A Gozsdu Udver bistropub. Flickr/ Vilmos Vincze. Soe rights reserved.This migration is not irregular, it is the seasonal speeding up of the global tourism of the middle class. European capitals are filled with people talking all kinds of languages, drink menus are replaced with new versions including higher prices and those who don’t belong to the global travelling middle class are crowded out of their cities for months.
According to Zygmunt Bauman “being a tourist” is a privilege, a sign of adaptation to the postmodern state of things. Therefore not only business people working and moving around in networks are classified as tourists, but also those cultural managers and intellectuals who adopt cosmopolitanism as their life strategy. Mostly they are the ones who make up the crowds in the inner city of Budapest, their local governors and their global counterparts are smiling happily, advertising through their life style such bilingual statements as “be a tourist in your own town”.
Digitalization of our city
So, here we are, tourists in our own city. “I love Budapest” – comes the message from new urban marketing. They order us to find a new café, a breakfast place, discover things that have already existed before but now can be “liked”, in other words: now visible for those who see through a digital eye. Let this city be in a light mood, let multiculturalism be a pastime activity, let’s discover day after day that we can discover something again tomorrow. The city turns into a constant buzz and it retains nothing else but its name, Budapest.
