THE RESEARCH OF MIGRATION BETWEEN THE CITY BOUNDARIES OF ZALAEGERSZEG
Abstract
In the last 50 years the urban areas were growing so fast, it gave rise to losing the rural-, and the green areas of the settlements in Europe, and also in Hungary. This process is called several ways, („urban sprawl”), or we can talk about suburbanisation as well. The process is discernible in many cases of our settlements in Hungary, however Zalaegerszeg is a good example, because the city has a mosaical settlement pattern due to development. This settlement's morphological situation originates from the fact that during history, several settlements has been attached to the center of the city, however the parts are several kilometres from each other and from the historical downtown as well. The outer parts are connected with access roads along with green areas (meadows, plough lands, pastures). This mosaical settlement pattern results an extensive urban area and a complex social stucture on the sampled area. The formerly independent settlements are parts of the city nowadays and they show big area growth after the political transition, which results a decrease in the green areas and changes in the land use, by building real estates, recreational facilities, and industrial and economical units. It’s contradictory that the population of Zalaegerszeg is showing a decreasing tendency in the past decades, however the areas of the city parts are still increasing continuously.
We can observe some kind of a duality in the city parts of Zalaegerszeg between the identities of the settlements parts and society as well. The reliefs separate in appearence: the places where the inhabitants have been living for long decades (since before the 90s, from now: native inhabitants) are different from those places where the inhabitants moved in after the political transition (from now: newly moving out people). The duality reflects in the streets, spaces and the appearence of the real estates. I tried to investigate with my research that the so-called „urban sprawl” - the decreasing of the green areas due to the proliferation of the built in and urban areas in the mentioned city parts - is caused by the suburbanization or not.
My applied methods during my field trips were data collection via questionnaires, and I used interviews too which I gathered spontaneously. I worked with secondary datas as well provided by databases from KSH and TEIR.
It turned out during the research that suburbanization inside the city limits is discernible in Zalaegerszeg’s case, and this causes the physical extension of the city in the city-countryside edge zone. It’s hard to measure the population movements statistically, they happen just in a few kilometres in many cases. The motivations and social statuses of the moving out people are also almost completely the same as what we know from the research which investigate the classical suburbanization.
