REACTIONS AND STRATEGIES ON PERFORATION IN THE BARANYAI-HEGYHÁT AREA

Abstract

Differentiation processes of rural areas affect the everyday dynamics of rural settlement
networks. According to the concept of rural restructuring the differing spatial practice of
the local societies define the spatial differentiation lead by the spatial centralisation of
workplaces, institutions, and amenities in local microcenters. A part of the rural settlement
network suffers from the foremostly negative effect of the differentiation which means the
isolation of local village dwellers. This also means the erosion of settlement networks
creates an incoherent spatial structure, thus the local inhabitant’s spatial practice is limited
to the inhabited villages. The process in which the rural settlement networks lose their
coherence could be understood as the perforation of the settlement structure.
The processes of perforation in the Baranyai-Hegyhát area affect some of the local
villages, the distracted kind of the local settlement networks challenges to solve everyday
issues for the local inhabitants. Visiting the doctors, bringing children to the kindergarten,
the everyday shopping tasks or simply achieve the workplaces creates unusual, constrained
solutions either from the inhabitants, or from the local municipalities. In this paper we focus
on the reactions and activities which the villages in the Baranyai-Hegyhát give on this very
situation. The formal collaborations between the villages make efforts with new
methodology and strategies in order to solve locally emerging issues and challenges. Our
aim is to research these collaborations and evaluate their reactions on the processes of a
perforated settlement network. During the research we made interviews with local
stakeholders, mayors, administrative leaders or representatives of the social institutions.