Metropolitan Research Institute

Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest

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Győr: How to compete with capital cities

European Investment Bank assigned Metropolitan Research Institute with the preparation of a study on the urban development of Győr, a thriving economic hub in Western Hungary – at the same time, a “secondary city” in the vicinity of three dynamic metropolises, which has to compete for workforce and other resources. The study, elaborated by senior experts Iván Tosics and Éva Gerőházi, also takesi nto account EIB’s role in the city’s outcomes.

Located between three European capital cities, Vienna, Bratislava, and Budapest, 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. Yet the three capital cities attract most of the development potential in the area, making it difficult for smaller cities such as Győr to attract the headquarters of international companies or to develop large-scale new urban areas.

Győr’s response has been to focus on “smart specialisation” in line with its broader innovation-based development concept. The city’s industrial heritage helped attract investment, especially a major AUDI plant, which has become a definitive player in the local urban economy. Yet this runs the risk of resulting in a monofunctional local economic development direction, and make the city vulnerable to economic cycles. To prevent this, the municipality has long been focusing on diversifying the local economy, relying among others on EU funding (for which national co-financing was advanced in the form of an EIB loan). A flagship pole in these diversification effort is the cooperation between Széchenyi István University, the public sector, and market actors. This is manifested in the Center for University-Industry Cooperation, permitting the implementation of the future Technopolis vision. In addition, EU funding supported the improvement of urban environment and alleviating spatial segregation in Győr. 

The study authored by Tosics and Gerőházi is available in English, German, French, and Hungarian on EIB’s website.

The housing paradox: more financing, less affordability?

Iván Tosics, managing director of Metropolitan Research Institute, has a long standing tradition of greeting the new year with a photo essay of issues he learned about in the old one. His photo essay for 2018 treats the issue of the “housing paradox”: how more financing seemingly curbs the affordability of housing across the globe – and no longer only in the so-called “hegde-cities”.

Housing Mobility Patterns in Segregated Neighbourhoods: Nóra Teller’s presentation on ENHR 2018

Nóra Teller presented her findings on Housing Mobility Patterns in Segregated Neighbourhoods in Uppsala, Sweden, in Plenary 3 of European Network of Housing Researchers’ 2018 annual conference. The presentation explored the patterns of housing choices of those who have lived in segregated neighbourhoods and how the households’ choices interplay with broader social issues like economic inequalities, ineffectiveness of housing policies and broader discrimination on the housing market. Based both on case studies and quantitative data the above-mentioned processes were presented, focusing on Roma poverty neighbourhoods’ developments and policies addressing segregation mechanisms.

Resilient Cultural Heritage: OpenHeritage project introduced in Budapest

MRI colleagues, researcher Andrea Tönkő and project coordinator Hanna Szemző participated in the Resilient Cultural Heritage and Communities in Europe conference on 10-11 May 2018, where they outlined the main goals of “OpenHeritage: Organizing, Promoting and Enabling Heritage Re-use through Inclusion,
Technology, Access, Governance, and Empowerment”, a 4-year Horizon2020 project to be launched in June 2018.

OpenHeritage concentrates a consortium of 16 partners: universities, SMEs, think tanks and NGOs, is led by Metropolitan Research Institute. The project will aim at creating a sustainable management model of heritage assets, working with an open definition of heritage, and involving sites that are not listed or incorporated into the official heritage discourse. Instead, the consortium chose to focus on buildings, complexes, and spaces which lie outside traditional and centrally located heritage spaces, and rather have a symbolic or practical significance for local and trans-local communities. Through community and stakeholder involvement, resource integration and territorial embeddedness, OpenHeritage will select, survey and analyse peripheral, often neglected heritage sites spread over sixteen Observatory Cases and six Cooperative Heritage Labs in 10 European countries.

For the high resolution Poster, please click on the image below:

Evaluation of Urban Innovative Action (UIA) proposals in the topic of Housing (2018)

Client: UIA Secretariat

Duration: May 2018

Éva Gerőházi, senior researcher of MRI, carried out strategic evaluation of 26 UIA proposals in May 2018 in the theme of housing. The proposals came from different countries of Europe and aimed at implementing innovative housing projects to be elaborated by local municipalities and their local partners. The main strategic evaluation criteria to award the projects was Innovation, which is not easy to achieve taking into account that housing is a cost intensive sphere where any innovation may have a high risk in implementation. That may have been the reason which is why the projects have more innovation in combining the already tested pilot elements rather than creating a brand new mechanism or solution. The evaluation made it also clear that writing a proposal requires a clear vision of what should be achieved and a well-defined way of how to achieve it as without these precise ideas the proposal becomes a hard-to-follow set of activities which the evaluators cannot judge properly.

Call: 13th Annual European Research Conference on Homelessness, Budapest

FEANTSA’s European Observatory on Homelessness, the Metropolitan Research Institute Budapest and Shelter Foundation Budapest are pleased to announce the 13th Annual European Research Conference on Homelessness in Budapest, on Friday 21 Spetember 2018, entitled Social and Economic Integration of Homeless People. The purpose of this research conference is to explore evidence on levels of and opportunities for social and economic integration of homeless people in Europe and elsewhere.