Contested growth machines in a post-socialist context, The case of Budapest, Hungary

Abstract

The growing economic importance of cities and the hypermobility of global capital has resulted in the creation of urban growth machines – tools for extracting value from the land itself by creating coalitions of pro-growth actors – which are often contested by anti-growth coalitions or alternative visions. The same phenomenon has been observed in Budapest, Hungary, with the redevelopment of Rákosrendező, an ex-industrial railway depot. The body of research on urban growth machines in general is extensive, but there is a lack of modern research on Hungarian growth machines, specifically on Budapest, which has been influenced by the unique factors of post-socialist and illiberal transformations. This study uses the framework of Savitch and Kantor (2004) to examine the bargaining position of the city in the international capital marketplace, as well as framing and narrative analyses based on the work of van Hulst et al. (2025) using selected newspaper articles on the two sides of the political divide in Hungary between 2023 and 2025. The findings indicate that the bargaining position of the city is advantageous, but is threatened by external circumstances. Furthermore, it shows that in post-socialist contexts, the invalidity of anti-growth arguments necessitates the reformulation of counter-arguments in terms of ‘good’, ‘green’, or ‘sustainable’ growth, making the creation of ‘progressive’ growth machines the main viable tool against ‘neo-liberal’ growth machines.