SGSUP Spring Colloquium Lecture with Janos Kocsis

Janos Kocsis, Budapest University 

We are excited to announce that Janos Kocsis, associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest and ASU Fulbright scholar, will kick off SGSUP's first Colloquium lecture of the Spring 2025 semester. 

About the talk: 

The transition to a market economy, coupled with significant advancements in transportation infrastructure, rapid suburbanization, and subsequent waves of intense urban sprawl, has profoundly reshaped Hungary’s spatial landscape over the past three decades. This transformation is further complicated by the socio-economic repercussions of globalization, social transformations, the process of European Union accession, and reintegration into broader European structures. These factors have collectively catalyzed substantial spatial realignment and readjustment throughout the country.

A prominent phenomenon arising from these changes is the emergent formation of metropolitan structures surrounding major urban centers, which frequently extend beyond national borders. While the most notable metropolitan area in Hungary is centered around Budapest—with a population of approximately 3.2 million, constituting one-third of the country’s total populace—Vienna's metropolitan area has similarly expanded to assimilate significant urban centers in western Hungary.  

The developments in metropolitan areas have led to pronounced polycentric tendencies, especially within more economically developed regions. The presentation will critically examine the processes underlying the formation of metropolitan areas in Hungary, with a particular focus on Budapest, while situating these developments within the broader theoretical context of urban studies. Emphasis will be placed on the implications of these metropolitan dynamics for regional planning, socio-economic inequality, and the sustainability of urban environments.

Speaker Biography: 

János B. Kocsis, PhD, is an urban sociologist with a master's degree from Budapest University of Technology (1995), ELTE University of Budapest (1999), and the University of Leicester (2002), and a PhD from ELTE (2008). He taught urban studies and planning at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, where he led the Regional and Urban Economics graduate program from 2003. Since 2016, he has served as an associate professor at Corvinus University of Budapest. He was a visiting professor at Indiana University, Bloomington (2014-15), and has lectured at Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj (Romania), and the University of Wrocław (Poland). Dr Kocsis has participated as chief researcher in numerous trans-European and Hungarian research projects. He has been the vice president of the Hungarian Society for Urban Planning since 2015. Currently, he is a Fulbright scholar at Arizona State University, Tempe, US. His research areas include urban fabric transformation in transitional, suburban and outer areas, gentrification, polycentric metropolitan regions, globalization effects, and urban planning and governance issues in Central Europe.