Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
6. Towns along the Hungarian and Slovak border
The line of Hungarian and Slovak towns development from new bridges at Komárom and Esztergom. Štúrovo counts on the resettlement of the suppliers of Suzuki and Sanyo, and North Komárno intends to establish a business park similar to that in South Komárom. To implement the above-mentioned bridge investments, an interstate agreement and inter-governmental negotiations will be necessary. • Rétság, Balassagyarmat, Szécsény and Salgótarján in Nógrád County and Ózd in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County make up the Hungarian line of towns, with rather weak gravitation areas, beyond the river Ipeľ. After getting to know Hungarian conditions, people commuting to work in Hungary from Slovakia move off to work in Vác or Budapest. • The Slovak line of towns with gravitation areas for Hungarian villages stretches from Tornal’a, through Plešivec and Rožňava to Moldava nad Bodvou. Commuting to work has begun. The mostly Slovak employers are satisfied with the well-trained Hungarian employees. The inhabitants of Hungarian villages can earn higher wages in the companies of small towns than if they commuted to their ‘own’ regional centres to work. • The only town in Bodrogköz to have no economic force to attract jobseekers from Hungary is Kráľovský Chlmec. The job-creating ability of Sátoraljaújhely is insufficient even for its own Hungarian environs. • Budapest has not been able to extend its gravitation area to Slovakia so far. Between Budapest and Košice there are no cities with strong gravitation ability. The border towns close to each other can be categorized in several ways. The ESPON (European Spatial Planning Observation Network) programme, which takes the morphological and functional characteristics of urban spaces into consideration, provides a theoretical framework for categorization. MOT (Mission Opérationelle Transfrontalière), which has been developed as a part of the programme, assesses the organizational level of cooperation (Székely 2007). Zoltán Dövényi, a Hungarian researcher, has elaborated a history-based categorization. This is the closest to historical and political reality, because the border divided existing towns and gravitation areas after the 1920 Trianon Peace Treaty. According to Dövényi’s (2002) categorization, divided towns emerged along the border. A characteristic feature of the divided town is that it had been developing as one town for centuries when, due to an unexpected historical event, the town on the two banks of the Danube was 151
