ABSTRACT
In 1945 the region was still predominantly rural with far too many people on the land to allow the productivity needed for comfortable living, but the postwar period saw a massive redistribution of population in favour of the towns. Leaving aside East Germany, the urban population increased almost threefold – from 27,400 to 70,700, yet this growth came largely from natural increase so that the rural population declined absolutely by less than 9,000 (Table 5.1). The greatest changes occurred in Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia where the urban share increased by more than 30 per cent while Albania saw the smallest change with only 15 per cent. In 1990, apart from Albania with 35 per cent, all the communist ECECs had an urban majority of 50-70 per cent, with 78 per cent in East Germany. Although the capital cities varied greatly in size, related to total population, they all grew with particular speed, while there were progressively lower rates of growth further down the hierarchy: regional administrative centres; other towns with substantial resources for industry; and small towns, which in some cases actually declined. Despite these increases in the population of the towns, the region remained ‘under-urbanised’ because housing shortages induced high levels of daily and weekly commuting. Figure 5.1 shows the main commuting routes in the Romanian Carpathians, and the sharp decline in the rural population in the western areas. There is, however, no simple correlation between accessibility to large towns and rural population trends because of variations in natural increase (referred to in Chapter 2) and in the availability of local employment, e.g. in wood processing. In some parts of ECE, bureaucratic controls on migration into the larger cities typically led to largescale growth in suburban areas just beyond the administrative boundaries. Hungary’s ‘National Settlement Plan’ of 1971 tried to slow down the growth of Budapest by strengthening the five largest provincial cities (Debrecen, Györ, Miskolc, Pécs and Szeged) and five others of intermediate size (Békéscsaba, Kecskemét, Székesfehérvár, Szolnok and Szombathely).
