Blaha Lujza Square, named after the nineteenth-century actress known as the nightingale of the nation, has been remade repeatedly. During the socialist period from the 1960s to the late 1980s, it functioned as a dense transport and cultural hub where trams and buses converged, kiosks and vendors occupied corners, and the nearby Corvin department store structured routines of buying, queuing and casual conversation. The National Theatre and the EMKE Café anchored the square as cultural nodes for artists, workers and intellectuals. After the political transition of 1989, the square fragmented into surface parking and heavy traffic, yet everyday sociability persisted through informal interactions and waiting practices embedded in that broken environment. The 2022 reopening, framed as a comprehensive renewal for mobility, accessibility and visual order, marked the latest and perhaps most consequential transformation.

The study’s central claim is that urban loss should be understood not as disappearance but as a process that reorganises material space, social rhythms and everyday relations. Viloria combines archival photographs from Hungary’s open-access Fortepan archive, which returned 718 images of the square dating from the early 1900s to 1990, with contemporary fieldwork photographs taken between 2023 and 2025, ten semi-structured oral history interviews with long-term residents, and analysis of online discussions about the renewal on Facebook groups, news portals and forums between 2022 and 2024. Interviews used photo-elicitation, in which archival and contemporary images prompted reflection and sensory recollection. This multimodal design treats loss as something enacted through movements, gestures and mediated discourse rather than a fixed event in the past.

The material evidence is striking when two aerial photographs are compared. A 1973 image shows a square textured with trees, benches and the traces of daily movement, with people hovering near tram stops, gathering under vegetation and occupying benches oriented toward one another. The 2023 view reveals a simplified geometry of wide granite paving, restrained greenery and carefully aligned furniture. The redesign introduced open paving, reduced shade and automated infrastructures, producing what urban scholars describe as aesthetic and moral ordering, or rule by aesthetics: governance through visual order. Where density once fostered contact, clarity now produces exposure. The reduction in shaded areas and the increased spacing of seating limit opportunities for prolonged co-presence, making sustained interaction less likely. In prioritising how the square looks over how it is lived, the design substitutes representational order for relational density.

The temporal dimension of this loss may be even more significant than the spatial one. 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, with bodies oriented toward one another rather than toward movement. Oral histories echo these scenes. Interviewees recalled meeting at the clock, coming to the square to meet people and say hello, and going on casual dates there. One participant described it as 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. Waiting, in this account, was a shared rhythm of urban life that affirmed belonging through co-presence.

In the renewed square, those practices have become difficult to sustain. The benches are narrow, shade is limited and the surfaces uninviting, so people pause briefly, often while checking their phones or waiting for a ride, before moving on. Researchers describe a new form of absent togetherness, in which attention circulates across physical and digital realms through short, frequent but thin mobile micro-interactions. Crucially, the study argues that digital technology does not erode sociability on its own; rather, it fills the void left by a square that no longer supports lingering or collective tempo. Even groups who arrive together often sit facing outward or turn to their phones, because the environment offers few cues for shared presence. Online commenters describe the square as too clean or soulless, a place one simply passes through rather than stays.

The most vivid embodiment of the new order is the delivery rider. Gig workers coordinated through platforms such as Wolt and Foodpanda now wait at the corner of Rákóczi Road, their movements dictated by algorithmic notifications rather than human tempo. Their sociability is what researchers call networked proximity: co-presence organised by data and labour rather than spontaneity. The square’s MOL Bubi bike dock and tram stop coexist with riders’ phones, forming a hybrid landscape of automation and mobility. A 62-year-old woman who has lived near Blaha since childhood recalled that her mother once bought from street vendors there, but now everything can be ordered on a phone and delivered by Wolt workers. Everyday practices once structured by embodied interaction, including waiting, choosing and casual conversation, have been compressed into platform-mediated transactions that reduce both the duration and social depth of encounter.

The transformation also extends into questions of who is welcome. The new infrastructures of the square, including automated toilets, surveillance cameras and benches designed to prevent lying down, perform control not through prohibition but through calibration. The timed, fee-based public toilet functions as a subtle tool of deterrence, making the square less inviting for people already stigmatised as undesirable, particularly homeless residents. This filtering of presence reflects broader revanchist urban policies in Hungary that frame control of public space as the protection of order. Meanwhile, the proliferation of Airbnb apartments in adjacent neighbourhoods has contributed to rising rents and the displacement of long-term residents. A 53-year-old resident who has lived in the area since the late 1990s described seeing different tenants in her building every week as owners rent to visitors, eroding the everyday recognition and familiarity that once structured neighbourhood life.

The study situates these changes within the wider trajectory of post-socialist urbanism, in which cities across central and eastern Europe experienced a compressed modernisation that condensed decades of capitalist restructuring into a few decades of rapid change. Renewal projects framed as Europeanisation or revitalisation often recode modernity as a visual and moral order in which cleanliness, safety and visibility stand for progress, producing socially selective spaces that privilege consumption over interaction. Yet the author is careful to note that the dynamics at Blaha increasingly reflect global digital capitalism rather than the post-socialist condition alone. Platform-based labour, data infrastructures and algorithmic coordination reorganise everyday rhythms everywhere, entangling sociability with optimisation, visibility and real-time responsiveness.

The conclusion is neither nostalgic nor simply pessimistic. Sociability at Blaha persists, but as fleeting encounters regulated by circulation, and fleeting encounters can still produce empathy, recognition and curiosity. What has disappeared is not public life itself but the depth, duration and mutual recognition that once sustained it: a condition the study describes as rhythm without resonance, social density without social depth. The square no longer breathes collectively; it scrolls. The real challenge, the author argues, is not to recover a lost past but to recognise how publicness is being redefined in the present through design, visibility and algorithmic governance, and to consider what forms of sociability might still emerge within, against or beyond the logics of efficiency and control that now shape the contemporary city.

Subject of Research: Urban renewal, platform labour and the transformation of public sociability in a post-socialist Budapest square

Article Title: Fleeting encounters: digital labour mobility and the loss of public sociality in Blaha Lujza Square, Budapest

Article References: Viloria, J. C. (2026). Fleeting encounters: digital labour mobility and the loss of public sociality in Blaha Lujza Square, Budapest. Geographica Helvetica, 81(3), 375-391. https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-81-375-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gh-81-375-2026

Keywords: urban renewal, public space, sociability, platform labour, Budapest, post-socialist cities, algorithmic governance, digital mediation, urban loss, gig economy, urban rhythms, geography

One of the review’s central contributions is conceptual housekeeping. Species are routinely labelled as social or solitary, yet those labels depend heavily on the criteria applied — estimates of how many mammal species are solitary range from more than two-thirds to less than a quarter depending on the study. Even so-called solitary species, from semi-nomadic orangutans to seemingly asocial carnivores, engage in repeated, non-random interactions that build genuine social structure. The authors therefore distinguish sociability, an individual-level tendency, from sociality, a property of groups and species, and stress that sociability is not a single unitary trait. It can be expressed through spatial proximity, affiliative contact such as grooming, or preferences for specific partners, and it can be measured with everything from simple observation counts to sophisticated social network analysis. This definitional tangle, they argue, has produced apparently contradictory findings across the literature and has left sociability among the least consistently studied of the classic animal personality axes, alongside boldness, activity, exploration and aggressiveness.

Crucially, consistent individual differences in sociability do not mean fixed behaviour. Individuals can shift their expressed sociability with conditions while repeatable differences among them persist, and they can even differ in how plastic they are. In common bottlenose dolphins, for example, individuals varied in how their gregariousness responded to short-term swings in food availability, even though the population’s overall social structure stayed stable. These individual behavioural reaction norms may themselves be heritable and subject to selection, meaning that environmental change can act on sociability through reversible within-individual plasticity, through developmental shifts in social tendencies, or through selective and demographic processes that change which social phenotypes exist in a population at all.

The feedbacks between individuals and their social worlds are where the review becomes genuinely striking. Individual tendencies build relationships, relationships build networks, and networks feed back to shape individual behaviour. A famous population of olive baboons illustrates the point: after tuberculosis removed the most aggressive males, the remaining group became markedly more tolerant, and this ‘pacific culture’ persisted even after every original male had been replaced by immigrants. In pig-tailed macaques, experimentally removing a handful of individuals that performed policing roles caused networks to become smaller, less diverse and less integrated. Such ‘keystone’ individuals — brokers, gatekeepers, social hubs — can stabilise or destabilise group-level structure out of all proportion to their numbers, a fact with obvious implications when humans remove animals from the wild.

Turning to the drivers of change, the review distinguishes indirect effects, such as habitat modification, climate change and pollution, from direct effects of human presence and lethal removal. Habitat change cuts both ways: structurally simple environments can push fish into larger, more cohesive shoals, while increased complexity can funnel sleepy lizards into shared pathways and boost social connectivity. In southern pig-tailed macaques ranging inside oil palm plantations, affiliative interactions dropped and aggression rose, while at plantation edges grooming rates and partner diversity were actually higher than in forest — but with low-ranking individuals, not high-ranking ones, occupying the most central network positions. Perceived risk and visibility, the authors suggest, can matter as much as food. Grey wolves exposed to intensifying human landscape modification showed reduced pair cohesion, suggesting that simply avoiding disturbance can quietly erode social bonds.

Climate change acts through temperature, resources and catastrophe. Warming can dissolve the thermal benefits of huddling: bushtits abandon dense communal roosts once temperatures rise, and modelling for desert night lizards predicts far fewer survival-enhancing aggregations in a hotter future. In sociable weavers, hot and variable temperatures increase panting and produce more fragmented social networks. In sticklebacks from warmer habitats, sociability is lower, heritable, and — tellingly — no longer repeatable across trials in warm-acclimated fish, hinting that warming may destabilise the very consistency that makes sociability a personality trait. Resource shifts are equally ambivalent. Ravens rely on roost-based alliances to access carcasses when food is scarce but abandon those ties when it is plentiful; Bornean orangutan females reduced association rates and increased aggression after fires caused prolonged fruit scarcity; and southern resident killer whales formed smaller, less interconnected groups in years of low Chinook salmon abundance.

Catastrophic events reveal the sharpest trade-offs. After hurricanes, rhesus macaques expanded their affiliative networks, with previously isolated individuals building new connections — a seemingly adaptive surge of social support under stress. But simulations showed that infection risk doubled and remained elevated for up to five years, and became more evenly spread across social ranks as low-ranking animals gained partners. Black howler monkeys suffered population crashes and prolonged social disorganisation after hurricanes, with interaction rates never fully recovering. The recurring lesson is that short-term social buffering can carry delayed epidemiological and structural costs, a pattern the authors identify as one of the most consistent themes across systems.

Pollution adds another layer of subtlety. A meta-analysis of fish studies found that chemical pollutants and artificial light consistently reduce individual sociability while leaving group cohesion unchanged, whereas mixtures of pollutants increased individual sociability but reduced cohesion — decoupling individual tendencies from emergent group properties. Pharmaceutical contaminants act directly on behaviour-regulating neurology: the anxiolytic oxazepam reduced shoaling in European perch, while fluoxetine increased shoaling in guppies only under specific social conditions. Noise pollution is similarly double-edged, tightening flock clustering in some birds as an apparent antipredator response while degrading the vocal communication that maintains social connectivity in others, such as red-backed fairy-wrens.

Direct human contact produces its own tangle of effects. Ground squirrels habituated to people and dogs showed reduced affiliative behaviour, whereas natural predators promoted cohesion — humans, the review notes, act as a qualitatively distinct class of disturbance. Urban macaques that spent more time monitoring humans groomed less and had fewer partners, consistent with a time-constraint mechanism, while semi-provisioned Assamese macaques with access to energy-rich human food spent less time feeding and more time socialising. The most sobering evidence concerns lethal removal. Vancouver Island marmots undergoing population decline experienced what the authors call a social ‘meltdown’ — smaller colonies, fewer greetings, more aggression, more vigilance and less feeding — that constrained recovery. Killer whale networks proved robust to random removals but fragmented when socially central juvenile females were targeted, as historical live captures did. Simulated poaching of central individuals reduced connectivity in elephant networks, and wolf packs destabilised by human-caused mortality lost reproductive output even without immediate declines in abundance. In elephants, the loss of older matriarchs also erodes ecological knowledge precisely when it is most needed under stress.

The conservation implications are concrete. Network-informed vaccination in wild chimpanzees could prevent large outbreaks with far fewer doses than random strategies, yet targeted removal of highly connected Tasmanian devils failed to control facial tumour disease because network positions shifted seasonally — the utility of such interventions hinges on how stable individual sociability really is. Social transmission can also spread problematic behaviours, as models of California sea lions stealing from fishing gear showed: culling works best before social learning amplifies recruitment. Translocation outcomes, invasion dynamics in guppies, and even responses to monitoring drones in guanacos all depend on social context. The review’s bottom line is that behavioural diversity deserves recognition as a component of biodiversity in its own right: preserving variation in individual social phenotypes and in the relationships they create may be critical for resilience, because populations are not merely collections of mean trait values but living networks whose architecture humans are quietly, and sometimes irreversibly, rewiring.

Subject of Research: Effects of anthropogenic environmental change on animal sociability and its population-level consequences

Article Title: Sociability Under Anthropogenic Change: From Individual Behaviour to Population‐Level Consequences

Article References: Sociability Under Anthropogenic Change: From Individual Behaviour to Population‐Level Consequences. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.74205

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1002/ece3.74205

Keywords: animal behaviour, sociability, animal personality, social networks, anthropogenic change, climate change, pollution, habitat fragmentation, conservation, wildlife management, social learning, disease transmission