Metropolitan Research Institute
Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest
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”.
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:
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.
Hanna Szemző and Andrea Tönkő presented OpenHeritage H2020 project, set to start in June 2018, on 20 March at the “Cultural Heritage, Social Cohesion and Place Attachment” workshop organised by the Institute of Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Science.
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.
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.
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.