Yujing Ma, Eric Koomen, Dani Broitman (p)

Erika Nagy

Urban dwellers benefit from ecosystem services in a wide range of scales and from different sources. Ecosystem services originated from green infrastructures within the urban areas that benefit people living in the city, depend on the physical configuration of the urban area and their availability vary at short distances. Therefore, the importance of urban-locally-provided ecosystem services (ULPES) for the wellbeing of dwellers in urban areas is increasingly recognized. A conventional approach for ULPES quantification is to assess their supply over space. While the main objective of ecosystem services research is to improve the benefit obtained by humans (in this case, urbanites), the demand over space needs to be assessed as well. However, relatively few studies address the balance between ULPES supply and demand using spatially explicit information with a high resolution. In addition, different public ULPES have different characteristics, as being congestible or not. These characteristics imply different quantification approaches. In this paper we address this gap by assessing the supply-demand mismatch of two ULPES associated with green infrastructures along an urban-rural gradient during a period of 15 years: recreation and cooling services. First, we develop a consistent quantification framework for each one of the services. Second, using data with high spatial resolution we quantify the spatial supply and demand of recreation and cooling services. Finally, we assess the spatial-temporal dynamics of the (mis)match between supply and demand in the entire region and along the urban-rural gradient. Increasing mismatch between ULPES supply and demand demonstrates the need for place-based policies towards a more sustainable and resilient urban development.

Klaudia Glittová (p), Miroslav Šipikal

Dani Broitman

Cooperation between universities, business and government is important in creating innovation, but often they face barriers which block the successful cooperation among institutional spheres. To improve and strengthen collaboration and overcome existing barriers were created hybrid organizations like university science parks.

The main goal of our paper is to examine the contribution of university science parks and research centres in Slovakia to increase of innovation and cooperation activities in the regions. In Slovakia, several such parks were built thanks to financial support from European Structural and Investment Funds in last 10 years. We applied the method of quantitative research – an online questionnaire survey complemented with interviews, which we used to collect basic data on all science parks in Slovakia. We also used project reports and annual reports of universities.

We found that despite quite large public investment, the research infrastructure doesn’t perform the required functions, which were declared during the creation of the parks. Cooperation with companies in the region is significantly limited in these parks. They do not create additional added value and rather implement activities that the universities themselves have done before and without them, such as basic research. The main barriers to development include insufficient funding for research, wrong set up of initial projects as well as lack of professional staff.

Erika Nagy (p), Melinda Mihály

Klaudia Glittová

A number of old industrial towns of CEE emerged as scenes to FDI-driven industrial restructuring and thus, spaces of the encounter of global production networks, governmental development policies and local society form the late 1990s. Such spaces are considered as champions of economic recovery in national and European policy discourses nevertheless, discussed also as vehicles of new dependencies and inequalities in critical political economic writings. Relying on the latter, critical stream of thinking we aim to unpack, how urban spaces were transformed by entangled and rivalling strategies of local and external agents, and highlight the contested relationship of peripheral reindustrialization and urban restructuring.
In this paper, we place municipal agency in focus, and analyse such strategies in two ‘model towns’ of industrial recovery in NW Hungary, struggling against lock-in position while also addressing needs, expectations and conflicts of the local community. Starting from Lefebvre’s critical concept of social space and state agency in the production of space, we discuss how changing municipal roles and practices reflected and (re-)produced both class politics and the relationships of state/capital and local/central state after the post-socialist transition in the re-designation of urban space. We grasp such relations by introducing two local projects. One is the local industrial park project in Tatabánya that was a municipal institutional experimentation to put forward industrial recovery, resulting a new narrative of local state agency, and naturalizing neoliberal, competition-centred development institutional strategies beyond the local context. The other (Győr) case exhibited an attempt to get rid of the current trajectory (strongly dependent on automotive industry and a single, powerful investor) by consumption-centred re-designation of urban space through large scale commercial developments and mega-events. By drawing the lessons local cases we highlight, how municipal strategies raised social conflicts and legitimation crisis, and in what ways local state agency was limited by centralisation and rescaling of state power after 2010, that trapped them in the double grip of global investors’ interests and central governmental strategy rested on peripheral industrialization.