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MRI is the leader of a consortium (with Politecnico Torino and University of Valencia) implementing the ESPON URDICO project. This one year project aims to analyse and compare the implementation of the Urban Dimension of Cohesion Policy in a diverse group of cities and urban areas. Data and qualitative analyses will explore (for the periods 2014-2020 and 2021 onwards) the different approaches to sustainable urban development in the cities/urban areas of Budapest, Florence, Ghent, Prague, Rotterdam, Strasbourg, Valencia, and Warsaw. Local experts and Eurocities are part of the working team, which is supported also by other organizations, like France Urbaine, Deutscher Städtetag, the Italian ANCI, the Dutch VNG, EUI and JRC, which act as observers. The Kick Off meeting was held in Budapest on 28 January.

For more information: https://www.espon.eu/projects/urdico-urban-dimension-cohesion-policy-and-other-eu-programmes

On the 17 of March Metropolitan Research Institute organised workshop dealing with the planning dilemmas of the Social Climate Plan in Hungary in the framework of the ComActivate project. The representative of the Ministry of Energy presented on the framework conditions and the current state of planning. The plenary was followed by three parallel thematic sessions.

The goal of the Social Climate Plan is to mitigate the price impact of the Emission Trading System (2) on buildings and transportation. One year before the introduction of ETS2 (1 of January 2026 according to plans) the member states should implement measures that decrease energy poverty in the building sector but primarily not by income support (however, it is also allowed), but by structural interventions into the renovation of the building stock.

The European Commission has developed methodological guidance on the creation of the national Social Climate Plans, but these guidelines could not properly take into account the differences between the member states. The Hungarian housing stock is much more owner occupied and socially more mixed also spatially and within the same buildings than the ones in Western Europe. Under these circumstances, it is much more difficult to support exclusively the energy poor.

The participants at the workshop aimed to find solutions on how to identify the energy poor in the privately owned family house, multi-family buildings and municipally owned housing segments, and besides that how it can be ensured that the non-energy poor leverage their funds as well.

We have reached the first milestone in the SOLACE CEE project! Over the past few months, several important events have taken place: in October 2024, we held the kickoff meeting in Košice, and then in December, the innovation team met in Budapest. Our working group has completed several important tasks in the past few months:

• We prepared the Monitoring and Evaluation Plan, which included developing surveys and interviews for the involved clients and professionals.

• We organized separate online meetings for project partners to ensure that the data collection elements matched the individual needs of the organizations.

• Due to the different target groups, we needed to create specialized surveys: separate questionnaires were developed for individuals and households.

• Our team actively participates in the work of the Innovation and Communication teams as well.

Details can be found at the link below: https://mri.hu/en/solace-cee/

Critical presentation on integrated urban development practices at the Croatian Urban Forum in Zagreb The first Urban Forum meeting of Croatian cities took place in Zagreb on 1-2 October. The theme of the meeting was Productive, Green and Just Urban Development. The introductory keynote presentation was given by Iván Tosics, who illustrated with international examples how conflicting the objectives of the conference are. Concrete examples were given of how urban development, disguised under the label of “integrated urban development”, is mostly dominated by one-sided, growth-oriented ideas that run counter to the increasingly pressing requirements of sustainability and resilience.

The presentation is available here:
https://mri.hu/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/Urban-Forum-Croatia-Ivan-Tosics-241001-Iván-Tosics.pdf

 

MRI has completed a comparative study, financed by the European Climate Fund, on the renovation subsidy schemes for residential buildings in Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary and Romania. All four countries have subsidy schemes for this purpose for decades, but they are still fundamentally different. The Bulgarian and Romanian scheme focuses on multi-apartment buildings, assuming that the residential communities are lacking both the financial capacities and the technical and organisational skills to implement the renovation, thus the subsidy schemes supports relatively limited number of communities, but these communities receive subsidies up to 100% besides strong technical assistance. The Greek system focuses on flats and the state provides financial subsidies for the renovation, the scale of which depends on the income of the families. Hungary was a pioneer of panel rehabilitation in the 2000s, the dynamics of which was broken due to the financial crisis and the focus of renovation was transferred to family houses. Currently the Home Renovation Programme for family houses struggles to find a balance between securing the proper quality of renovations and still requiring easy to follow administrative processes. The comparative study itself can be found here:

https://mri.hu/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/01/ECF-subsidy-systems-in-Eastern-Europe-for-workshop-%C3%89va-Ger%C5%91h%C3%A1zi.pdf