Zsolt Séra

Summary

I've loved playing games since I was a kid and I've always been passionate about cities. You can guess; SimCity was my favourite game in my twenties. And I kept the same enthusiasm for working on urban development since I started my career 25 years ago, approaching cities primarily from an economics and management perspective. During these years, most of my assignments have been related to urban strategy consulting and international project development. I participated in developing dozens of successful international projects, from URBACT, European Urban Initiative and Interreg Europe to North-West Europe, Central Europe, Danube, Life, Creative Europe, and Horizon. 
In recent years, my interest in urban economics gradually shifted to social innovation, citizen involvement and urban adaptation to climate change. I developed and implemented several projects and performed expert assignments in these areas. During the previous URBACT programme, I was the Lead Expert of the SIBdev Network on social impact bonds, a fascinatingly innovative topic. 
It is often said that "the more we know, the more we know we don't know". And this is also true for cities, especially nowadays when we face so many unprecedented challenges. But the more we don't know, the more we can learn from others: from other cities, other people, other regions of Europe, small towns or big cities. 
I firmly believe URBACT offers an excellent opportunity for cities, stakeholders and experts to get involved in the knowledge exchange and learning process on a European level and provide better answers to the problems that cities must address to satisfy their citizens' needs. And it would be a great pleasure and honour for me to help cities in this learning process as a Lead Expert or Ad-hoc Expert.