Metropolitan Research Institute
Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest
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).
Vera Horváth, the fomer staff member of MRI obtained her doctoral degree on 2 October 2025, with the support of her thesis consultant József Hegedüs. Horváth carried out research on the housing and social strategies of middle-class households living in peri-urban, non-residential areas. While technically middle-class, due to the lack fo significant family help these families are unable to afford urban housing. The thesis was inspired by a past research of MRI, also led by Hegedüs.
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.
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.
Metropolitan Inclusivity in Climate and Digital Transitions (MICAD) is a Horizon Europe project focusing on inclusive metropolitan planning in climate and digital transitions. The project will highlight key elements of multilevel governance policies focusing on digital and climate transitions, understood as a comprehensive and collaborative approach to urban development that actively involves a diverse range of stakeholders: residents, communities, businesses, and governmental bodies. The goal is to ensure that the planning process considers and incorporates the needs, perspectives, and priorities of all members of the metropolitan community, especially those who may traditionally be marginalized or underrepresented.
The project includes five European cities/metropolitan authorities: the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB) in Spain, the Metropolitan City of Milan in Italy, the City of Tirana in Albania, the City of Chisinau in Moldova and the Górnośląsko-Zagłębiowska Metropolia (GZM) in Poland.
These cases will be analysed by the knowledge providers partners Metropolis (FR, lead partner), MRI (HU), UTA (FR), ENoLL (BE), HES-SO (CH), ALDA (FR), Kentyou (FR) an Institut Metropoli (ES).
MRI is the leader of Work Package 2 of the project, with the main tasks of analysing metropolitan governance, strategic metropolitan planning and inclusive approaches in order to develop an inclusive metropolitan planning framework. Furthermore, MRI will lead the work to develop a toolkit prototype for inclusive metropolitan planning in digital and climate transitions. The Kick-Off meeting of 3 years long MICAD project has been held in Chisinau, Moldavia on 12-14 March 2025.
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: