Metropolitan Research Institute

Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest

Urban Development Projects

TExTOUR (2021-2024) Social Innovation and TEchnologies for sustainable growth through participative cultural TOURism.

Cultural tourism is about managing cultural heritage and tourism in an integrated way. It’s about working with local communities to create benefits for everyone involved. This helps preserve tangible and intangible cultural heritage while developing tourism. TExTOUR is an EU-funded project which co-designs pioneering and sustainable cultural tourism strategies and policies. The ultimate goal is to improve deprived areas in Europe and beyond. To do this, it sets up Cultural Tourism Labs at eight pilots located within the EU and outside it. Various societal players and stakeholders in the Cultural Tourism sector will be involved in the Cultural Tourism Labs. The selected pilots have diverse and complementary characteristics, which enables the project’s experts to develop a wide range of scenarios for inland and coastal areas, rural and urban, deprived remote or peripheral areas, facing multiple social, economic and environmental challenges. Are you a policy maker, practitioner or part of a local community? Via the TExTOUR open access platform, we will share with you our knowledge gained as the project unfolds so that you can benefit directly.

For more information visit the website or social media channels of the project:

Webiste: https://textour-project.eu/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/textour.project

ESPON MISTA – Metropolitan Industrial Spatial Strategies & Economic Sprawl (2019 – 2020)

ESPON MISTA – Metropolitan Industrial Spatial Strategies & Economic Sprawl

Duration: October 2019-December 2020

Contracting party: ESPON EGTC

MRI, in cooperation with Politecnico Milano, WIFO – Austrian Institute of Economic Research and Latitude carried out a series of studies on the metropolitan dimensions of urban manufacturing (ESPON MISTA).

The study was organised around the role of manufacturing in urban areas of Europe with special attention to the forseen challenges of the 4th industrial revolution and the specific sectors of manufacturing in different urban areas that ensure the satisfacton of local needs but keeps the competitive position of cities at the same time. In order to reach these goals the research concentrated on finding the proper coordination mechanisms on metropolitan scale in the framework of fragmented governance systems.

The study evaluated the general trends in the manufacturing sector (decreasing labour force but increasing added value) in and around urban centres and analyses the spatial dynamics of different segments of manufacturing moving out from urban cores. The study also aimed to identify the possibilities for cooperation through which a more optimal division of manufacturing capacities can be achieved on a metropolitan scale based on the cases of Berlin, Oslo, Riga, Stuttgart, Turin, Vienna and Warsaw.

The study concluded that to a certain extent the division of roles in manufacturing between the city cores and their agglomeration is natural: having high added value activities inside cores where land prices are high, while locating manufacturing activities with high land use and transportation needs outside cities. However, this natural phenomenon tends to be harmful in cases where it generates additional transportation flows of goods and people, emptying out the city cores of basic manufacturing activities which provided jobs and sustained services. Thus, stronger interventions by public actors are needed not only on the level of the city but rather across whole urban functional areas to influence locational decisions of individual companies.

Besides analysing the general trends in manufacturing and evaluating the local situation in seven metropolitan areas the project developed a detailed description of inspirational cases that are providing guidelines for a more efficient local manufacturing policy.

All the final outcome of the project can be found at https://www.espon.eu/mista

OpenHeritage (2018-2022)

OpenHeritage

Organizing, Promoting and Enabling Heritage Re-use through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment

Client: Európai Bizottság (DG Research and Innovation)

Duration: June 2018 – May 2022

Project website: https://openheritage.eu/

Social media: https://www.facebook.com/OpenHeritageEU/

The project, funded under DG Research and Innovation’s H2020 framework programme, creates a sustainable management model of heritage assets. We work with an open definition of heritage, and involve sites that are not listed or incorporated into the official heritage discourse. The OpenHeritage consoritum concentrates 16 partners, among which universities and research institutes, SMEs, and NGOs, and is led by Metropolitan Research Institute. The project coordinator is Hanna Szemző, managing director of Metropolitan Research Institute.

The consortium focuses on buildings, complexes, and spaces which lie outside traditional and centrally located heritage spaces, but have an important symbolic or practical significance for local and trans-local communities. Through community and stakeholder involvement, resource integration, and territorial embeddedness, OpenHeritage selects, surveys and analyses peripheral, often marginalised and neglected heritage sites spread over sixteen Observatory Cases and six Cooperative Heritage Labs in ten European countries.

For the high resolution project poster, please click on the image below:

Győr: How to compete with capital cities (2018-2019)

Client: European Investment Bank – City, transformed

Duration: June 2018 – February 2019

Located between three European capital cities, Győr has to work hard to attract investment and jobs. The Hungarian city has set itself up to attract innovative companies, creating new urban values such as education-based innovation, a high-quality urban environment and a lively cultural sphere. Here’s how a “secondary city” builds on its industrial past even as it breaks away from its dependence on it.

European Investment Bank (EIB) contracted MRI to elaborate a study on the development pathway of Győr in the last decades, and the role EIB played in it. The study pointed out that Győr is located in between three major cities (Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest), consequently it had limited potential to attract a mix of large companies and investors. Nonetheless, it had the potential to deploy smart specialisation – and it succeeded in doing so. Győr has been known for its highly qualified work force: before the regime change and economic restructuring, one of the largest state-owned companies (RÁBA machinery) was located here. After the transition, the decreased relevance of RÁBA was compensated by the newly settled Audi Hungaria plant, which has come to employ as much work force as RÁBA did in its heyday. In addition, this considerable manufacturing capacity attracted numerous smaller companies to join the value chain.

The operation of Audi Hungaria is one of the economic engines of the second-tier city. However, it also runs the risk of mono-functionality and high dependence on car industry trends. In order to diversify the local economic structure, a new cooperation is currently being established between the local university (Széchenyi István University), the municipality, and local economic actors. This already resulted in new developments, like the Higher Education and Industrial Cooperation Centre (FIEK in Hungarian).

Győr’s recent development has been strongly supported by European funds (similarly to all Hungarian cities), in which national co-financing was secured by EIB loans. The majority of these funds was absorbed by the private sector, although large scale public developments were also implemented, like the two-stage renovation of the inner city, and the social rehabilitation of Győr-Újváros. In addition, EIB provided loans to commercial banks for various purposes, among others for the renovation of privately owned residential buildings in ESCO schemes (the RaabSol project).

The study is available on EIB’s website in English, German, French, and Hungarian; and was also promoted on the EIB’s blog and social media.

Analysis of the governance of five metropolitan areas in Europe (2017)

Client: Metropolitan Authority of Barcelona

Duration: November 2017 – December 2017

The Metropolitan Authority of Barcelona contracted MRI to evaluate the operation of five metropolitan areas in Europe in order to gain practical suggestions on how to intensify the metropolitan cooperation around Barcelona. The metropolitan areas under analysis were Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Manchester, Stuttgart and Zürich. From these five metropolitan areas Stuttgart has the strongest governance structure with a directly elected parliament; Greater Manchester has weaker legitimacy but stronger metropolitan identity, more competences in service provision. The Zürich Metropolitan Area Association has common projects with limited influence so far, but it has an approved metropolitan spatial plan. A somewhat weaker cooperation characterizes Copenhagen, where a strong metropolitan spatial plan is created by the national government, but there is no institutional framework for further metropolitan cooperation in place. A similar level of cooperation operates in Amsterdam, where the institutional structure is evolving incrementally, but they lack the proper spatial framework, and the cooperation is mostly based on bi- and multi-lateral negotiations.

Barcelona Metropolitan Area is more developed than any of these metropolitan features still there are approaches and tools that may be interesting for them like having a directly elected president, building partnership with economic actors, acquiring more devolved competencies, improving the efficiency of spatial planning.

The study elaborated by MRI, Addressing the Metropolitan Challenge in Barcelona Metropolitan Area, was presented in a workshop on the 15 of June 2018 for the decision makers of the Metropolitan Council of Barcelona.