Hospitality, Culture and Regeneration: Urban Decay, Entrepreneurship and the ‘Ruin’ Bars of Budapest

Abstract

This paper considers the relationships between hospitality, culture and urban regeneration through an examination of rom (ruin) venues, which operate in dilapidated buildings in Budapest, Hungary. The paper reviews previous work on culture and urban regeneration in order to locate the role of hospitality within emerging debates. It subsequently interrogates the evolution of the rom phenomenon and demonstrates how, in this context, hospitality thrives because of social and physical decay in urban locations, how operators and entrepreneurs exploit conflicts among various actors involved in regeneration, and how hospitality may be mobilised purposefully in the regeneration process. The paper demonstrates how networked entrepreneurship maintains these operations and how various forms of cultural production are entangled and mobilised in the venues' hospitality propositions.

Development as a Battlefield

“…took place over six consecutive weekends during the winter of 2014-15 and created the atmosphere of an 'urban guerrilla' happening (see Lugosi et al, 2010). The organisers asked participants to 'bring tables and folding chairs and also a smoking barbecue' to disrupt the complacent calmness of the pops.12 Activists made frequent allusions to the 'cold' sterility of the towers, emphasising their estrangement from the humming streets of the surroundings: 'We considered setting on fire the wooden benches' , one of the organisers wrote jokingly, 'I fully understand young kids that vandalize the benches in public gardens and set them on fire.…”

Obliterating creative capital? Urban governance of creative industries in post-socialist Budapest

“…It is true that these urban transformations mobilise various forms of capital (Lugosi et al 2010), and newly opened bars might be lively and important meeting points for the creative class. However, local social conflicts and negative social trends may also emerge.…”

Critical hospitality management research

“…It is broadly concerned with exploring the social, cultural, political and ethical dimensions of hospitality and is theory-oriented, seeking to build and interlink with wider theoretical arguments and propositions for the advancement of knowledge for its own sake (Lashley et al, 2007a). Moreover, hospitality studies has attempted to use hospitality to understand a wide range of social processes and has thus sought to advance other disciplinary knowledge (cf., Bell, 2007;Germann Molz and Gibson, 2007;Lugosi and Lugosi, 2008). Highly liberal in its approach, researchers often adhere to phenomenological or constructivist ontologies adopting experimental research methods associated with the more recent historical moments of qualitative research where researcher reflexivity is stressed in order to foreground the subjective process in the construction of knowledge (for example, Germann Molz and Gibson, 2007;Lashley et al 2007a;Lugosi, 2006;Lynch, 2005).…”