Beginnings of urbanisation processes as exemplified by the Budapest Metropolitan Area. Preface to a historical model of urbanisation

Abstract

Investigating Hungarian urbanisation processes – especially when using the example of the Budapest Metropolitan Area – has been a central research topic of the Hungarian regional science discourse during the last decades. Research work increasingly contributed to better understand those urbanisation processes, on the basis of a model of urbanisation elaborated by Leo van den Berg and – as for the Hungarian literature – György Enyedi.

This article begins with a theoretical introduction that conceptualises the two most important approaches to urbanisation, the “evolutionary school” and the “historical school”. The evolutionary school can be interpreted as a group of theories that identifies urbanisation as a universal process of successive “stages of urban development”. Representatives of the evolutionary school set out from van den Berg’s terminology which identifies four stages of urbanisation: urbanisation, suburbanisation, desurbanisation and reurbanisation.

In contrast, the achievements of the historical school are relatively unknown. This is because it concentrates not on popular – and, sometimes, slightly simplistic – generalisations, but rather on characteristics of individual trajectories of urbanisation. Of course, representatives of the historical school do not deny the existence of phases of urbanisation. They merely postulate that the intensity, extension and even the chronological order of urbanisation phases can vary from city to city.

Joining forces with the historical school, the second part of the article tries to formulate a clearer notion of urbanisation phases within the context of the Budapest Metropolitan Area during the period of 1900–1945. Using contemporary statistical publications, we built a database that helps to quantify the intensity of urbanisation processes. We were able to distinguish settlements falling under the “closest urbanisation zone”, settlements falling under the “broader urbanisation zone” and settlements that did not participate in any urbanisation processes at all.

At the same time, we aimed to understand the character of urbanisation processes, by distinguishing settlements falling under “industrial area”, “labourer, employee and holidaymaker colonies” and settlements falling under the “agricultural supply area of the city”.

In any case, this study should be interpreted as preliminary. The authors aim to collect “raw material” for their future research, based chiefly on archival sources. However, this preliminary study – especially the spatial and chronological identification of zones and areas and the characteristics of their spreading – may be suitable for specifying a model of the so-called “evolutionary school” on urbanisation phases by means of a historical approach.