Pittsburgh Romanian Studies

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“Memory, History & Identity in Bessarabia and Beyond”

University of Pittsburgh,

October 21-22, 2005

“Globalizing Cities in Eastern Europe: The Trope of “Paris” in Budapest and Bucharest’s Urban Marketing Discourses, 1870-1940”

Alexander Vari

Center for the Arts in Society

Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:

During the 1850s and 1860s, as a result of its large scale urban redevelopment under the leadership of prefect Georges Haussmann, Paris turned into a model that many other cities tried to emulate during the decades that followed. The appeal of the French capital stretched over a wide geographic area stretching from the plains and hills of Eastern Europe to the pampas of South America. While from the 1880s to the early 1900s Budapest tried to market herself as the “Paris of the East”, Buenos Aires did the same, often depicting herself as the “Paris of South America”. A couple of decades later, it was Bucharest’s turn to tout herself as the “Little Paris” of the Balkans. One can also invoke the case of such cities as Lima, Mexico City, Brussels, Havana, Rio de Janeiro and Warsaw, among others, which at one point between 1850 and 1950 compared themselves in one form or another to Paris.

It would be too simplistic, however, to explain Paris’ appeal in these more or less distant areas of the world just by referring to the power of its architectural example. A more attentive look at the specific historical context that called up such Paris-referencing tropes in Hungary and Romania (the geographic focus of this paper) will show that it is more accurate to see them as strategies aiming to promote and inscribe the local and the national within the global. In the case of Budapest, for instance, it was not only architectural emulation but open challenge of Paris’ function as a nodal city in the transnational urban network of the late-nineteenth century, which motivated local boosters to use “Paris” as a strategic catch-word and marketing tool aiming to add to the appeal of the Hungarian capital in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Similarly, in the case of interwar Bucharest, it was not only an attempt to emulate but one meant to challenge and surpass Paris’ architectural and metropolitan appeal that motivated locals to work on changing the physical face of the city within a short span of time.

In order to document this point, in the remainder of the paper, I will look at two aspects of Budapest and Bucharest’s self-marketing strategies. First, I will review their urban development plans and accomplishments and the way they related to the example set by Paris. Second, I will look at their attempts to connect and insert their new urban sceneries and touristic potential into pre-existing metropolitan networks.