Metropolitan Research Institute

Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest

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Measuring Homelessness in Europe – Webinar series with participation of Nóra Teller

Webinar Series on Measuring Homelessness in Europe, a public event series organised by COST action CA15218, covering 24 COST member states has just been announced. The webinars summarise the scientific achievements of a 4-year international cooperation about methods, challenges, and results relating to measuring homelessness.

  • 1st webinar (February 25, 2021) National and Local Counts
  • 2nd webinar (March 4, 2021) Dynamics and Time
  • 3rd webinar (March 11 2021) Ethical Issues

For any queries, please visit the website of the webinar or contact Nóra Teller at teller@mri.hu

UPLIFT Project- Two New Deliverables are Available

At the end of December, the UPLIFT team (the project of which is coordinated by MRI) has submitted two essential deliverables on socio-economic inequalities in Europe. The main aim of the deliverables was to create a theoretical framework for analysing urban inequalities with the main focus of the younger generation (aged 15-29).

The Atlas of Inequalities (Deliverable 1.3) summarizes the main social inequality tendencies in Europe, with a special focus on the urban young adults. The analysis was carried out for the years 2007/2008; 2012 and 2018, which provide us information about inequalities just before and shortly after the economic crisis and then the latest data enables us to see how countries recovered from the crisis with regard to socio-economic inequalities. For the analysis the EU Study on income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS) were used. Besides analysing the indicators on the national level, the analysis was carried out on NUTS1 or NUTS2 regions, where data was available.

The Framework Study on Inequalities (Deliverable 1.4) identifies and shortly describes the drivers of inequalities in the context they occur: different governance levels, in different domains (housing, employment, education). In addition an urban typology was created based on the potential linkage of social cohesion (measured by a complex equity index and a labour market exclusion index) and economic competitiveness (measured by innovation index, productivity, globalization and population change). The Metropolitan Areas database was used for this analysis, providing comparable data for the years of 2017/2018 in 110 metropolitan areas.

Please find the studies here:

D1.3 Atlas of Inequalities in Europe

D1.4 Framework Study on Inequalities

‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’ – urban lessons learnt from the pandemic (photo essay from Iván Tosics)

In his traditional New Years’ photo-essay Iván Tosics writes about urban reactions on the pandemic. How did cities act with emergency measures in the spring and what could they preserve from their progressive interventions by late summer, when life seemed to go back to ’normal’?

’Never let a good crisis go to waste’ – this famous sentence is thought to be said by Winston Churchill. If we accept that a crisis is a good opportunity to make changes, cities should address those aspects of urban life which were drastically wrong and contributed to the crisis. How are cities doing that and what are the conditions for long lasting results – this is what Iván writes about, illustrating the story with many photos.

The photo-essay is available here.

ComAct “Communities’ Taylored Actions for Energy Poverty Mitigation” programme has launched with the participation of MRI

In September 2020, our new H2020 project called ComAct – Communities’ Taylored Actions for Energy Poverty Mitigation took off. In the next three years, we will be working together with our partners from Bulgaria, North-Macedonia, Lithuania, and Ukraine on a new financial and technological renovation scheme for multi-apartment buildings focusing specifically on energy poverty in Central-Eastern Europe (CEE). Due to the very high homeownership rates in the region, the traditional schemes shaped by Western-European experiences, where energy poor people typically rent their homes, are hardly applicable here. Thus a new approach is needed, as there are a lot of people in CEE who live in their own apartments but still need assistance to renovate their homes. A comprehensive and effective program needs to cover the financial, technical, and communal aspects of renovation of multi-apartment buildings, therefore, ComAct combines all the three factors.

While the financial and technical factors are frequently discussed and studied, less work analyzed the communal aspects of the renovation of multi-apartment buildings. Thus we aim to unfold the obstacles of renovation stemming from the dynamics of the community, and we try to find ways to overcome these obstacles. These can include the mixed social composition of condominiums, differences in financial situation and interests, but also previous conflicts within the community. ComAct builds upon the idea, that with community building and good management of the community it is possible to include many of those condominiums in mainstream renovation programs that have been left out from these previously.

Within the framework of the pilot programs of ComAct, multi-apartment buildings will be renovated in all of the five partner countries. MRI works on the deep renovation of buildings in the third district of Budapest in cooperation with the municipality of Óbuda and local NGOs. We aim to find the complex technical-financial-communal solution, which makes deep renovation available for low-income households too. We want to change the widespread approach, according to which deep renovation is a luxury and can be available only for high-income groups. We believe that these overarching interventions have to be and can be made accessible also for communities affected or threatened by energy poverty.

The website of ComAct will be out soon, till then, check REELIH, our previous project related to energy poverty in the region at https://www.habitat.org/emea/stories/rely-reelih.

Source of photos: Municipality of Óbuda

‘Cities against the pandemic’ by Iván Tosics

In the COVID 19 crisis cities are key stakeholders fighting for environmental and social sustainability. Their contribution to tackling the present crisis could serve as a blueprint for future social policies that take into consideration social justice and the green economy. In many countries, cities are the last bastion of progressive social policies. It is therefore essential that we learn from the mistakes of the past and avoid a renewed wave of austerity against municipal budgets. In this paper, concrete examples are given of the vital role local governments play in the fight against the pandemic.

The article is available here.