The Pauperisation and Suburbanisation of the Countryside: Two Aspects of Spatially Differentiated Post-communist Development in Slovakia

Abstract

The “Velvet Revolution” of 1989, the symbol of the collapse of socialism in former Czechoslovakia, evoked gigantic, unexpected and ambiguously perceived post-communist transformation. Dramatic changes in the spheres of politics (division of the state), economy (establishment of a market economy) and social system (polarisation of society) decisively influenced the development trajectories of rural areas in contemporary Slovakia. The aim of the present study is twofold. First, it attempts to describe and analyse the dynamism of the spatial labour market in the context of the unemployment, poverty and pauperisation of socially excluded rural inhabitants from marginalised areas of Eastern Slovakia. Second, it briefly presents the development of the largest suburb in Slovakia (Chorvatsky Grob, near Bratislava), not only as a visible sign of change in the post-communist countryside, but also as a controversional outcome of the chaotic, unplanned suburbanisation process.