Citizen participation in urban development: shifting roles in transforming spaces of Budapest

Abstract

Citizen participation has always been a popular theme of contemporary urban studies. In urban development interventions, citizen participation is usually interpreted as a process of consensus- or conflict-based expression of opinion manifesting itself at the urban level. Hungarian scholarly literature has used a variety of approaches to map these struggles. The present study interprets citizen participation as a result of broader processes. Employing examples from Budapest, the structural and narrative aspects shaping citizen participation are at the forefront of the analysis: the development of political and economic turning points and local power dynamics, as well as decision-making and professional ideas about the role of citizen participation. The theoretical approach relies on two aspects of inquiry: how the hierarchy of scales during state restructuring has reshuffled, and how it affected state-civil society relations.

Based on these aspects, three periods are analysed: the decentralization aspirations and the period of mass privatization during the 1990s, the spread of project-based and partnership agreements linked to EU transfers after the mid-2000s, and finally the strengthening of central power in the years following the onset of the 2008 global financial and economic crisis.

As an introduction, the article provides an overview of the relevance of the topic of citizen participation and the structure of the study. Afterwards it presents the conceptual and theoretical framework along with a literature review. In the following, the article unfolds the characteristics of the three different periods through cases from Budapest that exhibit emblematic urban development processes.

Describing the first case, the article builds on the period when mass privatization and the fragmentation of ownership structures occurred, meanwhile a relatively autonomous and critical civil society mobilization focused on issues of housing and speculative urban development. The second era of citizen participation unfolds experimentations with the partnership model of urban development where the inclusion of civic groups served as the solution to growing inequalities by strengthening the social sensitivity of urban interventions.

Parallel with the continuous gentrification of the inner-Budapest areas, this controversial period is symbolized by the much-debated example of the Magdolna Quarter Program of the eighth district. The last stage covers the recentralization of urban development strategies, focusing on touristification and the beautification of public spaces in a period when civil society organizations have been instrumentalized to legitimize city marketing strategies and large-scale urban development.

In the last section of the article, the conclusions of these diverse eras are drawn building on the initial analytical points, highlighting the role of economic restructuring, the role of the state in channelling civil society demands, and a reflection on the role of citizen participation in the discussed contexts.