Urban Planning and Mass Housing Construction Under State Socialism: Planning Socialist Budapest, 1960–1975

This study explores how mass housing construction shaped urban planning under state socialism in Budapest, Hungary, between 1960 and 1975. It focuses on the fifteen-year housing construction program, which aimed to provide one million dwellings nationwide, including nearly two hundred in the capital, and offers detailed insight into its planning process. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with urban planners and state officials active at the time, alongside archival research into party and state documents, the analysis reveals how urban planning was shaped by the power dynamics of state-party structures, its dependence on and conflicts with the logic of the socialist planned economy, and the role of informal relations in planners’ articulation of interests. Housing estates thus emerged as distinctive urban products of state socialism, improving living standards while being instruments of regime legitimacy. While resembling postwar Western European estates, Budapest’s housing estate developments diverged in form and quality due to political-economic conditions, leaving a lasting imprint on the cityscape.