Levente Polyak

Levente Polyak is urban planner, researcher, community advocate and policy adviser.  He has worked on urban regeneration programmes for the New York, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Budapest municipalities. He taught at MOME and BUTE (Budapest) and TU Wien and was visiting fellow at Columbia University and the ENSA Paris-Malaquais and holds a PhD in Sociology from the Central European University. He is member of KÉK (Budapest) and editor of the Cooperative City magazine that maps good practices and innovative policies across Europe. With his organisation Eutropian Research & Action (Vienna-Rome-Budapest), specialised on urban regeneration, community participation, civic economy and social innovation, he supports public administrations and citizen initiatives of various sizes and geographic locations across Europe in creating new partnerships, cooperation processes, spatial development projects and new governance models. He has been working as expert in URBACT networks (Temporary Use as a Tool for Urban Regeneration, Interactive Cities, ACTive NGOs, RiConnect, CO4CITIES) and Urban Innovative Actions projects (Curing the Limbo Athens, DARE Ravenna, CUP 4 Creativity Újbuda), designing learning trajectories and supporting knowledge exchange among cities. Within Eutropian’s research projects, he has drafted policy recommendations based on innovative public-civic cooperation models, and developed methodologies for best practice adaptation, knowledge transfer and trainings. In the past years, he has been researching new organisational and economic models of community-led urban development projects and methodologies of civic ecosystem-building, co-authoring the books Vacant City: Experiments in Inclusive Urban Regeneration (2015), Civil Város: Lakatlan ingatlanok a közösségek szolgálatában (2016), Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces (2017), Il rilancio dei mercati: spazio pubblico, servizi comunitari ed economia circolare (2019) and The Power of Civic Ecosystems: How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient (2021).