Producing CET - Uneasy alliances in the making of a new urban space

Producing CET. Uneasy alliances in the making of a new urban space in Budapest.

In this paper I propose to map out the emergence of one particular urban development on the riverfront in Budapest, which city elites purport it to be the first iconic architecture here. It is seductively named Central European Time, but it is largely known by the moniker CET, a play-on-words, which means ‘whale’ in Hungarian. What and whose vision does this novel post-socialist urban design articulate? What public as ‘space’ and as ‘people’ is produced?

I intend to build the argument along several levels of analysis: first I will approach this particular instance of urban intervention as an endeavor of turning value trapped in land into productive capital, that is, transforming a defunct industrial site into a service-led urban cultural venue. At this level of analysis the structural determinations and the political economic aspect will dominate. Second, I will finesse the analysis further and show how this urban development is defined and framed at the intersection of diverse interests, imaginaries and values. For this I turn to some urban policies and their materialization, at the way these are deployed by diverse agents. I will look at the meanings and practices mobilized to advance this project, at the power geographies that emerge. I map out the cultural politics of local economic and cultural urban development through the several phases of the project. I show the many contradictions, unexpected alliances and divisions among diverse actors, which challenge any facile binary divisions like global-local, fleet-footed capital versus place-bound state. This ethnographic account of one particular urban space is also a pragmatic inquiry into conceptual disjunctures (Graeber). What meanings, roles have the state, culture, economy and politics acquired in the post-socialist context given the global onslaught of neoliberal economic imaginaries?