Metropolitan Research Institute

Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest

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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.

Caught between the public and the private: Urban cooperative solutions in Central Europe

The edited volume Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces was recently published in Vienna, presenting stories and models of community finance and civic economy. The volume’s chapter on Central and Eastern European urban civic initiatives was authored by Hanna Szemző, managing director of Metropolitan Research Institute.

Development of social support system in the housing and utilities sectors in Kazakhstan (2016-2018)

Project duration: 21 November 2016 – 31 December 2018

Client: Government of Kazakhstan and EBRD TC Account Regarding The Programme of Technical Cooperation

The Government of Republic of Kazakhstan has been committed to a broad economic reform program. Part of this reform is improving the tariff policy by introducing cost recovery tariffs in the public utility sector. The aim of the project is to design social protection mechanisms in order to protect the population from excessive burden of coming tariff increases in utility sector. The project includes the identification of main deficiencies in the existing system of Social Support System (SSS) for low income population, preparing recommendations on legal, institutional and methodological changes of the SSS, preparing recommendation for selection of appropriate level of support on a country-wide level or by regions, assessing the need for integration of information systems of various state authorities, developing policies and procedures for implementation of a pilot project and assisting the administration of the pilot city in their implementation and the quality and quantity assessment of the results of the pilot city implementation.

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.

Colleagues of MRI at the “Opening up to an ERA of Social Innovation” Conference in Lisbon 

Eszter Somogyi and Hanna Szemző attended the Opening up to an ERA of Social Innovation Conference on November 27-28th. The Lisbon conference, organized by the EC, the Portuguese government and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation focused on finding ways to promote social innovations, both as a way to increase inclusiveness and to overcome the difficulties caused by budgetary cuts and changing shifts in public financing. Representing HomeLab, MRI’s project focusing on innovations in the housing and employment sector, Eszter and Hanna have focused their efforts on deepening their knowledge and their network in the field.

 

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