Award Information
My project seeks to research how current practices of urban development architectural restoration, and historical preservation articulate competing visions of national memory, history, and identity in post-socialist Budapest, Hungary. Drawing from archival research, current media debates, participant observation, and interviews, I shall examine the city's architectural development and restoration projects slated to commemorate October 23, 2000 (the millennium of the founding of the Hungarian "state"), as sites that attempt to materialize particular historical visions of Hungarian national identity and modernity within the changing political, economic, and social geographies of post-socialist East Central Europe. My investigation of the intersection of urban planning, national cultural policy, private economic development, and the institutions of an emerging civil society shall illuminate how each of these discourses and practices participates in the imaginative and actual re-working of Budapest’s historical and spatial order.