The study ‘Sometimes up, sometimes down on the seesaw: Experiencing industrial investment and disinvestment in Budapest’s Ganz-MÁVAG manufacturing site’, authored by Márton Berki and Mirjam Sági, is now available.
Drawing on Neil Smith’s “seesaw” metaphor of uneven development, this paper examines how historical cycles of industrial investment and disinvestment were/are lived, experienced, and narrated in Budapest’s former Ganz-MÁVAG manufacturing site. The findings show that “up” and “down” positions on capital’s seesaw were experienced in highly ambivalent and differentiated ways: socialist-era “being up” could be narrated simultaneously as security and pride, but also as constraint and frustration, while post-socialist “being down” unfolded as an affectively intense rupture, often entailing not only job loss but the withdrawal of paternalistic care, community life, and local infrastructures.
The study is available online in the Hungarian Geographical Bulletin: https://ojs3.mtak.hu/index.php/hungeobull/article/view/21851
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