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The 11th March for Housing Will Make the Housing Crisis an Issue for Local Elections in Budapest

Note from LeftEast Editors: The English translation of this interview, which first appeared in Hungarian, is published on LeftEast thanks to our cooperation with Hungarian portal Mérce within the framework of the East European Left Media Outlet (ELMO). You can read the original article at: https://merce.hu/2023/10/15/mindenkinek-laknia-kell-valahol-elindult-a-11- The Budapest Housing March (Lakásmenet) was held for the 11th […]

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Urban Struggles and Theorizing from Eastern Europe: a collective interview with Ana Vilenica, Ioana Florea, Veda Popovici and Zsuzsi Pósfai

Note from LeftEast editors: this interview first appeared as a chapter in the edited volume of Michele Lancione and Colin McFarlane Global Urbanism Knowledge, Power and the City (Routledge, 2021). It was reprinted with the kind permission of the interviewers and interviewees, and was made open access with the support of The Swedish Research Council […]

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The Helpers of the Afghan Park

Text and photos by Szilárd Kalmár, translated by Arnold Velansits. First published in Mérce. In the spring of 2015, a wave of refugees reached Europe of a size that had not been seen before. The general public – including us – was not informed, or barely were, about this situation and only realized what we […]

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Hungary: The Destruction of Reason and the Semi-Destruction of an Archive

Editors’ note:The legacy of Marxist Philosopher György Lukács has been under attack in Budapest. In 2016, protests began against the closure of the Lukács Archive, located in the philospher’s former home. In March 2017,  Lukács’ statue was removed from Szent Istvan Park, after a proposal from the Jobbik party was accepted by the Fidesz-dominated Budapest […]

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The illiberal democracy and the revanchist city – The spatial and political transformation of Budapest since 2010

“We need to give back public spaces to the citizens” – argued István Tarlós, the mayor of Budapest and a member of the nationalist-conservative Fidesz party when he tried to justify the city’s criminalizing of homelessness in most of its public spaces. The message here was clear: homeless people do not qualify for citizen status […]

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Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary: A radical re-imagination of housing is what we need (part 2)

Note from the LeftEast editors: the first part of Mariann Dosa’s text on the housing policies in Hungary can be read here. Any housing policies that prioritize equity need to be based on broadly accessible public housing, because it is the only way forward that transcends the structure of neoliberal capitalism and hence, offers radical […]

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Struggles in and over Public Space: Hungarian Heritage as a Homeless Free Zone

Source: CritCom, Council of European Studies, Columbia University In November 2013, members of the organization The City Is for All (A Város Mindenkié, henceforth AVM) were forcibly removed from the Budapest General Assembly, after forming a singing, poem-reciting human chain in protest of the extension of criminalization of homeless people ‘to a major part of […]

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Housing poverty and (missing) housing policies in Hungary (part 1)

Housing has recently become a hot topic in Hungarian public discourse. This increase in attention was caused by the alarming hardships caused by the steep increase in the interest on foreign currency (in which most mortgages taken in the 2000’s were taken) and the increasingly harsh, systematic, and overt criminalization of homeless people in the […]

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Hungary: A Black Hole on Europe’s Map. An interview with Gaspar Miklos Tamas.

An interview with G. M. Tamás by Jaroslav Fiala (A2 magazine) 1/You were writing on post-fascism. In recent years, the growing rise of nationalist and racist forces has taken place across Europe. What is your explanation for this phenomenon?   The whole nature of European politics has changed after 1989: the two hegemonic blocs had […]