An urban regeneration “made-in-China”: Chinese traders and market expansion in Budapest

• Main Author: Ya-Han Chuang
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: OpenEdition 2020-07-01
• Series: M@ppemonde
• Subjects: Chinese diaspora; Central Europe; deindustrialization; urban regeneration; wholesale
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/mappemonde/4212

This article highlights how the emergence of trading routes between China and Hungary after 1989 has contributed to the urban transformation of Budapest. Initiated by migrant entrepreneurs arriving in a new economic context, and in response to a lack of everyday household products, the Chinese traders’ spatial practices have evolved through three stages: they started with the rehabilitation of contaminated land within deindustrialized areas; they continued by redistributing the lands’ usage rights via an emerging community of property actors and tenants; finally, they constructed modern showrooms dedicated for use by the wholesale sector. While increasing the land value through real-estate operations and management, the entrepreneurs also sought to cope with the aesthetic norms of urban renewal policy. By analyzing their spatial practices through a longitudinal perspective of thirty years, the article contributes to the study of economic globalization and urban transformation via a rare example of post-socialist cities.