Varga László - Lugosi András (szerk.): URBS. Magyar Várostörténeti Évkönyv XIII. - URBS 13. (Budapest, 2019)
Recenziók
Abstracts 379 The study briefly presents the most important parks of Vienna, Prague and Zagreb. In the case of the imperial capital special attention is paid to patterns like the development of the Ringstrasse and its area, the institutionalized festivities and representative exhibitions of the Prater, which served as examples to be followed for Budapest, Prague and Zagreb too. The comparative history of the parks of the four cities is analysed, together with their creators and the role these green spaces played in the social life and their specific characters rooted in the local circumstances (their topographic peculiarities, the specific forms of use and the social and ethnic structure of their public). On the basis of the examples of these four cities, the study analyses the nature of collective symbolic meaning their parks and gardens could embody on the universal, imperial, dynastic, country-wide and national level. The last part of the study sums up how parks of Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Zagreb could become memory places. The paper constitutes part of my PhD dissertation (Promenades, pleasure gardens and people’s parks.” Public parks of the Habsburg Monarchy: Private gardens and city parks in the social life of Buda-Pest (-1870-1918) (with comparative case studies of Vienna, Prague and Zagreb) defended at the Loránd Eötvös University of Sciences, Budapest in 2008. It is based on extensive research in the archives, museums and libraries of Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Zagreb. Miklós Melega The city of parks (?). Green areas in Szombathely in the period of dualism It is commonly believed in Szombathely that as a result of the dynamic urbanization in the period of dualism, the municipality became the city of parks. The goal of this study is the critical examination of the veracity of this statement. It examines the extension of the city’s green areas in space and in time, studies the functional utilization of the parks and their effects on the citizens’ life quality. It explores the social needs behind the attempts to plant trees in the streets and establish parks and studies the results of the development programs carried out on private initiative or led by the city administration. With comparative analysis of the available statistical data, the study compares the general situation of Szombathely and other Hungarian cities in the period and concludes that from the perspective of access to green areas, Szombathely achieved a prominent place in the hierarchy of cities.
