Ferkai András: Housing Estates - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2005)
Housing Estates after 1945
Epilogue No new housing estates have been built since the regime change in Hungary. Residential parks, however, have been built in large numbers. This being an age of the theme park, the industrial park, the info-park and the rest, why shouldn't there be residential parks, too? Obviously, a residential park answers the definition of a housing estate as a separate unit of detached houses or smaller apartment buildings, a type frequently met above. The rejection of the earlier name is tantamount to the rejection of the traditions represented by the housing estate of socialism. Residential parks emphasise private property, individuality, cosiness and security, everything, that is, which is absent from state housing estates. Separation and security are often overemphasised to the outside world, while the individual parts of the property are not clearly separated from one another. As opposed to the old-fashioned neighbourhood of detached houses, the residential park turns in upon itself, rejecting the idea of community with the rest of the city. While one can freely walk in the streets of Wekerle, the Postal Workers’ Estate or the OT1 Garden-City, a stroll in the internal walkways of a new residential park is unthinkable. The residential park then is a segregated pocket in the city, similar to the Graphisoft Park, which one can only enter with a special permit. Less politely put, the residential park is a ghetto, as it is a closed area inhabited by a homogenous population (in terms of financial status at least). True, its residents chose to live here of their own free will, and they are also free to move out whenever they wish to. From the viewpoint of the town, these pockets are in no way better, though, than the large housing estate tearing through the texture of the city. Two major tasks will have to be undertaken in the next few years. One will be to learn how to build good housing estates. This would of course require some state- or city-sponsored programme of welfare housing, as there is a growing number of people unable to find long-term accommodation. It takes no more than a look at neighbouring Vienna to see what it means to have an unbroken tradition of municipal housing in place since the 1920s. The Austrian capital has particularly fine examples to offer of how small housing estates of a mixed composition can be constructed. Then conditions encouraging self-organising communities to build tenant-owned properties should be created once again. It is essential that not only profit-oriented investors build rented flats. By now it has become clear that tenement houses built and operated on a speculative basis are in many ways worse than their predecessors from the interwar period or even the 19th century. Better quality can be expected of a non-profit association, 77
