News

The research focused on identifying the so-called “conversion factors” that lead to path-dependent choices of young people who struggle from poor housing conditions, low level of education or precariat working conditions.

In the framework of the research, MRI conducted interviews in Pécs with policy implementers, experts, and programme facilitators and 40 vulnerable young people (20 of whom are currently 15-29 years old, while 20 were at this age at the time of the financial crisis).

In the analytical phase, first the local structural and policy context was described: what are the theoretical opportunities of young people, that are provided by the local education and housing system and the labour market. Then individual, family based and institutional factors were identified, that divert young people to live with the local opportunities and to live a life, which they value. The main findings of the research process were:

• With regard to housing, we concluded that social housing functions as a trap. Rather than providing a transitory solution, it is hard to enter and to leave. There is a big gap between the rent level of public housing and private rental, which few public tenants can afford, but even if they would have sufficient household income, they prefer staying in the sector, which is possible due to the non-transparent operation of the public housing stock.
• In education, we found that public schools and supporting institutions are practically not able to counteract the lack of family support (including the positive attitude towards educational achievements) and can only support those ones who are already supported by their family. Even if there are innovative and relatively flexible educational solutions (e.g. Tanodas, Gandhi secondary school, “small 500” school that implements the Dobbantó and Orientation programmes) these can be successfully applied in case young people have proper information on them and supportive families to cooperate with the institutions. Thus, counteracting difficulties in education e.g. failing, missing out, getting pregnant before graduation, is rather remaining a challenge.
• In employment, we analysed the reasons behind the high rate of inactivity of women having children and found that besides the low adaptation of the labour market to provide flexible solutions, paternalistic family structures (where men are wage earners no matter how low that wage is) also contribute to inactivity.
• In addition, we investigated the perceptions on discrimination of Roma people in the labour market and found that education level is the most decisive factor that is able to reduce discriminatory behaviour against Roma youngsters.

After identifying the main factors behind the individuals’ path-dependent life choices, MRI formulated recommendations to improve the implementation of policies even under the current rigid and unfavourable legal and financial framework. These suggestions are focusing on 1) creating cooperations and more efficient information flow among the actors to provide comprehensive services and transparency towards clients, 2) creating transitory solutions and 3) implementing early interventions to prevent accumulations of difficulties.

The case study is available here: https://uplift-youth.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Pecs-case-study-report.pdf

More on this research including the case of other seven European cities can be found at https://uplift-youth.eu/research-policy/

The article was originally published at Iván Tosics’s website: https://tosics.eu/en/hogyan-lehet-jobba-tenni-a-varosokat-az-emberek-szamara/

Are you a local politician, decision-maker, or a city practitioner? Or a citizen who is interested in making your city a better place for people and shift from car dependency to sustainable urban mobility? The Walk’n’Roll Cities initiative of the URBACT Knowledge Hub has just published a practical and concise guidebook presenting innovations in urban mobility and public space development.

One of the key challenges many cities across Europe face is the physical separation of the different components of everyday life, leading to significant mobility demand. This demand is met to a large extent by car use: people drive cars in order to shorten the time needed for moving between different parts of the city – to work or to use various services. However, car-oriented local mobility has a wide range of adverse consequences, many of which negatively affect the quality of life already in the short run.

While most cities understand the problem, its likely consequences and are committed to implement a shift towards more sustainable urban mobility and public space use, this is easier said than done. That’s why 28 European cities of different sizes from 16 countries have come together to face today’s mobility challenges. Partners of the RiConnect, Space4People and Thriving Streets URBACT Action Planning Networks decided to establish a long term cooperation and created Walk’n’Roll Cities – a platform to exchange ideas, inspirations and learn from each other.

Together, these cities explored visions and interventions that could contribute to massive reduction of car use in our cities. And, thanks to the Knowledge Hub initiative of the URBACT programme, an online publication has also been created that presents these visions and interventions.

As someone who has been actively involved in the development of this publication, I am proud to inform you that the online Guidebook is now available for download on the URBACT website. It is an accessible, practical and concise resource for local politicians, decision-makers, professionals, city practitioners and citizens, who are interested in urban mobility and committed to make their city a better place for people.

Go ahead, download the document, take a ride with us and make the most of your journey!

Click here to access the dedicated URBACT Knowledge Hub Walk’n’Roll Cities page.
Or go ahead and download the publication.

Iván Tosics participated in the “Kyiv Investment Forum” held in Brussels on 28 November 2022. One of the side events of the KIF was the “Kyiv Agglomeration Sustainable Rebuilding” meeting, organized by Eurocities. Mayors of settlements around Kyiv participated in the meeting in online form, due to the seriousness of the situation in their area. In the framework of the Ukrainian decentralization reform, the ‘Kyiv agglomeration’ territorial unit has been created with roughly 3.9 million inhabitants. 18 settlements from the 1.8-million oblast around Kyiv (consisting of 69 settlements) belong to the agglomeration, together with the capital city of 3 million people. The topic of the meeting was the operation of this agglomeration association and its possible further development, taking into account the planning related to the reconstruction of the region and the adaptation of the expected international assistance to local needs. During the meeting many European examples were mentioned, with special regard on the ways how the operation of metropolitan areas can be made more efficient.

Cover photo was taken by Peter Austin.

The UPLIFT project is organising an on-line session on the 22 of November between 3-4.30 PM (CET) to share the results of a comparative research investigating how the economic strengths of cities and local policies influence social inequalities in urban young population. The research is based on two different methods: first a quantitative analysis was implemented from the dataset of the European Quality of Life Survey, and second, 16 urban areas of UPLIFT were analysed from the perspective of their labour market structure and local welfare systems based on desk research and interviews. While the quantitative analysis found slight connections between certain economic and welfare parameters, the qualitative analysis calls attention to those factors that may divert economic development to go hand in hand with social cohesion.

The session will be based on two short presentations on the research findings by Ábel Csathó from TÁRKI and Éva Gerőházi from Metropolitan Research Institute, and feedback will be provided by Yuri Kazepov, Professor at Department of Sociology, University of Vienna and Ruggero Cefalo, Post Doc Researcher at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna.

We would be happy to discuss with you our scientific results, on which you may find more details in chapter 6 of the Synthesis Report, and you can dive into each individual urban case by looking at the urban reports.

In case you intend to participate in the on-line event, please fill in the registration form in order that we can inform you on the details of admission.

The UPLIFT project, which is coordinated by Metropolitan Research Institute in the framework of EU Horizon programme, has reached a milestone by completing 13 reports on different urban areas of Europe. The goal of the reports was to understand the educational, housing, employment and social possibilities of vulnerable young people (aged 15-29) in these locations, taking into account the nature of the local economical dynamics and the national and local welfare systems.

Metropolitan Research Institute in cooperation with local experts have written three of these ‘urban reports’ on  Łódź (Poland), Bratislava (Slovakia) and Pécs (Hungary).

We found that even though the cities share a common historical, political and economic heritage, there are substantial differences in their social inequality outcomes and policy performances both in employment, housing, and education. While Hungary and Slovakia seemed to suffer from the consequences of the financial crisis, Poland was less affected. The recovery period seemed to be successful in all three locations also with regard to the currently ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

There is a rather conspicuous difference between Pécs, Łódź and Bratislava. While Bratislava (being a capital) city and also the region itself is among the most economically developed regions in Europe, that provides a wide variety of jobs for both low and highly skilled employees, Łódź and Pécs sharing a post-industrial heritage; both are suffering from the difficulties of importing foreign investments to boost the local economy and improve the variety of jobs. This difference also reflected in demographic trends: while there is a substantial influx of mainly high skilled employees from other regions to Bratislava, Łódź and Pécs experiences outmigration of high-skilled workers. In Łódź, influx of low-educated immigrants, mainly from Ukraine, even before the war period, also significantly shapes the economic situation of the city. Despite the differences, the unemployment rate is low in all three locations, even among young people, but the rate of people, who are active in the labour market is different: many are inactive and not even seeking for a job in Łódź and Pécs functional urban areas.

Inhabitants face very different housing difficulties in the three locations. Poland and also Łódź faces a lack of housing supply which manifests into worse overcrowding numbers while in Bratislava due to the prosperous economic position and henceforth the already mentioned influx of people from other regions of Slovakia keeps the local housing market under a huge pressure which is reflected in increasing housing prices and rents. The affordability of both buying and renting a flat in Pécs blending into the national and European tendencies of the housing crisis. Due to path-dependency, home ownership is still the most common and most desired tenure type in all three countries and cities, while despite the different timing and dynamics of the privatization of public stock, the availability of social housing is quite different in the three locations. While in Bratislava the social stock is resudialized (around 1%), it reaches 5,5% in Pécs and nearly 12% in Łódź. The common feature however is the run-down physical state of municipal buildings that result in high rate of unusable flats.

The Polish education system seems to be the most efficient among the three examined countries and cities. In Bratislava and Pécs (in Slovakia and Hungary), the outcomes are among the worst in Europe with regard to compensating the inherited social difficulties of pupils. All three educational system seems to be highly centralized although they seem to differ in regard of freedom of local authorities and schools. While in Łódź and Bratislava the local system seems to have more delegated competences set by law, in Pécs local authorities are completely left out from education. Another similarity that vocational education has been reported as a school type that has a negative perception among especially highly educated parents and seemingly reforms have already tried to tackle with this e.g., with the implementation of the dual education and scholarship programmes.

Concluding the comparison, it can be seen, that there are many consequences of local and national economic and social welfare conditions to the life chances of young people, which we will further examine in case of Pécs, in the next research phase, to understand not only the policy setup but also the perception and the perspective of vulnerable young people through 40 individual interviews.

Please find the all the urban reports in the UPLIF website: https://uplift-youth.eu/insights-reporting/official-deliverables

Four members of the Metropolitan Research Institute gave presentations in different sessions of the Europe Housing Forum 2021 that was organised by Habitat for Humanity between 16-19 of November 2021.

József Hegedüs in contributing to the session on “Diverse approaches and common challenges to housing” emphasized that the most important determinants of housing outcomes and thus of the affordability problem are economic potential of the urban environment and the national/local welfare system. Different housing interventions have different outcomes in economically strong cities where housing affordability is the most crucial issue, and in shrinking areas where quality of the stock and large share of empty and abandoned housing creates the impediments.

Éva Gerőházi, participating in one of the side events of the conference  (REELIH Regional Conference II.) called the attention of the audience that the energy efficient renovation of multi-family buildings in countries like Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina or North-Macedonia requires first to establish the legal and organisational foundations of the renovation (e.g. legislation on Home Owners Associations, metering consumption, development of financial products) before energy poor households can be the specific targets of interventions.

Nóra Teller Nóra spoke in the outbreak session “Is housing the solution to homelessness in CEE?” chaired by Ruth Owen, deputy director of FEANTSA on the opportunities of tackling homelessness through housing solutions in the CEE region, along with colleagues from Chechia – Jan Milota (Platform for Social Housing), Slovakia – Tomáš Dobrovič (Nota Bene, Slovakia) and Poland – Jakub Wilczek (President of the Polish Federation for Resolving the Problem of Homelessness, vice-president and representative of Poland in FEANTSA). The speakers reviewed ongoing and past initiatives, like housing first and housing led interventions, in their respective countries, lessons learned from these programs, and the barriers and obstacles that hinder scaling up service delivery which is based on providing housing for the most vulnerable groups. Whilst the most progressive approach and strategic mainstreaming of Housing First is present in Czechia, local small pilots in Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary seem to be important but are technically very marginal compared to the national shelter-based homeless provision systems. The speakers also concluded that EU funds have been an important lever in paving the way for more progressive solutions to tackling homelessness, but systemic changes are needed to handle affordability and tenure security issues.