Principal Theoretical Approaches of the Phenomenon of Suburbanisation in the Literature of Urban Sociology and Other Related Sciences

Abstract

The suburbanisation phenomena has a strong impact on today's urban processes in Hungary, especially in the case of Budapest. The disciplines studying this theme have put forward several theories to describe these phenomena from their special point of view. Amongst the architectural and the geographical approaches the paper deals mainly with the two theoretical traditions in urban sociology, according to I. Szelenyi and places the theories found in the literature in this framework. The ecological or evolutionary tradition sets up a universal straight line in the urbanisation process where each town takes up a position appropriate to the ecological status as the ecology progresses take a step forward. The steps have the same order in every society, the social–ecological structure only alters the appearance of the actual step. The historical tradition reverses the relation, according to its neo-marxist branch the mode of production is the basic factor in the actual urban formation, the neo-weberian branch considers the social–ecological organisation as the independent variable, whilst the state of the ecology is the intervening variable in both branches. The difference between these two traditions sketches two strongly different urbanisation processes and presence of cities. The paper describes some of these theories in the frame of the theories.