Rescuing a small village school in the context of rural change in Hungary

Rural regions and rural societies in the Central and Eastern European member states of the European Union (NMS10) are generally believed to be the biggest losers of the transformation from state socialism to capitalism. The transformation process has resulted in an extremely polarized regional development where the capital regions have more or less caught up economically with Western Europe while the rural peripheries stagnate on a low level or fall even further behind (Schon, 2006: 388–389).

The Peripheralization of Rural Areas in Post- socialist Central Europe: A Case of Fragmenting Development? Lessons from Rural Hungary

Faces and causes of Roma marginalization: experiences from Hungary

Violations of the right to the city for women with disabilities in peripheral rural communities in Hungary

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Peripheral areas and their distinctive characteristics: The case of Hungary

The object of my paper is an area with small villages, largely over-represented by Roma population. In the middle of the 1980s there were one or two small villages becoming ghettos, at present 17 ethnically segregated settlements can be found in the micro-region besides dozens of other villages approaching towards the state of ethnic segregation. As a result of massive unemployment and the demographic changes brought about by the exchange of population, not only more and more villages have become ghettos in the area, but the structure of local society has also changed. In each settlement either the majority of the inhabitants or, in more serious cases, the whole village community is excluded from the labour force market as well as from the education system, which could offer them social mobility. This article intends to present to what extent the new poverty formed under the effect of the economic structural shift after the political transition in 1990 changed the spatial location of the Roma population, which is otherwise strongly over-represented among poor people. I investigate ethnical segregation not in itself, but with regard to the determinant social changes, primarily the shift in the economic structure and the accompanying unequal spatial distribution. I am going to argue that socio-economic transformation created such changes in spatial structure, which generated a fundamentally new pattern of spatial segregation: the regional ghetto. The relevance of the study is reinforced by the fact that nowadays researchers belonging to various workshops of social sciences have also called attention to a similar phenomenon: they report on the unequal spatial representation of the Roma population and the regional processes of ghetto-formation (Kocsis and Kovacs 1999: 19), the increase of seclusion ratio and the changes in the forms of segregation (Janky and Kemeny 2004b: 100). These studies describe the various types of the segregated areas (Bihari and Kovacs 2004: 21), and urge the rehabilitation of those ghettoised areas where the disadvantagon population is concentrated (Ladanyi 2004). In the 1990s in the Hungarian society a new social group emerged, whose members can be characterised with low qualifications and transitional or permanent exclusion from the labour market. In this group, where Roma people are over-represented, people are exluded from the majority of the society; they do not have the least opportunity to have regular income, adequate housing conditions, social insurance,

Tünde Virág

Papers

The regional ghetto