Erika Nagy

Urban Restructuring in the Grip of Capital and Politics: Gentrification in East-Central Europe

The causal relationship between global economy, neo-liberal urbanism and gentrification transforming urban landscape to an increasingly large extent has been identified in a number of studies conducted at various places all over the world. This paper strives to outline how one-time “socialist” or “controlled” gentrification in post-socialist countries has been integrated and stimulated further by the urban restructuring of global capitalism. Our international studies reviewing the revitalisation of small and medium-sized towns reveal that the now independent local policies in East-Central Europe give green light to capital, thus helping market-driven gentrification, in the same way as their counterparts in the ‘West’. Within economic, social and political interconnections, at both local and global scales, a special emphasis is given to gentrification in the towns of Veszprem, Oradea and Sopot.

The Everyday Practices of the Reproduction of Peripherality and Marginality in Hungary

The persistence of spatial inequalities within Europe is an issue that has been pointed out in governmental papers and also in academic discourses looking back to the last ten years of the enlarged European Union. Official reports put a strong emphasis upon the ‘convergence’ of European regions supported by the eastward extension of the European division of labour. Meanwhile, scholars engaged in critical social research were concerned with the various forms and dimensions of ongoing socio-spatial polarization and the emerging dependencies of East and Central European (ECE) spaces that were made apparent and reinforced by the recent economic crisis (Smith and Timar 2010, Hudson and Hadjimichalis 2013, Lang 2013). Such discourses revealed the multi-scalar nature of polarization processes that occur at European (east/west, south/north) and also at a sub-national scale, and manifest vigorously in ECE in the centralization of power and resources in capital cities, in regional inequalities, and also in urban-rural dichotomies (Ehrlich et al. 2012).

A társadalmi-térbeli marginalizáció folyamatai a leszakadó vidéki térségekben

Rurality has been associated with economic backwardness and social erosion in public discourses in Hungary since the early years of the transition, even though academic debates highlighted the diversity of historical trajectories and socio-cultural contexts of rural transformations. To contribute to a deeper, more nuanced understanding of major structural changes and their local consequences in rural spaces, we focus on marginalisation processes in four regions in Hungary that are labelled as ‘declining’ and ‘backward’ in political as well as academic discourses. We consider marginalisation as a ‘product’ of changing social relations that become manifest in socio-spatial processes shaping all aspects of everyday life. This concept allows us to focus on daily practices of social groups (women, Roma, those who live with disability problems) and economic agents (entrepreneurs) living/operating in ‘declining’ rural spaces. In this way, we can explore the mechanisms that marginalise individuals, communities and spaces through various lenses, and reveal how marginality is ‘lived’ and responded to in various contexts. Our key arguments are the followings: 1. The diverse processes of social marginalisation and the accumulation of backwardness in rural spaces are linked intimately, in fact, reinforce one another; thus, marginalisation should be considered as a spatial process that manifests itself at and through various scales – from neighbourhood to global level. 2. Marginalised groups and individuals living in backward rural spaces are compelled to adopt practices that reproduce their own disadvantages, dependencies (and often, exclusion) within the existing structuralinstitutional frameworks. The analysis rests both on the transdisciplinary review of concepts and discourses over marginality and on social and economic structures in rural spaces. The empirical tier of the paper contains extensive field work in four socio-economic crisis-hit rural regions in Hungary (the micro-regions of Lengyeltoti, Mezőkovacshaza, Sarkad and Sarospatak), completed in 2013. The empirical work based on qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews) by which we targeted marginalised social groups, local entrepreneurs and the institutions that shape – rather reinforce than counteract – everyday practices reproducing marginality.

The (Re-)Production of Peripherality in Central and Eastern Europe

The idea of this special issue was inspired by two powerful processes that encompassed academic studies focused on socio-spatial inequalities within Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and beyond . 1 . One is the highly uneven development of socio-spatial processes endemic to global capitalism, that manifested itself recently as a persisting financial, structural and social crisis across Central and Eastern and Southern Europe, a sluggish recovery in European (and other) ‘core’ economies, and a multiplicity of political conflicts at various scales inside and outside (yet related to) Europe. For CEE, it was the first deep structural and financial crisis since the transition. It exhibited and reproduced the inequalities stemming from post-socialist conditions (accumulation through rapid and extensive dispossession) as well as from the embedding in global spatial division of labour and European institutional contexts in a strongly dependent and contested way (Böröcz, 2010; Pickles and Smith, 2015) . 2. Moreover, the region has been objectified and marginalized by academic inquiries from the West (Timár, 2004; Stenning and Hörschelmann, 2008) . Studies from the East remained mostly invisible, as they failed to enter mainstream discourses and challenge them from the periphery through reflexive re-conceptualization of CEE transformations, such as re-thinking their (our) own peripherality (Timár, 2004) . Nevertheless, the recent crisis raised new concerns about growing socio-spatial inequalities and heated the debates on powerful concepts and narratives of the highly diverse realities of everyday life . To contribute to such discourses, this issue aims to get a deeper understanding of the reproduction of peripherality through research