Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)
Recenziók
510 Abstracts as secondary. Since there was a lag in the urbanisation of Central Europe, including Hungary, the stages of urbanisation were delayed and did not spread to all towns. The other view, although admitting the importance of economic development, finds that even where countries were equal in this respect, the pace and nature of their urbanisation differed in highly characteristic ways depending on whether their modes of production were socialist or capitalist. The author claims definite validity for a peculiarly (state) socialist model of spatial planning and urbanisation. What makes this different from the model followed in capitalist countries is not just that the Eastern European socialist countries had a lower level of economic development or that their socio-economic development lagged behind that of Western European countries. There were features of urban and spatial planning under (state) socialist conditions which contrasted just strongly with Western models as did the economic and social structures of these countries. The paper presents these features and analyses the extent to which urban and spatial planning in Hungary in the post-transition period has turned out to be a dead end, with signs of a return to the “Prussian model”. ÁGNES NAGY The city of power and knowledge, 1945-1970. Historiographical review of history and social science research into Hungarian towns of that period. This historiographical review looks at four areas of history and social science research into post-1945 Hungarian towns. Firstly it examines whether socialist towns (newly-built and newly-developed industrial towns) and socialist housing estates - which rank among the central topics of urban research into the area - may be regarded as microcosms of the socialist political and social system. Secondly, it exposes a basic limitation of the political-history approach which concentrates on “urban development”: the failure to step out of that era’s state-power outlook and mode of speech and to adopt analytical tools. Thirdly, it identifies a lack of post-1945 social history research into Budapest. Social developments following the Second World War were first outlined by Gyula Benda in 1985 through the structuralist paradigm, but have not been the subject
