A létező falusi világ a fogalmak és folyamatok Prokrusztész-ágyában

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.