‘BORDERLESS’ STRATEGIES AND CHANGING RURAL-URBAN RELATIONSHIPS

THE DRIVERS OF SUBURBANISATION IN THE HUNGARIAN-ROMANIAN BORDER REGION

Abstract

The financial and economic crisis that deepened socio-spatial inequalities and hit the “structurally weak” South and East particularly has been discussed in the context of uneven development and imbalanced power relations of the European economic space by political economists since 2009. In this paper, I discuss how local agents react to their perceived “peripheral” position (reinforced by the recent crisis) within hierarchical institutional systems and capital flows by expanding their networked relations – that are contested, imbalanced, culturally (and often, ethnically) defined – beyond the boundaries of the urban region, exploiting the supranational institutional arrangements and cross-border potentials. My findings rest on an extensive field work, such has series of interviews and the review of relevant documents related to socio-spatial processes in the urban region of Oradea. The empirical results suggest that i) new institutional and individual strategies and daily practices were adopted in cross-border urban regions that are nested into various transnational networks; such networks are organised across (linking) various scales and they are sources of knowledge, information, profit and thus, of stability for local agents; ii) the strategies adopted by powerful local agents (their growth alliances) focused on economic produced new socio-spatial inequalities that manifests in changing urban-rural relationships crossing the national border.