ABSTRACT
In 1949 half the economically active population of Hungary was working on the land, and only 22% were employed in industry. The concepts for developing settlement in Hungary have had to take all these problems into account, but they have always benefited from the advantages of small territory and a relatively dense urban network. As in some other socialist countries, the growth rate for the nonagricultural population has been higher in the Hungarian People's Republic than for the urban population. Along with problems relating to the great concentration of economic, administrative, service, cultural, and scientific activities in Budapest and its agglomerations, the Hungarian settlement system is confronted, then, with problems stemming from the variant historical development of settlement in the Danube Basin and on the Great Hungarian Plain. The 1973 national strategy envisaged an urbanization rate measured by the concentration of population living in urban communities.
