A City Built Of Steel
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Dates2018 - 2023
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Author
- Location Hungary, Hungary
In 1949, after the communist take-over, the Hungarian Working People’s Party decided on the implementation of the first five-year plan, which was based on a Soviet model, and later on constructed with an industry and territory settling purpose in Hungary.
In Hungary, certain settlements were established from scratch, mainly based on heavy industrial planning. All of these new socialist cities' goal was to ensure and maintain production, with the so-called help of socialist workers of the Hungarian state. The historical relations of Dunaújváros, Tiszaújváros, Ajka, Ózd, and Kazincbarcika (Primer industrial settlements in rural Hungary) could be compared to each other, after World War II and the change of regime, in 1989.
The five-year plan-based economic model, which had been the catalyst of the Hungarian industrial towns and the major pillar of the socialist economy, was no longer sustainable in the new, free-market conditions. After the fall of the Soviet bloc, these industrial towns suffered an enormous loss in the new economic and political system, many factories closed their facilities, unemployment and permanent subsidence of the population became a general political issue. The industrial production started to decline in the 1990s, as the role of heavy industry simply lost its relevancy, so the state-owned factories started to cut back in a series of downsizing operations. In the face of economic uncertainty, a gradual downward spiral started to play its effect on social conditions.
More than 20 years later, the situation has certainly eased a bit, but the inhabitants of many industrialized towns still live in a kind of peculiar bond with the present. This relationship is an oddly ambivalent one since it carries the inalienable socialist past, and the failure of the neoliberal economic system, as well. In the course of my project, I examine the past and present perspectives of the many Hungarian industrial cities and their striking social, economical, and political imprint in Central Europe.
