The Villages of Hungary in Terms of Concepts and Processes

Abstract

Working with the Society volume of the Hungarian National Atlas over the last number of years, we found several questions and problems connected to the typology and social-economic processes of Hungarian villages. We would like to give a short review of these problems in this paper. We dealt with the definition of the villages, and asked what a village is nowadays in Hungary. Are all the non-urban administrative units villages and are there any villages that from a geographical viewpoint are without local government? There are plenty of former villages which have lost administrative independence, but they look and work like a village. On the other hand, there are small settlements that have a local government, but with only a dozen people and without any other functions. Other questions connected with new processes of urbanization-suburbanization, social and economic changes, and changing local identity make it extremely hard to group the villages.