Minor Cities in a Metropolitan World: Challenges for Development and Governance in Three Hungarian Urban Agglomerations

Abstract

Minor cities represent urban centres on a sub-metropolitan scale which are struggling to integrate into competitive city networks characterized by intense, worldwide agglomeration processes. Lacking sufficient mass and often situated on Europe's geographic or socio-economic peripheries, they must balance specialization and diversification agendas, and develop effective urban governance to remain viable economic centres. This paper investigates ongoing urbanization processes and their effects on minor cities, illustrated by three case studies from Hungary. Findings suggest that development cooperation and the foundations of ‘urban regimes’ emerge even in small and institutionally weak city-regions, although the content, as well as organization of the resulting arrangements exhibit differences from the base model.

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

This paper has been supported within the TÁMOP-4.2.2.A-11/1/KONV-2012–0010 project (The automotive industrial district of Győr, as the new direction and method of regional development). The author would also like to thank the OTKA #81789 project (Particular questions of the institutionalization of agglomerations among and beyond public administration structures) and the project team, whose results have contributed to the case studies in this publication.

Notes

1. The metropolitan character of urbanization economies has previously been investigated by Brouwer, Budil-Nadvornikova, and Kleinknecht (1999) and van der Panne (2004) on the Dutch, and by Paci and Usai (1999) on the Italian example; although van der Panne offers no conclusive evidence of their differentiating role in the polycentric, heavily urbanized Dutch city network.

2. Innovation here is not assumed to be restricted to high-tech; but rather encompasses all new products, processes and socio-political patterns which can open up beneficial evolutionary paths for the city-region.

3. In the 4 Visegrad countries, Bulgaria and Romania, 97 cities are above 100,000 inhabitants, but two-thirds of them are found in Poland and Romania (Horváth 2012).

4. Miskolc, in particular, is the centre of a traditionally strong, although crisis-stricken polycentric city network which consists of eight additional cities between 10,000 and 34,000 inhabitants, and nine more between 5000 and 10,000. It has a more recently developed inner agglomeration of 40,000 inhabitants. The other two city-regions have a more monocentric structure, but have developed large agglomerations from a very low basis since 1989. While Hungary is facing severe demographic decline, the populations of the Pécs and Győr city-regions have stayed stable, although with strong suburbanization processes and the emergence of inner agglomerations with 25,000 and 58,000 inhabitants, respectively (Table 1) (Hardi 2012).