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

Blaha Lujza tér, one of Budapest's central public squares, has undergone repeated transformations, from socialist modernisation to its renewal in 2022. This paper explores urban loss not as disappearance, but as a process that reorganises material space, social rhythms, and everyday relations. Using archival photographs, contemporary fieldwork, oral histories, and analysis of online sentiment, the study traces how the square's dense and improvised sociability has thinned into more fleeting forms of public life. The redesign introduced open paving, reduced shade, and automated infrastructures, producing what urban scholars describe as aesthetic and moral ordering. These material configurations intersect with platform-based mobility, as delivery riders and transient users increasingly shape the square's social life. Sociability persists, but as fleeting encounters, regulated by circulation rather than lingering. This paper argues that loss in Blaha is processual and relational and felt through changes in how people wait, gather, and recognise one another. Rather than a nostalgic account, the study shows how publicness is being redefined through design, visibility, and algorithmic governance, revealing the everyday textures of loss in a contemporary post-socialist city.