Ferenc Gyuris

Knowledge and Power in Sovietized Hungarian Geography

Our chapter demonstrates how the discipline of geography was reorganized in a country belonging to the Soviet occupation zone after World War II. After the violent establishment of the Communist system, geography was found guilty of having served the interwar political regime. The old “reactionary” and “bourgeois” geography was demolished, and a new, Marxist-Leninist geography based on Soviet principles was established. The latter derived from economic determinism, and “physical” and “economic” geography were strictly separated. State research institutes, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Central Planning Office became the most important “centers of calculation” where Soviet-type “big science” was established. Several “old” geographers were pensioned off or exiled from academia. Others were driven to the periphery or forced to compromise with the system. Important positions were given to politically loyal “newcomers.” Geography as a discipline was expected to contribute to the “construction of socialism,” so “bourgeois” subdisciplines without “practical utilization” were dismantled, and “reactionary” human geography was rejected. Instead, emphasis was placed on issues serving the needs of economic planning, such as the socialist transformation of settlement networks, the establishment of a spatial framework for economic planning, and the transformation of nature to promote agricultural production. Geography was, moreover, expected to participate in the propagation of these new goals. Thus, Sovietization thoroughly reshaped Hungarian geography and changed its social, political, and economic roles as a field of science.

Urban Inequality: Approaches and Narratives

Social and economic disparities within ‘ordinary cities’ have been under-researched in contemporary urban studies. This chapter addresses the complexities of urban inequality with its many conflicting approaches and narratives. After a brief overview of the normative aspects of disparity, I discuss the influence of the situatedness of the researcher and the conflicting notions of the ‘urban’ on studying urban inequality. Thereafter I provide a historical overview of the manifold approaches and narratives in social sciences, with special emphasis on those from the contemporary decades. The analysis is aimed at identifying the main conceptual issues and considerations along which a complex investigation and interpretation of urban inequality in the creative city is possible.

A Contextual Analysis of the Emergence of Spatial Disparity Research

The various categories defined in the last section appeared in scientific thought as topics of research at very different points in time. A firm interest in spatial differentiation was already to be found in the earliest geographical works. As early as in Strabo’s (1983) Geographica written some 2,000 years ago, to describe of parts of the then known world and to identify differences between them was but a presentation of spatial differentiation. Basically the same was true for chorological works compiled over the next many centuries, including the Geographia Generalis of Bernhardus Varenius (1650), and even for the scientific contributions of chorological geography in the early twentieth century hallmarked by names such as Alfred Hettner and Richard Hartshorne (Warf 2010). In all these works, the spatial unevenness of physical geographical factors (such as location, relief, climate, vegetation) was a main factor along which various parts of the earth were distinguished and described.

The Debate Over Social Disparities and the Disparity Discourse

The analysis of spatial disparities has quite a long tradition in human geography and other social sciences; it has been among the major research issues of several disciplines for decades. Browsing the works written by geographers, economists, sociologists, or even experts of political sciences, one can find a great many contributions related to what is called spatial “differentiation”, “disparity”, “inequality”, “injustice” or “unevenness”. In the vast body of literature, however, the exact meaning of these terms, certainly all concerning the inhomogeneity of space and the peculiarity of places, remains unclear, especially as such expressions are often considered as synonymous, either explicitly or implicitly (Hinderink and Sterkenburg 1978). For this reason we find it important to have an overview of the various forms of geographical differences, and to introduce clear terminology first, which we can use in our essay to avoid misunderstandings.

Spatial Disparity Analysis and Anti-Capitalism: The “Classical” Marxist Tradition

The Marxist debate over inequalities in space was independent from the social survey movements as well as from the discipline of geography, although several decades later it exerted a significant impact on geographical thought. A Marxist interpretation of spatial disparities began to crystallize around the concept of uneven spatial development. This was actually not to be found in the works of Marx and Engels themselves, although their ideas also concerned the issue of spatial disparities at certain points. As Wissen and Naumann (2008) underscores, one such point was their reasoning in The Communist Manifesto:

Spatial Disparity Research After the Initial Decades of Cold War: End of the “Golden Age”

In the last few sections we showed that the spatial disparity discourse gained greatly in importance in the post-World War II context, where it became a sort of battlefield between the two superpowers and the political and economic blocks they led. These years witnessed the emergence of new approaches, new concepts, and new empirical results that threw new light on many aspects of spatial disparities, even if they had important shortcomings. This “golden age” seemed to be over, however, after 2 decades. Gradually but tendentiously, the political attention paid to the issue began to decline. The debate over theoretical aspects lost especially much in its vividness. The “big science” like investigation of spatial inequalities aimed at a universal explanation of underlying mechanisms and the formulation of “great theories” tended to withdraw to relatively peripheral domains in scientific research. These changes were caused by various political, social, and economic reasons, which are worth being analyzed one by one.

Political Functioning of the Spatial Disparity Discourse: A Summary

In Chaps. 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 we have provided a broad multidisciplinary overview of the theoretical concepts about spatial disparities. This journey through the history of the research tradition has shown that the challenge to explain geographical inequalities has inspired thinkers very differently in terms of personal background, the methods they used, and the way they conceptualized the topic (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2). The first actors came from the domain of natural sciences, and interpreted spatial disparities based on then accessible “moral statistics”. Later on, the tradition became dominated by new approaches. From the late nineteenth century onwards, philanthropists, charity movements, political philosophers, and even active politicians came to the fore. Thus, the discourse moved into the hands of actors actively involved in public issues, but only until the Cold War period, when spatial disparity research became the arena of academics—first economists, later sociologists and human geographers as well. Meanwhile, the original interest in questions such as education and crime, regarded then as decisive in the reduction of poverty, gradually shifted to the economic aspects, which have been dominating the discourse ever since. The attention paid to various geographical scales has also moved broadly.

Social Disparities Meet Space and Concepts Surrounding It

Human society is a heterogeneous aggregate made up by a huge number of individuals, all of whom are different from one another. Thus, it is possible to distinguish a great many of societal groups along various lines of distinction. And one can measure virtually any parameter of the individuals or groups; actual values will always indicate a certain level of disparities. As it was explained in the previous chapter, these inequalities can attract much interest from the side of social research, for analytical as well as for political reasons. Among the many aspects to which one (especially a geographer) may give attention here, one is highly geographical in nature: social disparities can be analyzed in their spatial manifestation. This is the fact on which the whole tradition of spatial disparity research is based, which we will present and analyze in this chapter. Before focusing on the long history, the underlying analytical and political considerations, and the outputs of spatial disparity research, however, we have to briefly discuss the possibility of conceptualizing social inequalities in spatial terms. Although this point might seem to lie outside the domain of analyzing a political discourse, it is of fundamental importance in the actual case. Given the complex relation of space and society, we first have to explain what spatial disparity research indeed means and contributes to a better interpretation of social inequalities. Without making this explicit, we can hardly understand the analytical as well as the political importance of spatial disparity research, which is in fact a necessary prerequisite to reveal the factors that influence and the mechanisms that shape the spatial disparity discourse.

Non-Marxist Reactions to the Marxist Problematization of Spatial Unevenness

Even before non-Marxist thinkers first responded to the Marxist problematization of uneven spatial development, the spatial imprint of social inequalities had not remained totally invisible to them. As was presented in Sect. 4.2, the nineteenth century had already brought increasing scientific interest in spatial disparities, especially those emerging within the urban space due to the polarizing effects of the industrial revolution. After this first wave of non-Marxist spatial disparity research, the second era to pay considerable attention to similar issues began in the 1930s. Since the Great Depression hit various regions to differing extents, the negative consequences of the crisis seemed to be concentrated in specific geographical areas. Furthermore, the rapid decrease in real incomes and skyrocketing unemployment also drew attention to the historically rooted problems of certain poor regions. Coming out from an already low pre-crisis standard of living, these areas faced a complex set of social problems during the recession.

And Yet Spatial Disparity Is a Problem of Capitalism: Leftist Approaches in a Post-Fordist World

As presented above, the issue of spatial disparity was put at the forefront of mainstream social studies in capitalist countries during the Cold War. In related investigations the United States was at the leading edge of theoretical innovation without a doubt. Due to the manifold changes in the overall political, economic, and social context, however, the topic gradually lost its exclusive position in research agendas from the 1970s onwards. After the neoliberal turn, in the eyes of many, spatial inequality is no longer a “problem” to be “handled”. Meanwhile, the European Union witnessed a different tendency: the attention given to spatial inequalities did not decrease but considerably increased here because of the remarkable economic disparities possibly posing a threat to political stability in the integration. Still, related research in Europe also remained within the theoretical framework offered by state-of-the-art theories of US origin, which mostly did nothing but integrate already accessible concepts to a neoclassical mindset and “language”. Thus, even the most cited and most “visible” researches in Europe dominantly did not go beyond description and left untouched the factors leading to either convergence or divergence.