Retrofitting the City by Stefan Bouzarovski

Author:Stefan Bouzarovski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: urban studies, retrofitting, building transformation, Europe, sustainability
Publisher: I.B. TAURIS

Figure 5.9 The district of Lipótváros extends across the northern part of the historical urban core of Budapest. It contains a mixture of commercial buildings and residential space in addition to a range of services and public areas. Much of the area has seen re-development and improvement, though not at the scale seen in some other ECE urban capitals such as Prague or Ljubljana (photo by the author).

Beyond the central parts of Pest, land-use becomes more diverse as one enters the inner-city areas of Vizafogó and Angyalföld, where residential, industrial, commercial and recreational functions are densely intertwined. Nevertheless, industrial land-uses dominate the area, with a fifth of Budapest's industrial workers employed here. However, apart from the wide variety of industrial buildings (which in 1992 employed 70 per cent of the district's population) Újpest also contains several busy commercial streets in the local district centre, whose public spaces are lined with large residential buildings and shops. This vibrant area is surrounded by quiet residential quarters with small family homes, many of which have been built to a lower-than-average standard, for Budapest terms (Kok and Kovácz 1999). The outskirts of Újpest are fringed by a set of socialist-era residential estates (mostly from the 1970s), which, as in other peripheral parts of the city, are in the form of multi-storey prefabricated apartment buildings.

The districts of Újpest, Angyalföld and Lipótváros display contrasting demographic features, despite occupying a small territory. A closer look at 1970–90 population change data, as well as the structural demographic indicators for 1990 (Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1992), shows several distinct micro-patterns of population growth and distribution. In general, the study area can be divided into four groups. The first of these is represented by Lipótváros and Újlipótváros, which were not very different from any central urban district of a western European city. There was a stagnation of population growth, mainly due to high mortality rates and ageing, rather than out-migration (Compton 1979: 468). At the same time, the shares of active earners and dependent children within the total population were less than 40 per cent and 15 per cent, respectively, indicating that these were some of the demographically oldest areas of Budapest. Moreover, the average household in both districts had 2.1 members, indicating that the second demographic transition was already well underway. Lipótváros, Újlipótváros, and the housing estates by the Danube (up to the Hotel Therm) had some of the highest growth rates of highly educated inhabitants in the whole of Budapest, as evidenced by the 1.5 times increase in their share of the population since 1970 (Hungarian Academy of Sciences 1992).

Population loss, ageing and low fertility rates also dominated the heavily industrialized suburbs of southern and western Újpest, Angyalföld and Vizafogó. At the end of communist central planning, this was demonstrated by the small size of resident households (2.2 persons on average) and the relatively low population shares of active earners and children (45 per cent and 17 per cent on average, respectively). The low rate of growth among highly educated residents (1.

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