A városrehabilitáció alakulása Budapesten = Development of urban regeneration in Budapest

Abstract

Urban rehabilitation is one of the most important strategic tools of urban development. Urban rehabilitation focuses on the deteriorated and usually variously used settlement assemblies’ planned and organised renovation, reconstruction, upgrading, or rebuilding and with curbing the further slipping of slum areas while maintaining or improving their market positions. In addition to this the containment of the social structure’s negative processes and the improvement of the social situation may also be considered as tasks of the urban rehabilitation. It is inevitable to find an answer to the technical, economic and social problems and conflicts, a solution satisfying the most possible aspects. Budapest is the capital city of Hungary, Budapest is the eighth most populous city in the European Union. The II. World War and the socialist planned economy – the economic shortage – caused a lot of damages in the built environment in Budapest, especially high housing shortage, but conflicts also arose between social groups and the government. Urban regeneration focused first on technical, infrastructural, architectual problems and housing estates from prefabricated panel-building. The first really successful project was started in District IX. (Ferencváros) in 1985, and urban regeneration of the district continues even today. At initial stage main objectives were the renewal of buildings and publicly owned land. The important thing was to solve financing hence, there were no social actions. Since gentrification was observed in the affected area, experts criticized the efficiency of the model. Nowadays social arrangements are prerequisites for urban regeneration project-planning. Ferencváros started a project, called „Social Urban-Rehabilitation in Ferencváros, József Attila Plan, Phase I.” in 2013. Analysing the factual operations we can conclude, that although the project integrates several aspects – among other social as well – , it still focuses mainly on construction activities.