Hungarian Urban Planning and the Challenge of Integrated Planning: A Sociological Analysis

Abstract

The paper takes the first steps to analyse changes concerning Hungarian urban planning in the recent years, focussing on the implementation and challenges of the integrated urban planning in Hungary in the light of planning traditions, arguing for the need of a better understanding of such traditions to understand current planning practices. It provides a sociological analysis on the effects of the political and economic context on urban planning, with specific regard to public participation, in different eras, like the state socialism, the period following the 1989/1990 transition and recent years. It presents how urban planning operated in very different and changing ‘faces of power’, under continuously strong external resource-dependency with varying key agents. It discusses the constraints of public participation rooted in contextual factors and in planning traditions. Finally, it also summarises existing research and presents hypotheses for a recently launched new research project.