Abstract
<p>The 21st century has brought fundamental changes in the development of cities, with the spread of ICT and the rise of digitalization. The new technologies are increasingly making their mark on urban planning and policy as well. The question of how contemporary urban planning is adapting to new challenges is particularly relevant as neighborhoods built in previous centuries and decades by traditional planning methods are now increasingly confronted with new public and environmental demands. Despite the bad reputation of Budapest’s 8th district, Józsefváros, based on the socio-economic and urban problems it has continuously faced in the past, the neighborhood has become one of the most dynamically developing urban areas in the last decade. From a planning point of view, an exciting area of the district is Szigony Street and its wider surroundings due to the strongly fragmented, heterogeneous urban fabric. Nevertheless, the only high-rise mass housing estate built in Budapest’s historic inner city in the 1960s and 1970s is located there. Our research used a complex methodology (document, content and database analysis, fieldwork, surveys with professionals, and interviews) to explore the planning history of the area’s development. Ultimately, the aim was to identify the most important outcomes and consequences of traditional and contemporary planning and design and whether modern digital planning can make a meaningful contribution to the development of the neighborhood. Our results show that urban planning and development in Budapest are still essentially based on traditional top-down approaches. Digitalization has a role to play primarily in visualization and contextualization but digitalizing of planning alone will not solve problems and past planning mistakes that affect the urban fabric of a neighborhood.</p>
Highlights
Over the last decade, we have witnessed the rapidly growing role of ICT and digitalization in urban develop‐ ment and the appearance of new concepts, like digitalUrban Planning, 2021, Volume 6, Issue 4, Pages 150–163 city (Ishida & Isbister, 2000), intelligent city (Komninos, 2002), and smart city (Hollands, 2008) that nowadays dominate professional debates
The concepts of digital city and intelligent city are mainly concentrated on the digital representations and manifestations of cities (Nam & Pardo, 2011), whereas the smart city concept is a com‐ prehensive, strategic approach in which infocommunica‐ tion technology is used as a tool for urban management (Washburn et al, 2009)
Traditional planning is related to power and the urban fabric is shaped by political will and economic interest (Brenner, 2011; Fuller & West, 2017)
Summary
We have witnessed the rapidly growing role of ICT and digitalization in urban develop‐ ment and the appearance of new concepts, like digital. From an urbanistic and planning point of view, it may be interesting to examine the relation‐ ship between traditional and new methods of urban development, and whether urbanism and contempo‐ rary architecture based on modern techniques can carry on, transform or, if necessary, correct the achieve‐ ments, consequences, and possible mistakes of previous decades and centuries. To explore this process, we have chosen a specific and highly complex area of Budapest’s inner city, which has been a testing ground for urban development efforts and experiments for many decades. The qual‐ itative research involved written and online in‐depth interviews with seven professional actors (planners and architects), who worked in the area in the last two decades and played a key role in its development
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