Faurest, Kristin: Ten spaces - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2010)

An American friend here in Budapest, searching the classifieds for her next apartment, comes to me once again bewildered by language: in what district, she asks, can she find this place called Tető tér? Because according to the newspaper, there are an awful lot of flats available there.

The mistake is not surprising: Tető tér isn’t an address, it literally means roof space, in other words, an attic that’s been converted into a flat. And space is, after all, such a deliciously ambiguous word, meaning everything and nothing at once.

So what do the spaces between buildings mean?

M. Christine Boyer, writing in The City oft Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments, attached great importance to them, declaring that the name of a city's streets and squares, the gaps in its very plan and physical form, its local monuments and celebrations, remain as traces and ruins of their former selves. The agora and the town square have been integral concepts of urban life since we have had cities. The design of the medieval city collected people and events in streets and squares. The urban commons is such an ancient and familiar concept that it has evolved into a common metaphor — particularly now that we live in an age where so many of our communal encounters occur over the Internet and not in a physical public space.

In the context of Budapest’s urban fabric there are at least three significant types of city space.

First, there are the monumentally-scaled sites designed to awe and impress, the most obvious of the many of them being Hősök tere. Their siting enables us to see them from afar, and as we approach them we are stunned by their spectacle and symbolism. They tell us who is significant in our city's collective mythology and are part of our identity. We visit them to be impressed, and they are always surrounded by crowds of tourists, but we aren't tempted by them to linger long or return frequently.

Then there are those many spaces that are just transit zones, places not to get to, but through - Moszkva, Blaha Lujza, Batthyány, Boráros. Our mental maps of them are populated not by statues, furniture, markets, neighbourhood characters or stately trees, but by the impersonal route numbers of buses and trams, the inscrutable signage of bleak underpasses.

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