The Everyday Practices of the Reproduction of Peripherality and Marginality in Hungary

Abstract

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 Timár 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).