Social-Spatial Transformation, Social Crisis and Crisis Management in Northern Hungarian Urban Ghettos – The Cases of Miskolc and Ózd

Abstract

In spite of the great multitude of regional and urban development interventions, urban ghettos as particular spaces of social and/or ethnic segregation have remained integral segments of socio-spatial structures of the rural hinterland of Northern Hungary since the regime change. Different social, economic, environmental, political and cultural factors have contributed to one of the deepest and most complex socio-structural crises in Hungary. Over the past quarter century, despite significant public and even EU financial support, the Roma and the extreme poor have experienced very little development in terms of their living standards. This improvement is still far from the average quality of life concerning low and low-middle strata people. Even though local governments have made steps towards mitigating the seriousness and extreme homogeneity of ethnic and/or poverty ghettos in recent decades. This could have been achieved due to urban regeneration projects, including de- and anti-segregation. These have involved the demolition of ghettos and the displacement of a large proportion of the extreme poor living in misery. The ‘spectacular’ results that might be observed in these areas have been overshadowed by the fact that ethnic-based ghettoization has not decreased significantly in the region for more than three decades. Instead, only its patterns have changed. Segregation, in fact, still persists, though in a modified form. Some of the notorious urban ghettos located in the vicinity of the city center have disappeared, and thus poverty has been ‘swept away’ from these areas. They were replaced by larger number of spatially fragmented, ethnically similar homogeneous neighborhoods. In the end, the conflicts still exist in different intra-regional and intra-urban contexts, mostly in some secluded spots of the rural countryside – far from social scientific observation and media attention. The emergence of these ‘islands of extreme poverty’ provide evidence of not one, but rather several parallel social realities in Hungary. These ghetto spaces are so different from mainstream ones that they might accurately be called ‘Another Hungary’.