To Preserve or Not to Preserve a Historic Neighborhood: The Strange Case of Budapest’s “Jewish District”

Since the 1960s city centers are being “revitalized” through ambitious historic preservation programs that help gentrify them, and that promote tourism as well as the general image of these cities.  Over the past two decades, moreover, preserved “Jewish districts” have flourished throughout Europe, becoming their own means of branding neighborhoods and cities. The neighborhood of Lower Erzsebetvaros in Budapest offers a puzzling exception to this rule of urban development. Centrally located in the touristy Hungarian capital, it is endowed with a strong historical identity recognized internationally as part of a World Heritage site. It is populated by a majority of small owners relatively well endowed with cultural capital, and it has been subjected over the past decade to extreme pressure from a booming real estate market. In addition, the neighborhood should have been able to count on a numerous, motivated and well organized Jewish community to support an ambitious preservation plans. How then to explain that this unique vestige of 18^th Century Budapest and Jewish life went through the most historically insensitive process of urban renewal between 2000 and the present, and stands today as an unevenly developed patchwork of preserved, decaying and new buildings in an area mostly known for its “ruin pubs”? The paper uses a narrative approach focusing on political mechanisms and path dependencies to make sense of a case for which existing theories of gentrification are powerless to account for.