Mezei István: Urban development in Slovakia (Pécs-Somorja, 2010)
3. The settlement structure of Slovakia
The settlement structure of Slovakia 3. 6. 2 Towns as the symbols of Slovak grandeur Industrial development had an important specific feature. In socialist countries industrial development followed the Western European model of the 19th century, i.e. huge factories, especially heavy industrial factories were built, which employed a high number of workers. This had further advantages for contemporary Czechoslovak politics, because under the auspices of this kind of development setting up the network of big cities could be started in Slovakia. The builders of the Slovak state called the actors of the historical past to account for the missing big city network, one worthy of an independent and industrialized country. It is true that Slovakia lost its short-lived independence after 1945, but under the conditions of the dictatorship they could claim that in the century before 1948 there was no industrial development that could have resulted in a town network of an appropriate size. This was the reason why the Slovak town network in a state of disintegration and almost exclusively made up of small towns (Očovský 1979). Since they were lacking a developed town economy, towns could not absorb the increase in the village population, so the surplus population migrated abroad, from the historical Hungary to the United States, then, during the era of the first Czechoslovakia, to Western Europe. During the era of the second Czechoslovakia there was no way to leave the country, therefore for decades the destination of migration was Czechia. In the 1950s the net number of people migrating from the Slovak section of the country to Czechia was over 10,000 (the difference between the numbers of people migrating to and from Czechia). Due to industrialization, this number began to fall and in the 1970s it decreased to about 3,500 people. There were far fewer people moving in the opposite direction, i.e. from Czechia to Slovakia, which draws a true picture of what the relations were like between the two parts of the country. Calculating in thousandths, 2.3%o arrived from Czechia and 9.2%o from Slovakia in the 1950s, which decreased to 0.7%o and 2.0%o in the 1970s, respectively (Kühnl 1982, pp. 21-23). Slovak researchers also calculated that, provided there had been favourable economic conditions and no migration, Slovakia would probably have become a country with 7,000,000 inhabitants by 1970. This huge population would mostly have been town dwellers. In reality, however, only two gravitation areas with a high population emerged, those of Bratislava and Košice. In their estimation, there would have been six economic and residential centres, each of them with a population of over 100,000 people by 2000, and one of them would have more than 500,000 inhabitants. 76
