Une régénération urbaine « made in China » : les commerçants chinois et l’expansion des marchés de gros à Budapest

This article highlights how the emergence of trading routes between China and Hungary after 1989 has contributed to the urban transformation of Budapest. Initiated by migrant entrepreneurs arriving in a new economic context, and in response to a lack of everyday household products, the Chinese traders’ spatial practices have evolved through three stages: they started with the rehabilitation of contaminated land within deindustrialized areas; they continued by redistributing the lands’ usage rights via an emerging community of property actors and tenants; finally, they constructed modern showrooms dedicated for use by the wholesale sector. While increasing the land value through real-estate operations and management, the entrepreneurs also sought to cope with the aesthetic norms of urban renewal policy. By analyzing their spatial practices through a longitudinal perspective of thirty years, the article contributes to the study of economic globalization and urban transformation via a rare example of post-socialist cities