Abstract
One of Hungary’s socialist new towns, Kazincbarcika was founded in the early 1950s. After three-and-a-half decades of privileged (state-funded) development and two-and-a-half decades of subsequent crises, the town became dependent on external sources again: its post-2010 development is predominantly based on capital investment from China and on funding by the EU and the ‘Swiss Contribution’. Against this economic and (geo)political backdrop, this essay discusses how these recent capital flows have changed Kazincbarcika’s architecture and iconography (as well as the perceptions of them among residents) through the concept of palimpsest, focusing on the layeredness of both the physical landscape and the symbolic landscape of the town.
