The metropolitan periphery around Budapest: an economic morphology

Abstract

There is a growing number of urban researches applying analytical tools of political economy available in Hungarian literature. However, the analyses refer almost entirely to the metropolitan core (in most cases, to Budapest), and rarely provide explanations of the mechanism producing suburban, or even increasingly urbanising rural spaces at the very periphery of a metropolis. This study aims to investigate the spatial structure of economic activity along the metropolitan edge around Budapest. Based on the spatial structure of entrepreneurial activity in the periphery, my goal is to interpret the urbanisation process and some particular findings on the political economy of the metropolitan periphery. I address the question of whether spatial morphology of joint corporations at the Budapest metropolitan periphery reflects typical spatial patterns of mature capitalist cities, i.e. specialisation and zonal settling of economic activity in the metropolitan region.

Methodologically speaking, I use statistical data as well as a self-collected database of joint corporations, encompassing the whole metropolitan area of 56 settlements and 1312 companies. The data were geocoded and plotted. Based on the research findings I argue that there is neither sectoral, nor functional specialisation of joint corporations to be observed at the metropolitan periphery. This implies that urbanisation forms of mature capitalist city regions cannot be clearly identified around Budapest. The spatial economy of the Budapest metropolitan area seems rather to be boosted by the scale and size of the metropolitan market itself, than by global market integration. Based on the data analysis of joint corporations, the Budapest metropolitan area can provide just a few specialised services and products for the global market, and is able to an only limited degree to be integrated into the global commodity chains and production networks.

Plotting corporations’ locations on the map shows a distribution of enterprises different in one settlement to that of another. Some local governments are able to concentrate economic activity to a few business parks within their administrative boundaries, but others seem to lose control over settling economic activities systematically. Some places seem to successfully internalise the pressure of neoliberal transformation, while others prove to be unresponsive to them. I argue that these differences are being produced by dissimilar relations between state and capital when comparing one settlement to another. I assume that the locally determined relations of state and capital lead to some variations in producing local economic spaces. To test that assumption I delimited a case-study area of three settlements (all of them showing dissimilar distribution pattern of entrepreneurial activities), where I made interviews with local decision makers, professionals and an investor. Discussing the interrelations between capital, state and place contributed to reveal state control and its mechanisms over producing places of economic activity. My interviewees pointed out the market-influencing practice and techniques of the local state, which reflects the neoliberal transformation of the capital-state interrelation.