Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 4. (Budapest, 2009)
Recenziók
Abstracts 447 ROLAND PERÉNYI Dens of Sin and Squalor. Locations of poverty and crime in Budapest at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries However true it may be that Budapest was less socially segregated than other cities at turn of the century, the sources which most define our picture of Budapest at that time - travel books, reports and early sociography - generally link urban poverty and the closely related issue of crime to well-defined spatial points in the city. As in London, New York, Vienna and Berlin, “slumming” became common practice in Budapest in the 1890s. Sensation-seeking reporters, members of charitable organisations and the intellectual prototypes of urban sociologists - usually accompanying the police on a raid - visited districts inhabited by the city’s poor for the purpose of sharing their experiences with the public in written form. Most of these reports, with their description of the curious world of squalor and crime, worked into the story of the brave author’s death-defying exploits, are comparable with adventure stories and exotic travel tales. The early 20th century, however, saw the start of sociographic studies with a scientific basis, produced using statistics and interviews and concentrating on understanding social problems and seeking solutions to them. What both genres had in common was in linking squalor and criminality to a specific urban locality, a tenement, street or district. The “Csikágó” and the “Százház” were well-known names among the many sites identified as concentrations of poverty. But the localities of crime and squalor were not permanent, unchanging points on the urban map. This is well illustrated by the example of the suburbs, which both press and police reports mentioned as dens of crime until the extension of Budapest metropolitan police powers. This proved to have a kind of civilising function, and the dens of poverty and crime moved elsewhere, mostly to less-controlled areas of the city outskirts. The study attempts to identify the Budapest localities where a world of poverty and crime was discovered rivalling the dark interiors of distant countries, and to determine the effect of this spatial association on the presentation of social problems in social science and journalism, and thus on the middle class picture of poverty and crime.
