Linking Emerging Cities—Exchange between Helsinki and Budapest at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (original) (raw)

2018, Journal of East Central European Studies

Between 1873 and 1914, the city of Budapest, which had been created by the merging of three separate cities, developed into a metropolis of industry, media, science and culture and consequently became a center of national power. Unlike any other city in the region, Budapest represented the particular ambivalence and velocity of Hungary’s modernization process. Numerous contemporaries described the city with its rapid development as “American.” The popular writer Viktor Cholnoky went further than this, labeling Budapest a “quasi—city” and complaining about its “emptiness.” “When its inhabitants are strenuous,” he wrote 1904, “[Budapest] begins to develop with an Ameri- can velocity, like the plague [...] Here, things are made that appear beautiful from the outside, but remain empty inside.” Many of his contemporaries shared Cholnoky’s dislike of the city’s development and criticized aspects such as its structural transformation, industrialization, and the enormous efforts made by the municipality to transform the three towns into a single regional metropolis. Using these circumstances as frames of reference, this paper investigates the role that the transfer of knowledge and best practices played in the rise of Budapest as an emerging city.By doing so, the paper seeks, on the one hand, to elaborate on the specific local conditions that gave rise to the transfer, ad- aptation and use of modern knowledge in the emerging cities of East Central Europe in the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it assumes that these emerging cities, such as Budapest and Helsinki, not only followed a strategy of keeping a careful balance between local traditions and needs and international trends, but also maintained an exchange based on mutual experiences and challenges.