An urban regeneration “made-in-China”: Chinese traders and market expansion in Budapest

Abstract

This article highlights how the emergence of trading routes between China and Hungary after 1989 has contributed to the urban transformation of Budapest. Initiated by migrant entrepreneurs arriving in a new economic context, and in response to a lack of everyday household products, the Chinese traders’ spatial practices have evolved through three stages: they started with the rehabilitation of contaminated land within deindustrialized areas; they continued by redistributing the lands’ usage rights via an emerging community of property actors and tenants; finally, they constructed modern showrooms dedicated for use by the wholesale sector. While increasing the land value through real-estate operations and management, the entrepreneurs also sought to cope with the aesthetic norms of urban renewal policy. By analyzing their spatial practices through a longitudinal perspective of thirty years, the article contributes to the study of economic globalization and urban transformation via a rare example of post-socialist cities.