Sometimes up, sometimes down on the seesaw: Experiencing industrial investment and disinvestment in Budapest’s Ganz-MÁVAG manufacturing site

Abstract

Drawing on Neil Smith’s “seesaw” metaphor of uneven development, this paper examines how historical cycles of industrial investment and disinvestment were/are lived, experienced, and narrated in Budapest’s former Ganz-MÁVAG manufacturing site. Methodologically, we combine extensive document analysis and qualitative interviewing, including non-conventional interview formats. Empirically, the findings show that “up” and “down” positions on capital’s seesaw were experienced in highly ambivalent and differentiated ways: socialist-era “being up” could be narrated simultaneously as security and pride, but also as constraint and frustration, while post-socialist “being down” unfolded as an affectively intense rupture, often entailing not only job loss but the withdrawal of paternalistic care, community life, and local infrastructures. The subsequent “up again” trajectory was brought about by reinvestment through trade/logistics, although frequently framed through cultural distance and ethnicised boundary-making. Overall, we conclude that Smith’s seesaw is not merely apolitical-economic model but a heuristic for tracing how uneven development becomes classed, ethnicised, and spatialised in everyday life – and that the form of reinvestment matters at least as much as its magnitude.