is witnessed by the depressed mood of the inhabitants, the lack of street life, and the deterioration of the environment as a whole. Studying the sociology of new housing estates in the late 1970s, Iván Szelényi and György Konrád found two reasons behind these problems. One of these they identified in the suburban character of the housing estate (as a residential area far removed from the places of work and public institutions), the other in the fact that the relatively high quality apartments "sucked people up,” keeping them from the desolate public spaces, which were thus unable to function as a sort of agora. Considering the fact that Árpád Mester would have had the ground- floor level of 30-metre high and ioo-to-200-metre long prefab buildings flanking a 40- to 70-metre-wide dual carriageway to act as the scene of urban activities, it is small wonder that reality failed to live up to his expectations. Nyírpalota út is not Oxford Street or even Váci utca. It may look good on a scale model or in a aerial photograph, but from a human perspective, its is an ill-defined environment petering out into a vacuum between the houses, hardly differing from the landscaped areas in public ownership (i.e. belonging to nobody) behind the buildings. Even as architects enthused about Újpalota, which they regarded as a real city rather than a housing estate proper, sociologists and even some urban planners saw clearly that all it represented was the myth of city life. Here is what Szilvia Sz. Urbanek concluded in a 1978 issue of Magyar építőművészet (Hungarian Architecture): "An urban city is more than a rationally-arranged spatial cluiter oh well-defined, medical functions of safety and convenience and a itructure of public and individual life [...] Urban planning ii not an exclusively architectural task, and the essence' of city life cannot be grasped in a single creative gesture." It is not only that the quality of life is determined by more than the quantifiable satisfaction of basic physiological needs. It is not even enough to merely take into consideration the psychological and sociological effects of a given spatial structure. What it is all about is that it is impossible, in itself, to create a city with a single paternalistic gesture from above and then to design it as an autonomous work of architecture. The problem is not with the particular act of urban planning or the appearance of the buildings, but with the whole conception from the centrally-adminis70
