What the Lake Remembers
Lake Balaton, the largest lake in Central Europe, stands on the edge of a critical tipping point. Its landscape, once shaped by natural hydrological rhythms and semi-wild ecological processes, has been progressively stabilized—contained by hard infrastructure, fragmented regulation, and intensifying development. Today, more than 50 percent of its shore has been transformed into artificial structures, reinforcing a static boundary between land and water. This physical redefinition has disrupted sediment flows, erased transitional habitats, and restricted public access—displacing both human and nonhuman inhabitants and activities.
Yet the lake has not ceased to function. Its ecosystems persist, but their adaptive capacity has weakened. This is the threshold that demands attention: a landscape not of visible ruin, but of compromised resilience. The most urgent question is not how to restore it, but how to intervene before collapse, while acknowledging its already contested and constructed nature. Ongoing scientific monitoring reveals shifts in nutrient cycles, algal bloom patterns, and hydrological responsiveness—evidence that challenges the sustainability of prevailing spatial and cultural approaches.
Conventional environmental restoration paradigms often seek to “return” ecosystems to a previous state. But Balaton’s layered history—agrarian traditions, socialist-era mass tourism, speculative development, and accelerating climate change—offers no stable reference point. In this context, restoration becomes less about recovery and more about reorientation: of spatial use, material flows, and cultural relations. Within ecological urbanism, landscape architecture, and territorial design, renovation is increasingly framed as a way to inhabit transformation; a method of adapting to environmental stress, socio-ecological fragmentation, and shifting imaginaries. It is not a return to stability, but a commitment to change: a spatial discourse grounded in care, negotiation, and long-term ecological attention.
Edges Under Pressure
Lake Balaton’s shore zone is no longer a place of fluid ecological exchange—it has been narrowed, hardened, and enclosed. What once functioned as a dynamic ecotone, shaped by seasonal fluctuations and overlapping uses, is now increasingly treated as a static threshold: engineered, segmented, and territorialized. Today, approximately half of Lake Balaton’s 236-kilometer-long shoreline has been transformed into artificial structures, primarily riprap embankments.1 These interventions, initiated between 1930 and 1965, were framed as necessary responses to shoreline erosion by waves and ice, flood risks, and tourism development.2 But they triggered a process of ongoing reconstruction. Reinforced embankments erased a mosaic of littoral habitats, disrupting nutrient buffering, spawning grounds, and sediment flow—key processes that once sustained the lake’s resilience. At the same time, they enabled the spread of invasive species that depend on hard surfaces, such as mussels, which were previously limited by the lake’s soft sediment.3 Over time, regulatory management gradually increased the lake’s water levels, and embankments, which, though initially built to accommodate a lower level, are now being re-evaluated. Turning that edge into a line undermines the shore’s ambiguity between land and water, and with it, its ecological function.
Access to the lake has also become increasingly limited. The intensification of private development has not only narrowed the physical shore zone, but redefined it as a landscape of exclusion.4 Public, freely accessible beaches are declining, while gated resorts and second homes fragment what was once shared space. Local residents, lower-income visitors, and nonhuman species alike have been displaced. The result is not just ecological fragmentation, but spatial injustice, where rights to the lake are unevenly distributed. This redefinition of the shore zone is codified at the regulatory level. Hungary’s “Balaton Law” (2000 CXII) continues to define the lake’s edge as a fixed “shoreline” used in land use and planning, rather than acknowledging its fluctuating, ecotonal character. This legal framing legitimizes spatial stabilization and enforces a binary distinction between land and water where an ecological gradient once existed.
Visual politics deepen the issue. Public perception tends to equate high water levels with lake health—a full, thriving surface—while lower levels are seen as signs of failure.5 This misperception has shaped infrastructure and policy. Reinforced structures are designed to maintain artificially high levels, which in turn require further hardening, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Ecological fluctuation becomes visually undesirable, while technical control is conflated with care. Yet long-term ecological resilience depends precisely on fluctuation.6 Periods of lower water allow habitat regeneration, restore floodable zones, and support reed expansion. Consistently elevated levels, by contrast, weaken biological cycles, collapse ecological buffers, and compromise open water quality. The combination of climate change and mismanagement has already led to unprecedented ecological disruptions in Balaton.7
Although spatial planning is governed by dedicated laws, environmental responsibilities remain fragmented. This fragmentation is especially evident in the case of water quality, where no single authority or coordinating body holds clear accountability.8 Monitoring systems exist, but enforcement remains weak and uneven scientific findings routinely fail to translate into coordinated action. During the record-setting 2019 algal bloom, which peaked in August during the height of the tourism season, no operational response was enacted despite clear recommendations from scientific institutions to restrict lake use in affected western zones—even after legal water quality thresholds were breached.9 This failure underscores the disconnect between ecological knowledge, public health risk, and institutional capacity.
Furthermore, the language of climate adaptation has been increasingly used to justify the stabilization of high water levels. Water retention is promoted as a resilience measure, intended to safeguard reserves during periods of drought or reduced inflow. Yet this framing centers water quantity while sidelining the ecological role of seasonal fluctuation. Crucially, the protection of fluctuation-based processes—such as temporary drawdowns that allow reedbeds and wetlands to regenerate—is not codified in any regulatory framework.10 This legal void allows climate adaptation to be instrumentalized as a rationale for infrastructural and visual stability, rather than ecological resilience. The management of the Sió weir reflects this contradiction. While formally regulated by flood control and water-use considerations, its operation is shaped by pressure to maintain elevated surface levels that visually signal abundance. This approach disregards ecological evidence showing that seasonal fluctuations are essential for reedbed regeneration, wetland resilience, and overall biodiversity.11
These ecological and institutional breakdowns are not abstract; they manifest spatially. As regulatory gaps and tourism-driven priorities reshape shoreline management, the lake shifts from being a shared, ecologically active space to a curated backdrop for private leisure. This reterritorialization affects more than humans: reed-nesting birds, amphibians, grazing animals, and aquatic species all face shrinking zones of interaction. Habitat corridors are broken, wetland functions erased. The right to inhabit, touch, and move through the shore zone is unequally distributed across species lines—and always contested. The misalignment between ecological thresholds and economic optics reshapes who and what can meaningfully engage with the lake’s perimeter.
Translating Ecologies
To reframe the future of Balaton, the shore zone must be understood not as a line to be held, but as a living interface: a space requiring negotiation, iteration, and care. It is here, at this pressured edge, that renovation as adaptive practice begins to take form not through grand gestures, but through a careful reconsideration of thresholds, rights, and the conditions for cohabitation.
The cultural and artistic practice of szabadonbalaton and the broader BALATORIUM initiative, curated by PAD Foundation, brings together a diverse group of scientists from established scientific institutions, including ecologists and other specialists, alongside urbanists, cultural practitioners, artists, local actors, and community stakeholders.12 The ecological topics it addresses—ranging from nutrient overload and reedbed loss to access, exclusion, and hydrological changes—are not chosen for symbolic resonance or aesthetic potential, but emerge from sustained investigation and collaboration. The work engages with systemic interconnections and their relative impact on the lake’s functioning, seeking an integrated understanding shaped by environmental sciences and attuned to the cultural and spatial realities of the site. Themes, formats, and publics are not pre-decided, but negotiated. Over the last six years, projects have unfolded across fieldwork, mapping, speculative design, participatory performances, artistic interventions, and educational programs. What links them is a shared transdisciplinary method—one rooted in direct connection to the lake’s ecological research and cultural landscape. All participating scientists contribute expertise specifically tied to Lake Balaton, and the artists and practitioners involved have developed work grounded in these environmental questions.
The szabadonbalaton bar (2019–ongoing) is a pop-up space that appeared on beaches, festivals, and public spaces around Balaton, carrying with it a mobile ecology of interaction.13 Styled as a bar, it offers drinks and food that embodied elements of the lake’s changing ecosystems, like cocktails layered to evoke sediment stratification, foraged snacks referencing vanishing shore flora, and nutrient-dense bites drawing attention to phosphorus loading and algal blooms.
Conceived and performed collaboratively by artists and ecologists, the bar transforms scientific data into sensory experience. The menu serves as a medium for exchange, translating ecological processes into layered flavors, textures, and conversations. Visitors, locals, tourists, and policymakers mingle and linger. Stories surface, memories are contested, and knowledge circulates across disciplines and lived histories. This informal ecology of encounter makes complex issues legible without simplification, inviting participants to physically and emotionally inhabit the entanglements of climate, land use, infrastructure, and identity. The bar offered not spectacle, but intimacy: a temporary rupture in the habitual rhythms of lakeside consumption, where food and drink became tools for collective sense-making.
Where the bar localized attention in a social frame, SLOWWALK (2022–ongoing) dispersed it into the landscape.14 Across twelve distinct walks, participants were invited to traverse the Balaton Uplands and shore zone deliberately, slowly, and often silently. Some walks concentrated on the lake’s edge, while others extended into vineyards, wooded pastures, abandoned fields, and transitional habitats shaped by historical land use. Each was guided by a specific ecological theme or mode of engagement.
One walk, “Beach Pastures,” reintroduced livestock—specifically horses—to historically grazed shores in defiance of current regulations, thus reviving a traditional land-use practice of grazing and bathing animals while foregrounding contemporary restrictions. Another walk, “New Liquidity: Tides in the Body,” invited participants to tune into the physiological rhythms of breath and water using guided sound and movement to dissolve the boundary between the sensing body and the aquatic environment. A third walk, “SLOWERALL: Pasture Imprinting,” used specially designed garments to tune into plant-animal entanglements and the quiet work of pollination and dispersal. Wearing overalls and smocks made from loose-weave and textured organic textiles and raw wool—each uniquely designed but serving the shared purpose of collecting dust, seeds, and pollen—participants became moving substrates, mirroring the dispersal role of grazing animals. Set within a restored wooded pasture—an ecotonal habitat shaped by historical grazing and cultural land use—the walk traced seasonal transitions and invisible exchanges across plant and animal life, foregrounding the pasture as a site of successful multispecies collaboration among humans, animals, and plants. After the walk, the garments were planted to observe germination and assess biodiversity, transforming the collected landscape into a living archive.
Organizing such walks required navigating legal, ecological, and cultural constraints—where permissions, pacing, and format became part of the critical method. Walking, here, becomes a form of research and critique—a way of experiencing where ecological patterns are constrained, redirected, or ignored by bureaucratic systems and policies.
szabadonbalaton and GUBAHÁMORI, BALATORIUM Beach Library, 2023. Photo: Balazs Turos / PAD / BALATORIUM.
Each initiative is designed to engage different users of the lake and its watershed—recreational visitors, seasonal residents, local stakeholders, and institutional actors—through the ways they interact with the landscape, such as sailing, swimming, gardening, fishing, or cycling. Programs are situated in the spaces and rhythms these practices inhabit, meeting users where ecological concerns overlap with everyday use. The BALATORIUM Beach Library (2023–ongoing), for instance—a mobile archive combining scientific and artistic publications—invited swimmers and sunbathers into informal encounters with the lake’s ecological realities.]15 As part of a broader constellation of public events—floating discussions, workshops, and installations—it engaged diverse user groups through their spatial and seasonal rhythms.
Other interventions addressed ecological and infrastructural tensions through situated public actions. The Balaton-Friendly Garden initiative (2023) offered residents practical tools to reduce runoff, boost biodiversity, and restore soil vitality—responding to the quiet abandonment of vineyards and gardens as seasonal homeowners disengage from cultivation.16 These subtle land-use changes have had disproportionate effects: surface sealing, erosion, and the fading of care-based practices that once linked people to place.
The Reed Route (2022), created for the Giro d’Italia cycling competition, marked ecologically sensitive zones fragmented by roads and development—turning a major sporting event into a site-specific alert on wetland vulnerability.17 In contrast, the reed-cloaked Hannibal sailing boat (2019) at the Blue Ribbon regatta challenged dominant lake imagery, drawing attention to the ecological consequences of maintaining artificially high water levels. While addressing different issues, both actions used the visibility of large-scale sports events to foreground environmental concerns often overlooked in these settings.
Among others, these initiatives have together laid the groundwork for Lake in Transition (2023–ongoing), which explores how soft, reversible infrastructures—reed-compatible banks, mobile rest points, seasonal paths—might unbuild hardened shoreline geometries and reimagine the lake edge as a fluctuating, adaptive zone of care.18
Cohabiting the Shore Zone
Scientific reports alone cannot translate the layered pressures acting on Balaton’s shore zone. Nor can abstract cultural commentary. But together, through shared spaces of encounter, exchange, and negotiation, the multiple truths of the lake—hydrological, political, cultural, emotional, ecological—begin to resonate. Renovation, in this context, is not about prescribing solutions, but cultivating site-specific vocabularies that shift perception and practice. Art, here, does not illustrate the ecological crisis, but renders its affects, its contradictions, its latent potentials.
Through acts of translation, of sense-making, the shore zone reemerges not as an engineered boundary, but as a multispecies interface where knowledge is exchanged, futures rehearsed, and new relationships to place are made possible. These forms of situated renovation rely not only on design thinking and shifts in cultural perception, but on time, care, and collective labor. Their slowness and iterative nature resist project-based logics, unfolding instead through seasonal rhythms and long-term presence. They do not replace scientific research: they amplify its resonance, while exposing its limits.
Nature-based and adaptive strategies like rewilded embankments, modular edge elements, and permeable zones designed to accommodate seasonal expansion and contraction reframe the shore zone not as a fixed boundary, but as a responsive interface, a living membrane for ecological and social exchange. This does not imply a rejection of technology; in some cases, advanced materials or engineered systems may offer more sustainable or adaptable solutions. Yet these solutions are often too costly or demanding to maintain—especially when responsibility for upkeep is unclear, and ecological benefits only emerge over longer timescales.
Ecological recovery at Lake Balaton is also inseparable from reclaiming the right to access, inhabit, and engage with the shore. Flexible platforms, adaptive shoreline structures, and temporary commons are not just aesthetic tools; they are claims to shared presence in a lake increasingly mediated by private interests. In this context, design becomes a negotiation not between pristine nature and total development, but between competing needs, temporalities, and imaginaries.
The map of the shore remains unfinished not out of neglect, but by necessity. To live with a changing lake is to acknowledge that the boundaries are always shifting—and the task is not to fix them in place, but to make space for their movement. A sustainable lake cannot emerge from singular visions or sectoral interests. It demands a space where ecological, recreational, economic, and cultural needs can be placed in dialogue; not resolved, but held. Renovation, in this context, is not about consensus: it is about structuring disagreement in generative ways. This means creating not just physical interventions, but institutional and discursive frameworks where conflicting desires can be acknowledged, negotiated, and translated.
Kata Karádi-Kovács et al., “Negligible native and significant alien colonization of artificial shoreline by macroinvertebrates in a large shallow lake (Lake Balaton, Hungary),” Hydrobiologia 850 (2023): 1837–1848, ➝.
Enikõ Katalin Magyari et al., “Large shallow lake response to anthropogenic stressors and climate change: Missing macroinvertebrate recovery after oligotrophication (Lake Balaton, East-Central Europe),” Science of the Total Environment 946 (2024), ➝.
Vera Istvánovics et al, “Chapter 9 - Changing biodiversity in Lake Balaton—A long-term, catchment-scale perspective,” Aquatic Biomes (2025): 125–44, ➝.
Balaton Algal Bloom Consortium, Action Plan: Climate and Nature Protection Action Plan – Investigation of the Causes of Algal Blooms in Lake Balaton (unpublished internal report, January 2022).
This point is developed further in the author’s forthcoming study on hydrological imaginaries of Lake Balaton.
Judit Padisák and C. S. Reynolds, “Selection of Phytoplankton Associations in Lake Balaton, Hungary, in Response to Eutrophication and Restoration Measures,” Hydrobiologia 384 (1998): 41–53; Viktor R. Tóth, “Reed Stands During Different Water Level Periods: Physico-Chemical Properties of the Sediment and Growth of Phragmites australis of Lake Balaton,” Hydrobiologia 778 (2016): 191–205.
Vera Istvánovics et al., “Record-setting algal bloom in polymictic Lake Balaton (Hungary): A synergistic impact of climate change and (mis)management,” Freshwater Biology 69, no. 1 (2022): 1–12, ➝.
Balaton Algal Bloom Consortium, Action Plan.
Istvánovics et al., “Record-setting algal bloom.”
Ministry of Construction and Transport, Balaton Shoreline Plan {Építési és Közlekedési Minisztérium, Balaton Vízparti Terv} (Budapest: e-epites.hu, 2025), ➝. Although this is the most comprehensive shoreline regulation currently in place, it does not codify ecological fluctuation or require seasonal drawdowns as part of adaptive management. This omission had already been identified more than a decade earlier in UNDP and GEF, Lake Balaton Vulnerability Assessment, Early Warning, and Adaptation Strategies (EarthEval, 2010), ➝.
Balaton Algal Bloom Consortium, Action Plan.
szabadonbalaton is a research-based ecological-cultural initiative hosted by PAD Foundation, combining scientific insight and artistic practice to raise public awareness and support decision-making related to the long-term ecological, social, and economic sustainability of Lake Balaton, ➝. BALATORIUM is an ecological and artistic program developed by PAD Foundation, involving numerous research and art institutions and experts, supported by Veszprém–Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture. It promotes dialogue between science, art, and the public to support ecological awareness and action around Lake Balaton, Hungary ➝. PAD Foundation is a Budapest-based platform advancing environmental justice in Central and Eastern Europe through research, policy analysis, advocacy, education, and socially engaged art, ➝.
“Szabadonbalaton Concept Bar,” Szabadonbalaton, ➝.
“SLOWWALK” Szabadonbalaton, ➝.
“BALATORIUM LIBRARY,” PAD Foundation, ➝.
“Balaton-friendly Gaden,” PAD Foundation, ➝.
“GIRO X BALATORIUM X szabadonbalaton,” posted October 11, 2022, by _PAD, ➝.
