The shift from state socialism to market capitalism generated one of the most rapid and uneven urban transformations in modern history. In central and eastern Europe, the introduction of market forces and the deconstruction of centralised planning altered the social imaginaries and material fabric of cities. This development has been characterised by academics as a “compressed modernisation” which condensed decades of capitalist restructuring into a few decades of rapid change (Sýkora and Bouzarovski, 2012; Tsenkova, 2008; Berki, 2014). The outcome is a heterogeneous landscape in which socialist infrastructures coexist with neoliberal redevelopment and global aesthetics of consumption. These shifts brought new geographies of power and exclusion. Swyngedouw et al. (2002) argued that European urban policy in the neoliberal era privileges entrepreneurial governance, producing socially discriminatory spaces under the banner of revitalisation. In post-socialist contexts, similar logics surfaced through projects of Europeanisation and revitalisation that re-coded modernity as a visual and moral order. Fleming (2012) shows how Łódź mobilised the discourse of “revitalisation” to legitimise privatisation and aesthetic control, while Lawton and Punch (2014) demonstrate that the “European city ideal” functions as a normative script aligning design with market competitiveness. These studies illustrate how modernisation is not only an economic process but also a moral geography in which cleanliness, order, and visibility are tantamount to progress.

Against this backdrop, the post-socialist city became a site of temporal and affective realignment. Sugarman and Thrift (2020) links neoliberalism to the internalisation of accelerated time, showing how the compression of temporal experience creates anxiety and a constant sense of delay. In a similar vein, Szpakowska-Loranc (2016) views the storytelling of modern cities as a spectacular, fast-paced show that undermines collective memory. In this sense, the loss experienced in post-socialist modernisation is not only material but temporal: a disjuncture between the lingering past and the hurried present. The Europeanisation of urban space also operates through design practices that aestheticise governance. In Ljubljana, Svirčić Gotovac and Kerbler (2019) show that sustainability narratives mask processes of gentrification and social filtering. Their findings resonate with those of Fleming (2012) and Lawton and Punch (2014) arguing that even when framed as ecological or cultural renewal, urban policy breeds neoliberal hierarchies of access. Such projects illustrate what Swyngedouw et al. (2002) term the post-political city, a mode of urbanism where consensus around growth suppresses contestation and difference. Within these restructured landscapes, public spaces become arenas where belonging and exclusion are negotiated daily. Newman (2013) conceptualises municipal authorities and private managers as “gatekeepers of the urban commons”, determining who may occupy, linger, or perform visibility. Yaghi et al. (2019) describe how artists and residents deploy performative interventions to reclaim such controlled environments, noting that even within neoliberal urbanism, alternative publics continue through creative and ephemeral acts. These performances operate as what Edensor (2010) describes as practices of consolation, the embodied gestures through which people cope with and respond to the experience of urban loss.

When viewed collectively, these studies position the post-socialist city as a laboratory of late modernity. They highlight the tensions of global trends including commodification, acceleration, and aesthetic governance. Urban renewal guarantees inclusion and modernity but often results in selective openness, spatial polarisation, and affective fatigue. Hirt (2014) describes this contradiction as the “post-public city”, a space that retains the appearance of collectivity while hollowing out its social substance. In Budapest, post-socialist urban transformation has been shaped by the reconfiguration of public space, housing, and social visibility, where privatisation, welfare retrenchment, and the regulation of marginalised groups have redefined urban life and intensified socio-spatial inequalities (Bodnár, 2001; Misetics, 2017; Ámon, 2019). These processes are further reflected in the everyday production of urban space, including shifting patterns of diversity, cultural inscription, and affective negotiations of belonging in central districts of the city (Balizs and Erőss, 2021; Boros et al., 2016). These tensions manifest vividly in the renewal of Blaha, where modernisation redefines the rhythms, emotions, and possibilities of collectiveness. Here, urban loss is not simply the loss of socialist material forms but the transformation of their social and temporal infrastructures.

The concept of urban loss has gained renewed significance in critical urban geography as scholars seek to understand the affective and social consequences of transformation. Modernity, as Reckwitz (2021) argues, is characterised not only by its generative tendencies but also by its continuous production of disappearance. Loss materialises when social practices, ties, and spaces that once carried value are eroded, displaced, or made outdated. In urban contexts, this becomes evident in the vanishing of shared rhythms, everyday sociability, and all other forms of collective presence that previously structured urban life. This view resonates with recent theories that frame loss not merely as an endpoint but as an ongoing process embedded in everyday practices of moving, sensing, and adapting to the city. In this sense, loss becomes both structural and experiential: it shapes the material order of the city while being continuously re-enacted in its daily rhythms. In post-socialist cities, where rebuilding the urban fabric also entails reassembling forms of collective life, these dynamics take on distinct spatial and emotional intensities.

In post-socialist contexts, loss is experienced with intensity. Hirt (2014) describes the “post-public city” as a landscape where once collective spaces, crucial to the socialist ideal of sociability, have been disjointed by privatisation and consumerism. Public parks, squares, and boulevards that were once sites of collective leisure and ideological display have been reimagined as nodes of consumption and surveillance. Kalyukin et al. (2015), analysing the reconstruction of Moscow's Gorky Park, identify a “second generation” of post-socialist change in which the very meaning of the public is recast through neoliberal aesthetics of order, safety, and spectacle. Although framed as efforts to design liveable, “European” cities, these projects often produce socially selective spaces that privilege consumption over interaction. Bugarič (2006) likewise traces how capitalist urbanism alters modernist ideals of public life into consumerist spectacles. The “Disneyfication” and “citisation” of the city reduce public space to a stage for scripted social performances, while the everyday spontaneity of encounter is superseded by visual and commercial simulation. The shift from form follows function to form follows finance signifies not only a change in urban aesthetics but also a more profound reconfiguration of how sociability itself is organised (Bugarič, 2006). Public spaces become privatised non-places where presence is regulated, encounters are fleeting, and the possibility of collective identification shrinks. This loss is not merely physical but relational.

Drawing from Lefebvre's understanding of space as socially produced, loss must be seen as a transformation of rhythms as the everyday patterns that sustain coexistence. When the temporal and spatial conditions that once enabled collective rhythms are disrupted, sociability becomes fragmented. The resulting interactions are characterised by mobility, short duration, and mediated connection.

Contemporary platform economies extend this transformation by embedding urban life within digitally mediated systems that increasingly coordinate everyday activity. Rather than replacing earlier processes of privatisation and commercialisation, platformisation intensifies them through algorithmically organised infrastructures that shape how people encounter the city and one another. Research from Hungary and neighbouring countries suggests that platform-mediated work has expanded through labour markets already characterised by precarity and flexibilisation, reinforcing rather than replacing existing forms of socio-economic inequality (Kahancová et al., 2020; Piasna and Drahokoupil, 2019). In Budapest, the renewal of public spaces has been associated with the emergence of what Boros et al. (2016) describe as “controlled diversity”, where visibility replaces deeper forms of engagement and urban encounters become carefully choreographed. Related processes of post-socialist redevelopment and market-oriented urban transformation have reshaped patterns of inequality and access to central urban spaces in Budapest (Berki, 2014; Czirfusz and Jelinek, 2022). At the same time, the regulation of presence in public space, particularly in relation to homelessness, has become a key dimension of urban governance in the city (Misetics, 2017). Regulation, surveillance, and gentrification thus reshape urban public life into a choreography of selective co-presence. These dynamics also resonate with broader debates on the politics of public space, where access, visibility, and participation are actively shaped by regulatory and institutional forces (Mitchell, 2003).

Tsenkova (2008) situates these developments within broader processes of neoliberal restructuring and social differentiation in post-socialist cities. Privatisation and the emergence of new consumption spaces have redefined both urban form and everyday life, producing new hierarchies of access and belonging. These dynamics reveal that urban loss operates across scales: from the demolition of material structures to the attenuation of shared rhythms and the erosion of public sociability. Therefore, rather than focusing on simple disappearance, this paper approaches urban loss as a process of relational reconfiguration. It includes the replacement of embodied sociability with mediated interaction and the displacement of collective practices by commercialised forms of encounter. The experience of loss encompasses both the material disappearance and the affective transformation, marked by the gradual thinning of the social fabric of daily urban life. This conceptualisation provides the foundation for examining how, in places such as Blaha, renewal projects produce not absence but new modes of fleeting, transactional, and hyper-mobile interaction that embody the late-modern condition of sociability.

The transformation of Blaha is not only spatial but temporal. If the previous era was defined by the density of shared presence, the renewed square expresses what Lefebvre (2004) might call a reorganisation of rhythms or the loss of everyday duration that once made sociability tangible. Socialist-era photographs capture the square as an infrastructure of time: people sitting on benches, feeding pigeons, waiting for trams, or meeting under the clock (Fig. 3). In these images, time is not only represented but embodied. People remain in place, sitting in clusters, leaning against railings, or gathering around fixed points. Bodies are oriented toward one another rather than toward movement, suggesting a spatial arrangement that supports interaction and duration. Benches are occupied in proximity, enabling both conversation and silent co-presence, while overlapping activities unfold without urgency. Waiting, resting, and socialising occur simultaneously, producing a layered rhythm of shared time rather than a sequence of isolated movements.

These scenes are echoed in oral histories, where interviewees recall how “we would meet at the clock”; come to the square to “meet people and say hi”; or simply spend time together, including casual encounters and even dates. As one participant noted, it was a place “where you always ended up talking to someone while waiting”, highlighting how waiting functioned not as idle time but as a socially productive interval that enabled spontaneous encounters and familiar recognition. The repetition of such moments, what Jeffrey (2008) called the politics of waiting, constituted the square as temporal commons. Waiting was not wasted time but a shared rhythm of urban life, one that affirmed belonging through co-presence, where encounters emerged through pause, repetition, and the simple act of “hanging out” together in time.

In contrast, such practices have become difficult to sustain in the present-day square. The minimalist surface and scattered furniture create an environment that values visibility and flow over stillness. The benches are narrow, shade limited, and the surfaces uninviting. People pause briefly, often while looking at their phones or waiting for a ride before continuing (Fig. 4). What was once a square of circulation and rest has become a transit space governed by acceleration. As Crang (2001) notes, time–space compression not only alters mobility but also redefines how urban dwellers experience waiting and encounter. The renewed Blaha reflects this shift: the loss of waiting as a shared temporal practice and its replacement by shorter, individualised intervals of movement.

This reconfiguration of rhythm is visible in the rise in what Thulin et al. (2019) and Sutko and de Souza (2011) call mediated presence. People no longer linger for social reasons but remain connected elsewhere through mobile interfaces. The smartphone produces a new form of absent togetherness, where attention circulates across physical and digital realms. In Blaha, the fleeting gestures of those seated on red benches such as checking notifications, glancing at a screen, or answering a call replace the tactile rhythm of conversation with a mediated rhythm of connectivity. These are what Vanden Abeele et al. (2018) describes as mobile micro-interactions, short-lived acts of presence that are frequent but thin. Yet absent togetherness here is not created by digital technology alone. The renewed spatial design reinforces it. Benches are widely spaced, shade is scarce, and the openness of the square makes sustained conversation uncomfortable. Even groups who arrive together often sit facing outward or turn to their phones, as the environment offers few cues for shared presence. In this sense, the digital does not replace sociability on its own but fills the void left by a square that no longer supports lingering or collective tempo.

This sense of temporal dispersion extends to mobility infrastructures. The delivery riders waiting by the corner of Rákóczi Road (Fig. 5) embody a rhythm governed by algorithmic time rather than human tempo. Their sociability is mediated through platforms such as Wolt and Foodpanda,

Wolt and Foodpanda are popular app-based food delivery platforms operating in Budapest.

This account captures how everyday practices once structured by embodied interaction such as waiting, choosing, and casual conversation have been compressed into platform-mediated transactions, reducing both the duration and social depth of encounter. The loss here is not only economic or spatial but deeply rhythmic, an erosion of shared temporalities that once sustained sociability.

These changing temporalities reshape the emotional landscape of public life. The sense of ambient sociality that Amin (2008) once associated with the city, the quiet awareness of others through gestures, smells, and overlapping rhythms, gives way to infrastructural thinness. Encounters persist, but they are increasingly ambient, asynchronous, and transactional. People occupy the same space but inhabit different temporalities. A delivery rider waits for an order, a commuter checks a timetable, a couple eats in silence before dispersing. Together, they form a choreography of disconnection: social density without social depth. This thinning is not limited to functional encounters such as those between riders and customers. It also affects relational encounters, including friends meeting, acquaintances chatting, and strangers sharing brief pauses. Interviewees noted that “there's nowhere to comfortably talk anymore”, pointing to how the spatial and temporal conditions for sustained interaction have been diminished. In the past, the square's rhythms encouraged spontaneous conversations, but the renewed Blaha now fragments attention and shortens time spent in the space. Residents express this loss indirectly. Online discussions about the renewal often describe the square as “too clean” or “soulless” and as a place one simply “passes through” rather than stays, reflecting a broader reluctance to linger. Such sentiments, though framed as aesthetic critique, are also temporal. Shade provides comfort for duration, kiosks invite lingering, and trees create shelter from visibility. Their absence enforces movement. The design's openness, presented as inclusivity, instead disciplines how long bodies can remain in public. The result is what Ye (2015) terms the ambivalence of familiarity, a feeling of recognition without belonging.

Delivery work further illustrates how new forms of interaction are replacing older modes of public exchange. Delivery riders now coordinate through algorithms instead of social ties, occupying public space only for as long as efficiency permits. The square functions as a staging point for mobility, a brief pause between data-driven movements. Digital infrastructures such as Wolt or Foodpanda extend the logic of urban flow, effectively turning the square into a component of a wider logistical system. These workers are hyper-visible yet socially invisible. Their presence captures what Latham and Layton (2019) describe as infrastructural sociability, in which social contact becomes functional rather than relational. Even moments of rest reveal layers of digital mediation. Conversations unfold alongside constant checking of devices, and gestures of attention are split with unseen audiences online. As Thulin et al. (2019) and Sutko and de Souza (2011) argue, the smartphone reshapes the urban sensorium by folding physical space into networks of mobility and information. In Blaha, this creates a form of public intimacy that feels both proximate and privatised. Individuals coexist in only partial relation to one another, linked by platforms yet separated by interfaces. The atmosphere of the square feels populated but uninhabited.

These observations show why sociability in Blaha becomes rhythm without resonance. People rarely move in unison long enough to coordinate their temporalities. Individualised flows shaped by design and data now occupy the square instead of shared pauses. However, any straightforward account of decline is complicated by these brief interactions. They show an ability to adjust, connecting through movement and mediation. Once rooted in co-located contact, presence now unfolds across multiple temporalities and spaces. Loss here is therefore qualitative rather than absolute: what disappears is the depth of public life and the gradual accumulation of shared experiences that once shaped the square's daily rhythm. Blaha's transformation reflects a broader condition of post-socialist urban modernity, where communal pauses give way to fragmented motion and cyclical time is replaced by linear efficiency. Encounters persist, but they are reorganised through mobility and mediation. The square no longer breathes collectively; it scrolls.

The transformation of Blaha does not end with new materials or rhythms. It extends into the logics that now govern how sociability itself is organised. What was once a square of collective rhythms and informal relations has become an environment structured by data, automation, and exclusion. In this shift, a different form of urban loss emerges: an affective and moral loss marked by the erosion of ease, recognition, and unconditional belonging. The renewal of Blaha exemplifies how algorithmic and neoliberal forms of urban governance reconfigure who can appear, linger, and interact in public space.

The new infrastructures of the square like the automated toilets, surveillance cameras, and benches designed to prevent lying down perform control not through prohibition but through calibration. These material forms guide movement, duration, and visibility. Public behaviour is managed in advance, programmed into the design itself. As Kitchin (2017) and Leszczynski (2020) note, algorithmic urbanism operates by embedding governance in the material and digital fabric of the city. In Blaha, sociability becomes a function of compliance: an individual can sit, pause, or move, but only within the aesthetic and temporal parameters the design allows.

The regulation of presence in the renewed square must also be understood in relation to Blaha's long-standing stigma. For years, the square has circulated in public discourse as unruly, unsafe, or “taken over” by homeless residents, a framing that appears repeatedly in online comments (Sági, 2022). In this context, the introduction of automated amenities, particularly the timed, fee-based public toilet, functions as a subtle tool of deterrence rather than mere modernisation (Fig. 6). By automating and limiting access to basic facilities, these infrastructures make the square less inviting for those already perceived as “undesirable”, quietly narrowing who can stay, rest, or meet bodily needs within the space. This controlled atmosphere contributes not only to the erosion of ease and informality that once supported everyday sociability in Blaha, but also to the production of uneven feelings of comfort, safety, and belonging, as such affective conditions are actively shaped through spatial design and governance (Tulumello, 2015). This subtle filtering of presence reflects broader shifts in urban governance in Budapest, where exclusion is increasingly enacted through design, regulation, and discourse rather than overt prohibition. As Ámon (2019) argues, revanchist urban policies in Hungary frame the control of public space as the protection of order and majority rights, effectively legitimising the marginalisation of homeless populations and other stigmatised groups.

The surrounding architecture reinforces this contrast. The Courtyard Marriott in the Europeum complex emerges as a symbol of investment and connectivity (Fig. 7). Above its polished façade, surveillance cameras scan the square, linking security, consumption, and visibility into a single urban logic. This view represents what Loughran (2014) calls the aesthetics of global urbanism: a surface of transparency and order that conceals deep social stratification.

This convergence of algorithmic systems and economic power creates forms of selective urban citizenship akin to the Ong (2006) notion of graduated citizenship and the analysis of racial banishment conducted by Roy (2019), in which access to urban space becomes conditional, stratified, and monitored. Certain users, such as tourists, consumers, and gig workers, are absorbed into the city's circuits of mobility and consumption, while others are made invisible or unwelcome. The renewed Blaha embodies this uneven geography of sociability: its red benches and smart infrastructure are open to everyone in theory but designed for particular forms of behaviour. Those who do not fit the aesthetic and algorithmic ideal of order, particularly the homeless or informal vendors, find themselves displaced by design.

Platform capitalism extends this pattern beyond the square. The proliferation of Airbnb apartments in the adjacent neighbourhoods has contributed to rising rents and the displacement of long-term residents, replacing local familiarity with transient flows of visitors. Several interviewees described this shift as altering everyday patterns of recognition and familiarity in the area. One 53-year-old resident who has lived in the neighbourhood since the late 1990s recalled the following:

I get to see different faces of people in our building. I am familiar with the faces of those who live in our building, but every week I see different tenants because some house owners are renting their houses for visitors.

This sense of living among constantly changing populations reflects broader processes of post-socialist urban restructuring and platform-mediated urbanism in Budapest, where market-oriented development and housing transformations have reshaped patterns of stability and belonging in central urban areas (Czirfusz and Jelinek, 2022). These dynamics are rooted in the post-socialist restructuring of housing and urban space, where market liberalisation and large-scale privatisation have intensified inequalities and reduced access to secure housing. As Misetics (2017) shows, the withdrawal of the state from housing provision and the commodification of urban space have produced structural conditions that sustain exclusion and precarious urban belonging in Budapest.

Encounters thus become shorter in duration and more weakly embedded, sustained by the pace of check-ins, deliveries, and platform-mediated transactions rather than repeated familiarity. As Leszczynski (2020) argues, platform urbanism transforms relation into transaction, turning presence itself into a monetisable event. What emerges around Blaha is an affective landscape shaped less by attachment than by circulation, where the square's atmosphere of hyper-mobility extends into surrounding streets and loss is felt in the thinning of everyday recognition. Similar patterns have been observed in inner-city districts such as Józsefváros, where processes of studentification and urban regeneration have increased socio-cultural diversity while simultaneously weakening neighbourhood cohesion and long-term social ties.

Neighbourhood sociability becomes fragmented, sustained by the rhythm of check-ins and data metrics rather than everyday recognition. The square's surrounding life now mirrors its internal logic: mobility replaces attachment, and social value is determined by visibility and performance. This redistribution of sociability also operates through moral and sensory codes. The absence of shade, the glare of lighting, and the uniformity of materials produce a landscape of overexposure. These design elements create a subtle discipline that regulates how long one can remain in the square. Green renewal, while marketed as ecological improvement, functions as aesthetic governance. Savić (2013) and Lelandais (2014) observe that pleasantness can be exclusionary: comfort for some entails discomfort for others. At Blaha, this tension manifests in the simultaneous presence of comfort and control, openness and surveillance.

What emerges is not the disappearance of sociability but its algorithmic reorganisation. Encounters remain possible, but they occur within scripted parameters: monitored, time-limited, and often mediated through apps. The city no longer requires social negotiation to maintain order; it is managed through design, software, and code. In this condition, the public sphere becomes an interface. The aesthetics of renewal mask a deeper transformation: sociability persists as data, movement, and visibility, but its texture, unpredictability, and depth have thinned. Blaha thus epitomises the paradox of post-socialist modernity. It is both a symbol of European progress and a laboratory of algorithmic control. More broadly, these transformations reflect the uneven and multi-layered nature of post-socialist urban transition, where market-driven restructuring, global urban imaginaries, and local governance practices intersect to produce fragmented and stratified urban spaces (Misetics, 2017).

The same networks that promise connection also enforce separation. The loss of sociability here is not the absence of relation but its automation, the conversion of togetherness into coordinated isolation. Between the protest for access and the surveillance of the hotel façade, the city negotiates its future as a place that looks public but feels private, that connects through systems but disconnects through experience.