Judit Timár

The Uneven Development of Suburbanization during Transition in Hungary

This paper considers how far suburbanization in Hungary has followed the Western model. The authors argue that the transition period, as a distinctive era, will not bring about fundamental changes in the cause-and-effect relationships of surburban development. The decisive role of capital in Hungarian suburbanization is evident in the uneven development of this spatial process. It is contended that the actors in the suburbanization of transition, although labelled ‘distinctive’ by some commentators, do not have a trajectory which is essentially different from that of their western counterparts. Differences arise from the means and pace of acquiring property and capital. As in advanced capitalism, suburbanization in Hungary results in social tensions, segregation and exclusion.

Uneven transformations: Space, economy and society 20 years after the collapse of state socialism:

Writing about the social and political revolts of 1968, Umberto Eco argued that one of the dominant narratives used in interpreting the impact of these events suggests that ‘[e]ven though all visible traces are gone ... it profoundly changed all of us’ (Newsweek, 22 December 1986: 49; quoted in Watts, 2001). Twenty years after the equally, if not more, profound collapse of state socialism in Eastern and Central Europe (ECE), the visible traces of the events of 1989 and the preceding era of state socialist collectivism remain very apparent in the geographies of ‘post-socialism’. But, just like the events of 1968, the effective collapse of the state-centrist, collectivist and planned model of development across one of the largest parts of the world not only led to a profound, highly uneven and contested set of transformations within the region, but has also meant that, in the words of Stenning (2010), ‘we are all postsocialist now’. The collapse of the collectivist and central planning systems, for example, has been one of the many forces that have been used for legitimizing the ascendancy of neoliberal capitalist relations around the world (not just in the ‘post-socialist’ world) – notwithstanding the dramatic global economic crisis that this particular model of development led to in 2008/9. As Pickles points out in this issue, however, ‘1989’ was not simply an unproblematic ‘ending’, even in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union (FSU), as the examples of Moldova and Russia attest (Pickles, 2010). ‘1989’ did, however, dramatically change all of us. The events of 1989, then, have their parallels with those of 1968, as Antonio Negri has recently argued: ‘To my mind, 1989 corresponds to 1968. While 1968 had broken down the walls that closed our society, 1989 broke down the wall that defended “real socialism”, from the world market’ (Negri, 2006: 1). However, what Negri fails to account for in this passage is that other events of 1968 – other than the student and popular revolts in ‘the West’ – also consolidated, albeit temporarily, the regimes that came struggling to an end in 1989. Indeed, certainly in the case of the former Czechoslovakia following the Warsaw Pact military invasion, if not elsewhere as well, 1968 also led to the firm re-establishment of

Female representation in the higher education of geography in Hungary

This paper charts the changing female representation in the higher education of geography, connecting it with the faltering development of feminist geography in Hungary. The transition from socialism to capitalism has compounded gender inequalities while many of the relevant statistical data display gender blindness. Gender issues fail to form a coherent part of national political debates while womens opportunities in Hungarian higher education and research have only recently been examined. Constraints on issues of equal opportunities within Hungarian geography are discussed.

Gender at the border : entrepreneurship in rural post-socialist Hungary

Introduction Borderlands The transition in rural areas Entrepreneurship in rural Eastern Europe Gender at the borders: entrepreneurs and social capital Gender relations in entrepreneurial families Conclusion Bibliography Index.

Fighting for recognition: feminist geography in East-Central Europe

In East-Central Europe (ECE), the evolution of feminist geographies began after the end of state socialism. Aiming to identify individual and shared characteristics, this study outlines the development of gender/feminist geography in East-Central European countries. Providing a brief historical overview, the first part of the article substantiates the arguments that i) the evolution of feminist geography in ECE is linked to the post-socialist transition; although the fall of state socialism has removed the political, social and ideological obstacles that prevented its gaining ground, this approach is still considered to be relatively new; and ii) today, development is hindered mainly by conservative mainstream geography, which seems slower in transforming itself than in some related disciplines which have ‘embraced’ gender studies. The topics, methods and theories of feminist geography that have developed in ECE is significantly influenced by the resistance that advocates of feminist geography have to contend with from representatives of mainstream post-socialist geographies. The second part of the article presents the major characteristics of gender/feminist geography in Europes post-socialist region, while providing an outline of the various methods used in an attempt to earn positive recognition for gender studies. The concluding section maps some lessons to be learnt on the relationship between the production of feminist geographical knowledge and post-socialism.

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.

What Convergence between What Geographies in Europe? A Hungarian Perspective

In studying different understandings of the changing geography of Europe from the perspective of a ‘transition country’, namely Hungary, this paper seeks to expand on the following argument. During the 50-year period of state socialism, the study of geography in Hungary never approximated that in advanced capitalist Europe as closely as it does now. However, if such approximation is to be termed ‘convergence’, then it is, at best, ‘uneven convergence’. Three manifestations of the one-sidedness and or partiality of convergence are presented.

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).

The transformation of social and cultural geography during the transition period (1989 to present time) in Hungary

In the 1980s, and not for the first time in the 1980s, the Hungarian Geographic Society, sensing some crisis situation, devoted its annual conference in the summer of 1989 to the evaluation of geography in Hungary. József Becsei (1989: 53–54), a settlement geographer, claimed that ‘central’ (i.e. state ideology-driven) perception, did not recognize ‘the existing society operating in horizontal and vertical stratification’; it only recognized the existence of ‘a labour force subordinated to production’. This approach ‘failed to identify both human beings in their entirety and their diverse (e.g. cultural, communityand service-related) needs’. In order that ‘geographical topics and methods with relevance to reality’ might be found, Becsei called for ‘the removal of ideological barriers’. According to Tivadar Bernát (1989: 39), an economic geographer, geography—hamstrung by the prevailing theory and practice of socialism—needed a change in paradigm, leading to the formulation of a new ‘grand theory’. He found that the creation of a ‘new image of socialism’, which was a prerequisite for the construction of such a theory, was the challenge of the time. Attila Ágh (1989: 11), a political scientist invited to the conference, went so far as to raise the issue of political reforms, claiming that ‘without mapping the current power relations, no comprehensive reform programmes can be worked out. Neither is national renewal in the true sense of the word feasible, for a nation exists in a given territorial structure with certain power relations, the renewal of which is one of the most pressing objectives of any political reform’. Life, however, rendered the future perspectives of not only geographers, but also Ágh’s, whose loyalty lay with the Socialist Party, obsolete. A few months after the conference, Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 7, No. 4, August 2006

Book review symposium: Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe, Costis HadjimichalisHadjimichalisCostisCrisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London: Routledge, 2018. xiii + 217 pp. ISBN: 9781138184503£105.00

This is quite a remarkable book, a product of years of careful and original research into the question of uneven and combined development in southern Europe (SE), informed by a sophisticated Marxian political economy perspective – one in which the influence of Antonio Gramsci and an emphasis on the cultural and political constitution and consequences of the capitalist economy is always prominent. Hadjimichalis combines a breadth and depth of evidence from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from across Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain with a rare political and theoretical sophistication, drawing on a deep knowledge of cross-disciplinary and multi-lingual literatures. I find it difficult to imagine anyone else being able to do this, and certainly not with the depth of scholarship and political insight that he reveals. The book is a rare achievement, one that should be widely read, both by academics interested in questions of uneven development and the future of Europe and by European Union (EU) politicians and policy-makers as they grapple with the task of finding a way forward out of post-austerity Europe and onto a socially more progressive development trajectory. As Hadjimichalis explains, there are good, sound reasons for focusing upon SE. Greece, Portugal and Spain all made the transition from dictatorships to democracy in the 1970s and became members of the European Community (EC, as it was then) in the 1980s. Italy was in a sense the ‘odd one out’ of the original six member states of the EC, although like its southern European neighbours it also had its own earlier history of profoundly uneven development and a transition from dictatorship to democracy. Furthermore, by the 1980s all four had broadly similar economic and social structures – certainly not identical and with differences among them but with enough commonality to distinguish them from the other member states of the EU. In addition, by 2009/2010 all four were in the grip of severe economic and financial crises. While these are issues on which he had been working for many years (for example, see Hadjimichalis, 1987), as Hadjimichalis explains the immediate stimulus for writing this book was an Book review symposium