SELF-SUPPORTING URBANITY - CONNECTION OF COMMUNITY GARDENS TO THE "GREEN, GREY AND RED STRUCTURE" OF BUDAPEST

Community gardening has become a regular urban function in most European big cities. With the knowledge of Western European tendencies reviewing country-specific attributes we can make more accurate deductions about the urban and sociological background and context, the local role and sustainability of gardens. Our overview is based on existing databases, of which the two most important are the 2015 Metropolitan Settlement Structure Plan and the data masses of the census results. The relevant parameters to the mode of inquiry (regional placement, characteristics of the surrounding residential zone, the date of the gardens' establishment, the part-taking and organizing social stratae) are with which we exhibit the almost 30 community gardens founded in the 2010-2016 period. It is visible from the regional analysis that one group of the gardens is part of the gentrification processes of downtown residential areas; the second group is the housing estate garden, meaning the new usage of green spaces neighboring socialist modern building stocks. The community gardens of Budapest are dominantly subjects of restricted public access, the open and thematic gardens, parts of Western European practice, are missing. Mediation between the municipality, the non-governmentals and the designers has an accentuated role in the realization and sustaining of the gardens. The Budapest overview makes it obvious that the highest demand for urban community gardening is in the housing estate areas. This may be subject of importance in the pre-emptive rehabilitation of the process of residential area slumization, a process that can be prognostized to exist in Hungary. From further research we hope to get to know the social effects of active gardens, along with the possible role it fills in improving the state of deteriorating downtown residential space stock as well as bottom line, segregated social groups.