scholarly journals Changes in Administrative Status and Urban Built Forms of the Town Centre of Berettyóújfalu After the Second World War

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 305-330
Author(s):  
Zoltán Megyeri-Pálffi ◽  
Katalin Marótzy

After the Second World War, Hungary adopted the so-called Soviet model, which gave rise to significant changes in the state organisation. “Centralisation” and “democratic centralism” are the keywords which described the operation of government and local bodies in the four decades between 1945 and 1990.Through the change of the townscape of one settlement, this study throws light on how the change in administrative status and the centrally determined settlement policy affected urban development in Hungary, similarly to other former socialist states.Our highlighted example is Berettyóújfalu, whose administrative status changed from period to period in its 19–20th century history. Today, Berettyóújfalu’s townscape is basically determined by three architectural periods: the era of the Austro–Hungarian Monarchy (1867–1918), the period between the two world wars (1918–1944) and the age of state socialism (1949–1989). Out of these periods, the third one was the most significant, as the most important interventions into the townscape occurred at that time.It seems that in Berettyóújfalu, the appearance of urban buildings has not been brought about by economic forces, but expressly by the change in the settlement’s administrative status. It was this change that influenced the town’s architectural character, which consists of two components: the official buildings and the residential building stock.In the era of socialism, the construction of housing estates also falls into the category of public developments, as after the Second World War, the system of state organisation changed fundamentally. Local governments ceased to exist, their role was taken over by hierarchical councils. Consequently, urban policy and urban construction became central duties according to the socialist state concept.The centrally developed industry and the resulting increase in the population was served by building housing blocks with system-building technology. These panel apartment blocks occupied the urban fabric that had been an integral part of the former townscape.In this way, this changed townscape could become a kind of architectural reader on Central and Eastern European history and urban development of the 19–20th centuries.Összefoglaló. A második világháború után Magyarország átvette az úgynevezett szovjet modellt, amely jelentős változásokhoz vezetett az államszervezetben. A „központosítás” és a „demokratikus centralizmus” azok a kulcsszavak, amelyek az állami szervek, s mellettük a helyi szervek működését jellemezték az 1945 és 1990 közötti négy évtizedben.Jelen tanulmány egy település városképének változásán keresztül arra világít rá, hogy Magyarországon – hasonlóan a többi volt szocialista államhoz – miként hatott a közigazgatási státus változása és a központilag meghatározott településpolitika a városépítészetre.A mai Berettyóújfalu településképét alapvetően három építési periódus határozza meg: az Osztrák– Magyar Monarchia kora (1867–1918), a két világháború közötti időszak (1918–1944) és az államszocializmus periódusa (1949–1989). Ezek közül a legmarkánsabb a harmadik, ugyanis ekkor történtek a legjelentősebb beavatkozások a településképben. E korszakokat és a mai városképet tekintve úgy tűnik, hogy a városias épületek megjelenése Berettyóújfaluban nem a gazdasági erő hozadéka volt, hanem kifejezetten a közigazgatási helyzetének megváltozásáé. Ez befolyásolta igazán a mai építészeti karaktert, amelynek két összetevője van: egyrészt a hivatali, másrészt a lakóépület-állomány.Az államszocializmusban a lakótelepek építése is a középítkezések körébe esik, miután a második világháború után alapvetően megváltozott az államszervezet rendszere. Az önkormányzatok megszűntek, helyüket a hierarchikusan működő tanácsok vették át. Ennek velejárója volt, hogy a településpolitika, a városépítés központi feladattá vált a szocialista államfelfogásnak megfelelően.A központilag meghatározott módon telepített ipart, a hozzá kapcsolódó lakosságnövekedést házgyári lakások felépítésével szolgálták ki. Ezek a paneles lakóházak épp azt a városszövetet foglalták el, amely egyébként a maga módján szervesen illeszkedett a korábbi városképbe.Ilyen módon ez a megváltozott településkép egyfajta építészeti olvasókönyvévé vált a 19–20. század közép-kelet-európai történelmének és városépítészetének.

Designs ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuliana Scuderi

Speaking about building retrofit in Europe, the attention is often focused on the residential building stock built after the Second World War, which represents the 75% of the total number of buildings present on the territory. Recently many cities are encouraging campaigns of retrofit of the housing heritage built after the Second World War, since, in terms of cost, time, financing, consumption, and sustainability, the practice appears more convenient than building anew. To maximize the benefits of these retrofit campaigns, it is essential to promote multi-purpose and innovative strategies considering contemporarily architectural, functional and structural aspects. In the field of housing, in particular, it is necessary to develop new models able to answer to the new living style of a dynamic society. In fact, today as in the past, one of the downfalls of the housing sector is failing to recognize the human dimension within the designing process. This paper evaluates past architectural practices to achieve adaptability and flexibility in the residential sector and evaluate strategies for integrated retrofit based on two macro-areas: architectural/societal/functional and structural/technological/constructional.


War Tourism ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 213-226
Author(s):  
Bertram M. Gordon

The study of memory tourism to war sites should not exclude the study of tourism during wartime. Both are components of war tourism, imparting meaning to war for both victors and vanquished. Both reflect their eras, whether through the gazes of the curious individual or the political and economic configurations sustaining the tourism industry. Germans who described a newfound appreciation of their homeland after touring occupied France show how tourism worked in two directions, impacting not only on the sites visited but also the self-image of the visitor. Local governments in France now reach a larger tourism public with new technology. A powerful hold of Second World War imagery in France continues to face ethical issues of sustainability and trivialization.


Author(s):  
James Greenhalgh

This chapter examines the origins of the post-war Plans as a means to interrogate a number of historical stereotypes about Britain after the Second World War. In 1945 Hull and Manchester, in common with many other British towns and cities, produced comprehensive, detailed redevelopment plans. These Plans were a spectacular mix of maps, representations of modern architecture and ambitious cityscapes that sit, sometimes uneasily, alongside detailed tables, text and photographs. Initially examining continuities between the inter- and post-war plans, the chapter emphasises the importance of the Plans in local governments’ attempts to express long-held desires to control and shape the city. I argue that the Plans evidence an attempt to mould the future shape and idea of the modern city through imaginative use of urban fantasy. Images of modernism, I argue, were not presented as a realisable architectural aim, but as a way of mediating between the present and an indistinct, but fundamentally better future. I suggest flawed interpretations of the visual materials contained in the Plans are responsible for an over-emphasis on the influence of radical modernism in post-war Britain.


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-298
Author(s):  
Putnam Barber

AbstractDuring the first half of the 20th century, many of the techniques of modern fundraising were developed. During these decades, fundraising demonstrated its potential for supporting important community goals, financing efforts to combat dread diseases, and initiating change in public policies. In this same span of years, community leaders, journalists, and policy makers became increasingly concerned with growing opportunities for inefficient or even downright dishonest fundraising. Local governments, federated fundraising organizers, and nonprofit charity ratings agencies attempted to forestall abuses of the public’s generosity. Further, during the Second World War, the federal government imposed significant controls on fundraising for war-related activities. The year 1954 saw the passage of new laws in two states that anticipated the most common form of charitable solicitations regulation in the second half of the century, a form that is widespread today. This paper traces developments from the end of the 19th century to show how the ground was prepared for post-war efforts by state governments to regulate charitable fundraising.


1989 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
G Zoványi

National urban-development strategies represent government attempts to influence one or more of the following features of urban development in a national context: (1) a country's rate of urbanization; (2) the size of particular urban places within a country; and (3) the city-size distribution of a country's national urban hierarchy. Hungary's post-Second-World-War experience with a national urban development strategy is presented via a description of government efforts to affect each of the aforementioned features of urban development.


Author(s):  
Dagmar Herzog

This chapter explores transformations in European sexual mores and practices in the era of the two world wars. It pays particular attention to the contradictory dynamics of the interwar era: on the one hand, a considerable loosening of sexual customs, especially for females; on the other, an unprecedented effort on the part of national and local governments to intervene in their citizens’ private lives. The phenomenon of increased state intervention in the intimate sphere—that of relationships, bedrooms, and bodies—would be true both for those nations that turned to fascism and those that remained democratic. But no changes would be as convulsive and consequential as those wrought by the slaughter unleashed in the Second World War, as sexuality also exploded out of the familial framework—a fact that explains a great deal about the renewed turns to conservatism and domesticity which would follow in that war’s wake.


Author(s):  
James Greenhalgh

Reconstructing modernity assesses the character of approaches to rebuilding British cities during the decades after the Second World War. It explores the strategies of spatial governance that sought to restructure society and looks at the cast of characters who shaped these processes. It challenges traditional views of urban modernism as moderate and humanist, shedding new light on the importance of the immediate post-war for the trajectory of urban renewal in the twentieth century. The book shows how local corporations and town planners in Manchester and Hull attempted to create order and functionality through the remaking of their decrepit Victorian cities. It looks at the motivations of national and local governments in the post-war rebuilding process and explores why and how they attempted the schemes they did. What emerges is a picture of local corporations, planners and city engineers as radical reshapers of the urban environment, not through the production of grand examples of architectural modernism, but in mundane attempts to zone cities, produce greener housing estates, control advertising or regulate air quality. Their ambition to control and shape the space of their cities was an attempt to produce urban environments that might be both more orderly and functional, but also held the potential to shape society.


2010 ◽  
Vol 201 ◽  
pp. 156-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bin Xu ◽  
Xiaoyu Pu

AbstractThis study addresses the Chinese Second World War victims' reparations movement (CWRM) against Japan as a case of contemporary Chinese memory politics. While many studies indicate the Chinese government's use of the war memories for political purposes, ours focuses on how official discourses are translated into citizens' political participation and how the state–society interactions lead to variation in the development of the movement sectors within the case of CWRM. Drawing on textual and ethnographic data and a theoretical “dynamic statism,” we argue that the central government's ambivalent attitude towards this ideologically useful yet institutionally troublesome movement created room for local governments and the movement to pursue their own causes. Yet the local and central governments' strong interventions, either facilitation or repression, discouraged civil society's participation and led to the underdevelopment of some movement sectors. In the sectors where the local governments held an attitude of absenteeism or co-operation, the movement was able to mobilize resources from civil society and state institutions and finally developed well.


1979 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberta Sbragia

Until the establishment of regional governments in the early 1970S, Italy was a formally centralized, unitary state. Both the legal and formal administrative frameworks within which local officials worked were such as to support the prevailing scholarly view that, in such a centralized state, the possibilities for local autonomy and initiative were very limited. The formal role of local governments after the Second World War continued to be that which had been specified by the Fascists in legislation designed to complete the centralization of the Italian state. Such a role left little room for local independence and initiative. Administratively, most decisions had to be approved by officials in Rome. Moreover, the policies and finances of local governments were closely supervised by the Prefects, who served as agents of central government.


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