Urbs - Magyar várostörténeti évkönyv 5. (Budapest, 2010)

Recenziók

518

Abstracts

To serve the needs of Duslo, the state authorities decided to attach the small village of Veca (Vágvecse in Hungarian) as a suburb of Sal’a in 1960.

Development has radically changed the cityscape: housing estates have been built with thousands of dwellings, and old streets have been demolished.

The city’s development has also brought some positive benefits: an extensive service network, accelerated provision of public utilities and public lighting, and improvements to the transport network, but the new city is still seeking an identity.

JÁNOS HONVÁRI

Győr. An example of adaptability from the 1960s

The viability of a town largely depends on how quickly and flexibly it adapts to changing conditions. The town of Győr has, together with its surroundings, frequently been obliged to change its course of development during its history. The need to adapt is therefore neither a novelty nor an unmanageable catastrophe. The municipal authorities and inhabitants have faced such challenges at least 4 or 5 times during the last 150 years. This paper covers the contradictions, conflicts and social costs involved in the radical change of production in the state enterprise - one of the largest in the country - which dominated the life of the town until the transition. In the 1960s, Magyar Vagon- és Gépgyár (Hungarian Wagon and Machinery Works) started to replace all of its traditional products, production processes, trades and skills, a process which continued into the early 1970s. The change was accompanied by a conflict, involving personal insults and public quarrels, between two emblematic figures in the town, the General Secretary of the County Party Committee and the newly- appointed managing director of the wagon works. These conflicts, unusually, were taken before the supreme bodies of the Communist Party (the Politburo and the Central Committee). It was the managing director, Ede Horváth, who came out victorious from the fight, and Ferenc Lombos lost his position as general secretary of the county committee and his membership of the Central Committee. He was saved “banishment” from the county, but had to accept chairmanship of the County Council Executive Committee.