The communists' dream of a million-strong Bratislava will not come true

In the early 1970s, the central government of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic resolved that Bratislava would become a city of one million inhabitants by 2050. It is now obvious that this plan will not materialise. Even though Bratislava has been growing, the most realistic prediction indicates that it will increase by only around 10 percent, to around 520,000 inhabitants, by 2050.

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“In order for Bratislava to have one million inhabitants, 15,000 people a year would have to move in, or every Bratislava female resident would have to have seven children,” said demographer Branislav Bleha, from the Department of Economic and Social Geography, Demography and Spatial Development at Comenius University. He is one of the authors of Bratislava 2050, a study published by the Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava (MIB) in March.

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The 600-page document, a demographic analysis and development prognosis, will inform the city's future plans – for example its new master plan, which sets limits and guidelines for the development of the city. For the time being, the city is working with a now-obsolete master plan dating from 2007.

“Bratislava 2050 is an important document that will enable the city to plan its development better and more thoughtfully,” said Petra Marko, head of the MIB. “It allows us to work with possible scenarios about the future of the capital city and take them into account when creating the new master plan, so that it reflects the future needs of residents.”

Bratislava, which spreads over 368 square kilometres and currently has 475,000 inhabitants, is one of the least densely populated cities in Europe. This is partly due to its geographical conditions, but also to the way it has developed. For architects and urban planners, a ‘sprawling’ city no longer represents an appropriate use of space. Compact cities with shorter travelling distances are regarded as preferable.

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The strong influence of suburbanisation

When elaborating the Bratislava 2050 document, its authors worked with figures from the 2021 census and used data based on permanent residence that state Bratislava has 475,000 inhabitants.

This number is important for the city’s finances, as it serves as the main indicator for calculating the share of state income taxes that are allocated to each municipality; these form a significant portion of the city’s incomes. In the past, the number of people who lived in Bratislava but were not registered as permanent residents cost the city, in the form of lower income. This in turn has affected budgets for road construction and maintenance, public spaces, schools, kindergartens and other amenities. Today, Bleha estimates, the number of unregistered long-term inhabitants is just a few thousand. The issue, he opines, was addressed by the introduction of a new city-wide parking policy, PAAS, in 2022. Only inhabitants with permanent residence can apply for residents' parking permits in Bratislava.

“This has pushed them to register their permanent residence in Bratislava,” Bleha said, adding that he and his colleagues did not include inhabitants without permanent residence in their Bratislava study as they lack sufficient data about them.

Bleha also points out another Bratislava phenomenon: people with permanent residence in Bratislava who actually live in the surrounding villages, either in Slovakia or in neighbouring Austria and Hungary.

“Just as the Bratislava city leadership can lament the fact that people are not registering for permanent residence in Bratislava, the mayors of villages in its vicinity may lament that some people have built large villas there, but keep their permanent residence in Bratislava,” said Bleha.

The trend of suburbanisation is proved by official data, too. Since 2011 the number of Bratislavans increased by 13 percent while the population in the 10 quickest-growing villages in Bratislava’s vicinity ballooned by as much as 76 percent.

“Over the last 20 years, 100,000 people have moved into the hinterland of Bratislava, and we don’t see this trend stopping,” said Martin Šveda from the Faculty of Science of Comenius University.

Although experts expected suburbanisation to decline a few years ago, the situation changed with the Covid pandemic. After it, even more people have been choosing to live further away from the city centre, as they often do not need to commute to work every day. However, people living in the suburbs put a strain on Bratislava’s infrastructure and generate traffic.

The study takes into account some variance between the city’s permanent residents and its users. It estimates the total number of people moving around the city based on mobile phone SIM cards located in Bratislava. In the past it was estimated, based on these data, that as many as 630,000 people lived in Bratislava, but the authors of Bratislava 2050 consider this figure to be an overestimate. Today it is estimated that 571,000 people move around Bratislava on average each working day.

A million-inhabitant city is a fiction

Bratislava experienced massive population growth during the previous regime due to the development of industry in and around the city. Fuelled by high immigration from other regions, a higher fertility rate than today, and the absorption of seven villages into Bratislava, it grew by 250,000 inhabitants in just four decades. In 1991, Bratislava had 442,197 citizens, according to Statistics Office data.

Between 2000 and 2021, the period analysed by Bratislava 2050, the number of citizens increased by 6.3 percent, or more than 28,000, to some 475,000. This was a significant increase by Slovak standards, as the population of the whole of Slovakia increased by only 0.6 percent over the same period, while in many municipalities, including a number of larger towns, the population actually declined after 2000.

The size of the Bratislava’s population is affected by the birth of children, deaths and immigration. The latter pertains especially to people moving into the capital from other regions of Slovakia, along with some others moving out of Bratislava into neighbouring villages.

The immigration of people from other countries to Bratislava is negligible and demographers do not expect it will result in a significant impact in the upcoming years.

“These may amount to a few thousand people over a decade, which is not a large number in the context of Bratislava,” Bleha said. He added that it is true that a number of Serbians, Romanians and Ukrainians live and work in Bratislava, but it is not known whether they will stay for one, two or three years and then return home – or if their families will ultimately settle here.

Five scenarios

The Bratislava 2050 study presents five scenarios for the development of the city's population.

“The more likely scenario for the future is an increase in Bratislava’s population, but we cannot rule out a slight decline,” the authors write in the document, adding that their two borderline projection scenarios do not provide a realistic estimate of the population of Bratislava, but instead document the great influence of migration on the development of the population.

The very high scenario counts on the biggest increase in population, to 600,000, partly fuelled by immigration from third countries, including Ukraine.

“If there was no war, we wouldn’t even consider such a scenario, because we wouldn’t have anywhere to take those people,” said Bleha.

This highest scenario seems to the authors to be a real ceiling, as even in forecasts of other central European metropolises population increases of more than 10 to 15 percent are not common.

The lowest scenario works with zero migration, estimating the population to end at a little over 430,000.

The study thus shows how important domestic migration is for the capital. In a zero-migration scenario, Bratislava’s population ages and declines significantly – by up to 10 percent by 2050. The reason for this is that the average number of children each woman living in Bratislava has during her lifetime is lower than two over the long term. Above this level, the population grows, below it, it declines over time.

The realistic range within which the population of the capital city could vary by 2050 is 470,000 to 561,000 inhabitants. According to the most likely scenario, the population of Bratislava should increase to 519,000 persons by 2050.

Does Bratislava need to grow?

Bleha considers the question of whether Bratislava needs to grow to be very complicated.

“I don’t think we need the cities in Slovakia to grow,” Bleha told The Slovak Spectator, adding that the phenomenon of so-called shrinking cities is becoming an issue in other European countries, too.

Bleha noted that their forecasts for regional cities actually say that with the exception of Bratislava and Košice, which will grow slightly, other regional cities will decline. This estimate is supported by the outlook for the whole of Slovakia for 2080, by which time the population should decrease from its current level of 5.4 million to just over 5 million inhabitants – or as low as 4 million, according to the most pessimistic scenario. These scenarios were supported by the latest data of the Slovak Statistics Office. Based on them, Slovakia’s population shrank for the third consecutive year last year, this time by more than 4,000 to 5.425 million.

Old-age care homes instead of kindergartens

A bigger change than the number of citizens will be the age structure of the population. The prediction is that in 2025, i.e. in 26 years’ time, the largest single group in the capital will comprise people in their sixties; today it is those in their forties.

The age of the average Bratislava citizen will increase, in all scenarios, to 2050.

“According to the most probable scenario, the average age of Bratislava’s population will increase to 46 years by 2050, which represents an increase of 3.4 years compared to the current value,” the study reads.

Just as the population ages and those in their sixties become the largest group, the number of people in older age categories will rise too. For example, the number of citizens aged 85 and above will increase, based on the most probable scenario, from the current level of more than 8,000 to some 24,000.

“The number of seniors above 85 years will increase steeply,” said Bleha, adding that the city and its boroughs will have to respond to this change. “If I exaggerate this a bit, the playgrounds will have to be replaced by other services.”

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