One of the recurring issues of urbanistics is why urban rehabilitation is necessary. There is a variety of answers to it from aspects of city-planning, heritage protection, technology, sociology and housing policy among others. However, we tend to ask this question repeatedly from time to time, and it givesus food for thought. Because urban rehabilitation is a global issue. If the community capable of constructing and maintaining a city modelled after those of organically formed traditional cities, rural towns and villages can be revived, we are not only talking of the rehab of a city, but also that of the communal spatial form of life: the rehabilitation of a living space in symbiosis with its environment. The hope and risk of its realization is a local solution we can possibly have as an answer to a global issue.

Béla Varga-Ötvös