As historical sources of urban heritage, the monument registers, the building regulations or the general master plans contain a wealth of historical and geographical information on the changing scale of urban heritage protection of Budapest. These sources were the outcome of a process of condensing conflicts and compromises. They were created through a series of aggregating, grouping and structuring operations, which were primarily intended for legal and administrative purposes. However, until the 1960s, these were partly or wholly stuck at some stage of enactment or were created only for professional purposes. Analysis of documents not legally/administratively validated reveal ad hoc urban heritage spatial categories which, on the one hand, represent varying degrees of conceptual sophistication and, on the other, are indicators of needs which are not yet or only partially expressed at the legislative level. These sources of urban heritage can also be used as evidence of the success or inadequacy of the current conceptual apparatus, in terms of whether changes in the perception of urban space can be effectively incorporated into the available terminology.
As a complement to the legislation of monument protection, the primary operational function of the monument registers was to enable the various administrative authorities to find out quickly and easily about the exceptional procedures required for protected buildings. The first official list was published in 1960. Previous attempts to officialise the list were stopped at various stages before official publication or appeared exclusively in a professional context. The lists issued in manuscript form before 1960 are considered to be useful sources of information about professional intentions and requirements for protection.
The building code is a regulatory document, mostly with geographically defined concepts. This is a set of provisions and, more broadly, of policy ideas for the construction of buildings in the city. Its main function, in general terms, is to provide a framework for organising the city of the present and the future, thus becoming one of the tools for implementing urban planning. It therefore also contains references and provisions relating to urban heritage. The building codes were adapted to the requirements and needs of the current urban policy and to local specificities, and have therefore had to be constantly updated.
During the period under review, general master plans of Budapest combined a strategic and technical approach, containing maps and textual information. Since the 1930s, professional and political debates have often focused on the need for a general master plan to solve many of the problems facing the capital. Yet Budapest’s first official document was adopted much later, in 1960. The analysis does not begin with the 1960 plan but includes those that remained at the approval stage (before coming into force) and those that defined strategic orientations for the plan as the Urban Development Programme.
To analyse the spatial concentration and geographic data contained in these sources, I have created a database of monument registers using geographic information system (QGIS software), thus integrated the object identifiers and descriptive data into a single system and projected them onto maps, coupled with the spatial information contained in the urban planning documents.
The definition and content of protected spatial categories depend on the type of documents, a priori on the scale of observation. These sources can be understood as levels of historical information, the product of the intellectual activities and interactions/conflicts of many actors and institutions. These regulatory and planning documents drew multifaceted ‘layers’ of content on urban areas, operationalised urban conservation objectives in different spatial categories, and encoded in their concepts the temporality of their operations, the specific ways of managing change in urban space. We can trace the typological and spatial expansion of urban heritage, which did not develop in a linear manner.
The co-existing protected spatial concepts and areas in these documents can also be considered as different urban readings. When applied to the studied area, they become systematisable, above all in terms of scale. The spatial categories of monument protection were mostly conceived of as groups of buildings, the urban zones of the building regulations expressed a territoriality, and urban master plans created objects from the townscape to the neighbourhood according to the territorial unit they approached. Their graphic representation also bears witness to their different approaches, whether it is a continuous line running along facades or a zone with specific boundaries. In essence, the line and the zone are value imprints of urban heritage, whose variations indicate the typological, spatial and abstract expansion of heritage. In addition, spatial concepts have emerged that have blurred boundaries or made them secondary: categories that protect the distant view and landscape relations have appeared in some conceptualisations.
This paper analyses the change in the spatial scale of Budapest's urban heritage through historical and geographical information gathered from the monument registers, building codes and general master plans between 1930 and 1990.