The importance of cities throughout history is indisputable. Their allocation of economic,
cultural and political power, their spatial organization functions are impressive,
and their role in social reproduction reached a milestone in 2008, when more than
half of the world's population was considered urban. Today, the urban population is
still growing. Small towns are extremely diverse in terms of economic power and society,
but their numbers and population base do not justify their dominance in the urban
network. There have been intense waves of urbanization across Europe, with the scope
of formal cities widening and the scope of functional cities closing. Grouped by population
category, there are more than 7,000 small towns in Europe, almost two-thirds of the
countries' urban settlements are small towns. This is particularly true in Central-and
Eastern-Europe, where, due to delayed urban development, there is a combination of
welfare suburbanization and urban depopulation, as well as forced-generated movements
from the big cities to smaller towns.In our study, we present the main characteristics
of population change in small towns in Hungary. We examine spatial and functional
differences in the population dynamics of small towns. The aim of the study is to
show the spatial distribution of the settlements identified by prosperous suburbs
and shrinking cities by illustrating the changes in the population dynamics of the
Hungarian small towns population over the last almost twenty years.
