Zsugorodó városok és társadalmi egyenlőt-lenségek magyarországon

Abstract

The population of Hungary has been decreasing since 1980. 75% of Hungarian cities experienced demographical shrinking between 2001 and 2011. Similar tendencies are happening in Central Eastern Europe. Even though that „declining” and „shrinking” cities have been analyzed after the 1970s in the US, and after 1989 in the East-German context, these concepts have not become integral parts of Hungarian social scientific inquiry. This article, which is the introduction of a special issue, focuses on how urban shrinkage shapes socio-spatial inequalities in the affected local societies. Urban shrinkage is treated as an empirical phenomenon, and the critical perspective on peripherialisation is suggested as an analytical and theoretical framework. The first part of the article introduces some key insights of the international literature on shrinking, and shortly presents the main tendencies in Central and Eastern Europe and in Hungary. After that, we describe our four-year-long research, which is the basis of the present special issue. Finally, we summarize the key arguments of the articles of this special issue, all of which pointing at ambivalent aspects of urban shrinkage in small cities, such as differing perceptions of shrinkage by different social groups, the microsociology of moving into transitional spaces, the educational markets of shrinking cities, the „middle-classification” objectives of Roma social development projects, and the changing relation between the central government and the local governments.