The UPLIFT project, which is coordinated by Metropolitan Research Institute in the framework of EU Horizon programme, has reached a milestone by completing 13 reports on different urban areas of Europe. The goal of the reports was to understand the educational, housing, employment and social possibilities of vulnerable young people (aged 15-29) in these locations, taking into account the nature of the local economical dynamics and the national and local welfare systems.
Metropolitan Research Institute in cooperation with local experts have written three of these ‘urban reports’ on Łódź (Poland), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Pécs (Hungary).
We found that even though the cities share a common historical, political and economic heritage, there are substantial differences in their social inequality outcomes and policy performances both in employment, housing, and education. While Hungary and Slovakia seemed to suffer from the consequences of the financial crisis, Poland was less affected. The recovery period seemed to be successful in all three locations also with regard to the currently ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
There is a rather conspicuous difference between Pécs, Łódź and Bratislava. While Bratislava (being a capital) city and also the region itself is among the most economically developed regions in Europe, that provides a wide variety of jobs for both low and highly skilled employees, Łódź and Pécs sharing a post-industrial heritage; both are suffering from the difficulties of importing foreign investments to boost the local economy and improve the variety of jobs. This difference also reflected in demographic trends: while there is a substantial influx of mainly high skilled employees from other regions to Bratislava, Łódź and Pécs experiences outmigration of high-skilled workers. In Łódź, influx of low-educated immigrants, mainly from Ukraine, even before the war period, also significantly shapes the economic situation of the city. Despite the differences, the unemployment rate is low in all three locations, even among young people, but the rate of people, who are active in the labour market is different: many are inactive and not even seeking for a job in Łódź and Pécs functional urban areas.
Inhabitants face very different housing difficulties in the three locations. Poland and also Łódź faces a lack of housing supply which manifests into worse overcrowding numbers while in Bratislava due to the prosperous economic position and henceforth the already mentioned influx of people from other regions of Slovakia keeps the local housing market under a huge pressure which is reflected in increasing housing prices and rents. The affordability of both buying and renting a flat in Pécs blending into the national and European tendencies of the housing crisis. Due to path-dependency, home ownership is still the most common and most desired tenure type in all three countries and cities, while despite the different timing and dynamics of the privatization of public stock, the availability of social housing is quite different in the three locations. While in Bratislava the social stock is resudialized (around 1%), it reaches 5,5% in Pécs and nearly 12% in Łódź. The common feature however is the run-down physical state of municipal buildings that result in high rate of unusable flats.
The Polish education system seems to be the most efficient among the three examined countries and cities. In Bratislava and Pécs (in Slovakia and Hungary), the outcomes are among the worst in Europe with regard to compensating the inherited social difficulties of pupils. All three educational system seems to be highly centralized although they seem to differ in regard of freedom of local authorities and schools. While in Łódź and Bratislava the local system seems to have more delegated competences set by law, in Pécs local authorities are completely left out from education. Another similarity that vocational education has been reported as a school type that has a negative perception among especially highly educated parents and seemingly reforms have already tried to tackle with this e.g., with the implementation of the dual education and scholarship programmes.
Concluding the comparison, it can be seen, that there are many consequences of local and national economic and social welfare conditions to the life chances of young people, which we will further examine in case of Pécs, in the next research phase, to understand not only the policy setup but also the perception and the perspective of vulnerable young people through 40 individual interviews.
Please find the all the urban reports in the UPLIF website: https://uplift-youth.eu/insights-reporting/official-deliverables