CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Veres, Judit Emese |
|---|---|
| Title | Places of Culture From Cultural Institutions to Culture-led Urban Development in Budapest |
| Summary | The thesis elucidates the emergence and trajectory of four urban cultural spaces in Budapest. Within a span of a mere decade a series of cultural places, under such nicknames as ‘Transformer‘ (1998), ‘Pothole‘ (2002), ‘The Palace of Arts‘(2005) and the ‘Whale‘ (2008-2012) appear in Budapest. A former industrial electric transformer house, an earlier socialist bus-station, hitherto socialist railway shunting yards, and turn-of-the-century warehouses are revamped into novel cultural spaces indexing a structural shift from a socialist, industrial city to a service-oriented metropolis in the European Union. The thesis approaches the emergence and trajectory of these four urban spaces in terms of ‘culture-led urban development’, a program and rationale of neoliberal urbanization. The thesis shows that the four cultural spaces mark different stages in a process of increasing neoliberal urbanization and through the four different forms it also formulates a critique of the concept and program of ‘culture-led urban development'. The thesis builds upon four case studies constructed and analyzed through a combination of ethnographic methods such as participant observation and seventy-five semi-structured interviews, complemented with a reading of urban strategic materials, urban development programs, plans and designs, of various media outlets from the daily press, to online portals, forums and blogs on urban development. Instead of clear-cut divisions and radical breaks before and after 1989, the thesis elicits continuities and gradual shifts through the biographies, careers and involvement of actors - cultural workers, entrepreneurs, cultural managers, architects, developers, municipal and state actors - that take part in the production of these cultural venues. While the discourse of entrepreneurship prevails throughout, it undergoes subtle but important alterations. From more alternative and competing visions of the eighties we can witness a slow consolidation towards hegemonic urbanism. |
| Supervisor | Bodnár, Judit Caglar, Ayse |
| Department | Sociology PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/veres_judit.pdf |
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