ESR 4

Project: Understanding the role of economic actors in (re)producing uneven development on the Hungarian housing market

ESR 4: Zsuzsanna Pósfai (Host: CERSHAS)

Description: The core-periphery relations are constantly shaped by social interactions between various agents reflecting their specific institutional environments. In this context, the project aims at understanding how the interactions of “peripheral” economic agents with “core” actors and their embeddedness into various non-local networks reflect, reproduce or counteract the peripherality of the region under study. The study will focus on housing markets and on actors present in this field. The research will strive to understand sub-national processes of peripheralization as embedded in global economic processes, and will investigate these broader dependencies as well. To better understand how these processes are shaped by different national contexts, the project will focus on (eastern) Germany and Hungary. It will make use of existing research capacities of Social Impact and IfL.

Results:

In my research I have explored patterns of uneven development on the Hungarian housing market from various perspectives. On the one hand I have traced how capital investment and state intervention cyclically produce socio-spatial inequalities on the Hungarian housing market. On the other hand, I have investigated the firm-level strategies and relations of actors present on the housing market, as well as the effects their activity has on the housing market. I have found that corporate strategies of profit maximisation and risk management are translated into uneven sociospatial development on various scales.

I conceptually position my research within critical and economic geography; centering my inquiry around the notion of uneven development. Furthermore, I build on notions of dependency  (especially on authors employing this idea to the European context) and of spatially and institutionally variegated capitalism.

My research has shed light on the institutional mechanisms through which capital is systematically channelled from the peripheries to the cores through housing markets on various scales. It has proven meaningful to approach cores and peripheries in a relational and not bounded way. This understanding of peripheries has also allowed for a more nuanced vision of spatial unevenness on the housing market as it unfolds through corporate strategies.