Housing estate... what a sinister term it is! It conjures up ten-storey blocks with patches of burnt-out grass in between. The term itself has not always had such an unpleasent connotation. Clusters of residential blocks used to serve a particular purpose exceptionally well, and some continue to function perfectly to this day. Most residents of these developments are quite happy to live where they live.
Due to constraints of space, we cannot survey all the noteworthy housing estates; the material had to be treated selectively. It was our intention to introduce the most characterisitic or most interesting representative of each major type. Arranged chronologically, the examlpes are taken from the history of about a hundred years, beginning with the 1880s and ending with 1989, the year of the major change of political regime in Hungary.