Turning a “Socialist” Policy into a “Capitalist” One: Urban Rehabilitation in Hungary during the Long Transformation of 1989

Abstract

The article describes the history of the policy of “urban rehabilitation” in Hungary from its introduction in the 1970s until the 1990s. The main focus is on the dialectic of how different capitalist crises open new intellectual and institutional spaces for new policy ideas and practices, and how certain professional groups navigate within these spaces while they are paving the way for the next round of crises. In the first section, the history of urban rehabilitation policies in Hungary is introduced from the 1970s until the 1990s; then in the second section, it is shown how this history is shaped by political–economic crises and structural changes. Finally, some aspects of expert brokerage are highlighted to propose a new methodology of historically analyzing policy changes.