[URBAN NOTE] "The ‘shadow play’ of Budapest"

[rfmcdonald]

Márton Békés and Balázs Böcskei's Open Democracy essay, focusing particularly on the transformations of Budapest, has much to say about the late modern city worldwide.

This migration is not irregular, it is the seasonal speeding up of the global tourism of the middle class. European capitals are filled with people talking all kinds of languages, drink menus are replaced with new versions including higher prices and those who don’t belong to the global travelling middle class are crowded out of their cities for months.

According to Zygmunt Bauman “being a tourist” is a privilege, a sign of adaptation to the postmodern state of things. Therefore not only business people working and moving around in networks are classified as tourists, but also those cultural managers and intellectuals who adopt cosmopolitanism as their life strategy. Mostly they are the ones who make up the crowds in the inner city of Budapest, their local governors and their global counterparts are smiling happily, advertising through their life style such bilingual statements as “be a tourist in your own town”.

So, here we are, tourists in our own city. “I love Budapest” – comes the message from new urban marketing. They order us to find a new café, a breakfast place, discover things that have already existed before but now can be “liked”, in other words: now visible for those who see through a digital eye. Let this city be in a light mood, let multiculturalism be a pastime activity, let’s discover day after day that we can discover something again tomorrow. The city turns into a constant buzz and it retains nothing else but its name, Budapest.

In the 2000s in Budapest, the money revolution arrived. The time of the invisible, off-shore development industry, which doesn’t communicate with anybody but itself. They wiped out entire neighborhoods and “developed” them into faceless mall-condo combos. The city embraced them in the name of “development” and only a few “crazy greens” chained themselves to trees and organized resistance.

The new pavements covering new urban rehabilitation projects take us to postindustrial workplaces to check in. On their paper thin laptops, account managers are making their money, forcing themselves to feel good at the places advertised in tourist magazines as “community venues”. In today’s Budapest, thanks to the sterilization and to the multicultural atmosphere-designer industry you have to write up on the entrance of a place what function they fulfil: social bar and public pub. As if a bar would not be a social place in the first place and the pub would not be public originally. While a bar is dark and mysterious, a social bar is white, carefully designed and sterile. While a pub is loud, smoky and swims in malt, a “public pub” is the place for craft, local and cherry beer.