ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the emergence of a new housing type, the so-called "residential park", can offer a lens into changing patterns of urban inequality. It chronicles that in cities across Eastern Europe after 1989, these residential parks have helped foster inequalities as they operate within the combined effects of large-scale privatization, state decentralization, and increasing globalization following the demise of socialism. The chapter focuses on a case study of Budapest and on the relationship between residential parks and gated communities to gain insight into the changing spatial configuration of urban inequality that now characterizes postsocialist Eastern Europe. The chapter explores the complex interplay of public and private forces in the construction of the new form of housing around key questions such as how the state at various scales (local, urban, national, global) interacts with local and foreign real estate developers in the completion of these projects.
