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The opening ceremony of the third class of the Urban Governance Academy, launched in 2023, took place on October 4, 2025, in the ceremonial hall of Budapest Municipality. As part of the event, the graduation ceremony for the second-year students was also held, attended by Mayor Gergely Karácsony and Iván Tosics, the professional director of the UGA. The photo shows the newly starting third class.

One of the biggest public events of the EU is the EWRC, which is organized every year in October in Brussels, usually attracting 5-6000 people from all over the EU countries, regions and cities. 

This year one of the sections of EWRC was titled “Unlocking the Power of EU Funds for Cities”. As opening of the session Kata Tüttő, President of the Committee of the Regions was talking, emphasizing the importance of the Cohesion Policy, which is now threatened by the simplification ideas of the Commission. The keynote presentation of the event was given by Iván Tosics about the results of the ESPON URDICO project, which is led by Metropolitan Research Institute, in cortium with Politecnico Torino and University of Valencia. The keynote was followed by contributions of Mathias De Clercq, President of EUROCITIES and Mayor of Ghent, Rafał Trzaskowski, Mayor of Warsaw (on video) and Hugo Sobral, Deputy Director-General of DG REGIO.

During the ENHR conference Iván Tosics was the moderator of PLENARY 2 on Urban climate change and increasing housing vulnerability, the speakers of which were Jennifer Duyne-Barenstein – Wohnforum, ETH and Gerald Mills – University College Dublin.

At the ENHR conference Iván was co-leading the Workshop Sessions of the Governing metropolis – land and housing Working Group. 

Finally, Iván was the organizer of the usual ENHR Slide Show Competiton, which attracted 19 teams: at least 90 people followed the event, which is an all time record in the 35 years history of slide competitions (by the way, the first Slide Competition was organized in 1990 in Paris).

May green policies lead to housing inequalities? This major question is investigated by the Horizon Europe ReHousIn project through the examples of 27 European cities among them large metropoles, but also middle sized and rural towns. After its first year the ReHousIn project is organizing its first Policy Labs in nine countries, among them in Budapest. The event, that took place on the 1st of April gathered Hungarian actors working on housing and green policies (energy efficient retrofitting, nature-based solutions and densification of urban areas). Through the presentations of the researchers at Metropolitan Research Institute the negative externalities of green investments, strongly experienced in Western European cities like green gentrification and renoviction, were showcased. The workshop in Hungary called the attention to several specificities of the Central European Region. The participants expressed their major concern that the weakness of green policies in Hungary seem to be more harmful to the socially excluded inhabitants than the possible negative effect of their implementation. It was also highly emphasized that due to the super ownership structure of the Hungarian housing stock social movements are much less quick and responsive than in European cities with high rate of rental units, which slows down gentrification and renoviction. On the other hand, Hungarian municipalities lack the tools to influence strongly the potential negative housing impacts of green investments, as they own less than 2.5% of the housing stock, and due to general centralization trends, they also have less and less financial resources and are crowded out from many fields of public policies.