State agency in the consumption-centred restructuring of urban spaces

Abstract

Consumption-oriented urban restructuring was a powerful process that redefined everyday life and the framework conditions for the production of social space. Moreover, it created the conditions for the emergence and development of new consumer cultures in the eastern periphery of Europe. Such processes were promoted not only by the post-shortage constellations of the CEE countries and the influx of capital into the urban real estate markets but also by neoliberal measures at various scales, i.e. EU, national and local. In this paper, we focus on the state agency in the processes of local consumer-oriented urban restructuring in Győr, shaped by the massive in?ux of FDI. Győr is thus regarded as a model city for the export-driven economic upswing in post-socialist Hungary but also has multiple dependencies typical of re-industrialised enclaves in the (Eastern European) periphery as well as the problems and conflicts arising from the recent (re-)centralisation of state power in Hungary. Starting from Lefebvre’s critical concept of social space and the recent transdisciplinary debates about consumer spaces as theatres in which different strategies (representations of spaces) confront everyday life, we have attempted to reveal the role of the local state as regulator, owner, investor and manager in the rearrangement of urban space, social relations and practices. In particular, we tried to understand how changing state roles and practices concentrated, reflected and (re-)produced both class politics and the relationships of state/capital and local/central after the transition in the design of space for cultural and material consumption. The analysis of the empirical results indicates that the neoliberal narrative of urban development promoted by the local state was discursively linked to control over post-socialist "redundant" (brown fields) and "chaotic" spaces (e.g. open markets) and also to the rise of the new model (consumer) citizen. The class-oriented policy, which manifested itself in urban development projects, was confronted with the daily consumption practices ("lived spaces" of the city dwellers) and also with the interests of the local retail trade which withered in the city centre due to urban redevelopment projects and large-scale shopping developments. But even the increasing resistance did not hinder the plans of the local state, although the latter worked against the envisaged re-establishment of the local "petty bourgeoisie" and also against the concept of reorientation of urban life (and aspiring citizenship) in the inner city. The state-sponsored physical and visual transformation of the inner city - driven by the mega-event (European Youth Olympics, 2017) - and the resulting highly selective social-spatial consumption practices revealed the limits of the local state: Municipal actions and policies were embedded in a complex geometry of power and were defined by state rescaling (re-centralisation), the grip of national party politics and the agents of global capital - all in an opaque system of bargaining processes through which the relationships in this geometry function. The authors encourage attention and further research on the multiple embedding of state agency in various local and national/institutional contexts and on state-capital relations in peripheral and non-metropolitan contexts. They also criticise place-based development policies by highlighting the power relations that keep local economies (and agents) on a definite track in the national, global and European context.