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.

Keywords: small town, urbanization, urban hierarchy, Hungary, census