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.
Geographer and urbanist by profession, ecologist and journalist by heart. Since 2009 I have been managing, developing and facilitating knowledge transfer projects across Europe in the field of urban regeneration, environmental protection, nature-based solutions, climate adaptation, cultural heritage and social innovation. I started my career with European cooperation projects working as a volunteer with gipsy youth in Spain and Hungary. I spent four years in the public sector, where first I co-designed the Regional Operational Programme’ ESF priority, then I built up a national network supporting employment partnerships and social economy actors. Since 2008 I have developed and successfully managed dozens of European territorial cooperation projects in various programmes. I was the Lead Expert of the CHANGE! – social design of public services and the “Come in! – Talking Houses / Shared Stories” URBACT networks. As the key expert of Bright Urban Solutions I carried out thematic expert tasks related to nature-based solutions, environmental protection, nature conservation, urban biodiversity, climate adaptation and urban green infrastructure. My key strength is a broad scientific and holistic perspective. As a journalist focusing on solution journalism, I am also committed to spreading knowledge related to above fields, including ecology and mountaineering as well (at the magazine of the Hungarian Geographers' Association and the most important outdoor magazine of Hungary). This led me to found TeAM HUb – the Hungarian Nature-based Solutions Hub, to share knowledge and nudge people and communities towards a more sustainable and fair future.
Mr. András EKÉS, transport service planning engineer and landscape architect, managing director of Mobilissimus, a Budapest based mobility planning and consultancy company (mobilissimus.eu) composed of young planners, engineers, and consultants. He has been involved in a wide range of projects focusing on sustainable mobility and urban development. He is committed to a smarter, greener, and socially more inclusive mobility both in planning and implementation. He is participating in SUMPs (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans) as author or consultant creating the first Hungarian documents in this professional area for several cities. He is committed to help the public transport stakeholders to share experiences and find new solutions during the strongly challenging periods.
He is a SUMP trainer and participates in the PROPSERITY project (H2020) and contributed to the URBACT “Motivating Mobility Mindsets” workstream and he was invited as an external expert to the BUMP (Boosting Urban Mobility Plans) project. Among others, he is participating in the Magyar CIVINET network as member of the secretariat and trainer under the CIVITAS CAPITAL and the SATELLITE project. András is participating in the Interreg CE project, SHAREPLACE, targeting new and shared solutions for cities both in public transport and in everyday home-to-work mobility chains.
He is also working on renewal of local public transport services (networks, schedules, public involvement, communication, operation) for several cities in Hungary and abroad. He has been leader of several Budapest-wide traffic and passenger counting and survey projects. András is active on improving the public transport systems in terms of quantitative and qualitative parameters, passenger information systems, ticketing, participatory planning, and communication activities in order to have climate friendly and sustainable mobility frameworks.
András has been speaker in different EU-wide urban and mobility conferences and fora, among others ECOMM, Open Days of the Regions, CIVITAS Forum, POLIS. He is invited to hold university lectures and often participates in awareness raising events to share the sustainable mobility knowledge for many stakeholder groups.
András is working with a wide scope of activities from strategic planning to operational tasks, synthetizing the synergies from all layers of the mobility planning and consultancy. He is an urban and mobility photographer for decades, being author of several illustrations and colourful presentations, planning documents and papers. He is proud to use the bike for home-to-work and for other journeys, and all of his colleagues choose climate friendly modes for their everyday travels due to their high-level sustainability commitment.
Since 2022 András is also working for FAIRTIQ, the Swiss mobile ticketing company as sales and business development manager for CEE countries.
Expert can perform Ad hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
With 15 years of experience in various strategies and projects on urban mobility from the local to the regional, national and European level, I would be happy to support networks of cities in accelerating sustainable urban transformation. Sustainable mobility is a key sector with significant impacts on both climate and urban quality of life.
As an expert at Metropolitan Research institute and from 2015 as founder of Mobilissimus, key topics of my curriculum include Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) and other mobility strategies for several cities on the functional urban area, city, district or neighbourhood level; strategies and plans on soft mobility / active and micromobility, e.g. cycling strategies and network plans, bike sharing and shared micromobility studies; public transport network plans in several countries; feasibility studies and cost-benefit analyses of CF and ERDF funded public transport projects (including infrastructure, vehicle – tram, trolleybus, CNG and electric buses –, traffic management and passenger information etc.); as well as data collection and data management tasks in several mobility-related projects, including GIS and Sustainable Urban Mobility Indicators (SUMI).
I have participated in several European projects (FP6 PLUREL, H2020 CIVITAS CAPITAL, PROSPERITY and SUNRISE, Interreg CE SHAREPLACE, EfficienCE, Dynaxibility, CE4CE, Interreg Europe CATCH_MR, UIA SASMOB Szeged) as expert or work package leader, spoken at various conferences (ECOMM, Velo-City, Veloforum, Radgipfel) and contributed to different kinds of written reports (e.g. ESPON Secondary Growth Poles in Territorial Development, innovation briefs on Regulating Dockless Bike-Sharing Schemes and on Micromobility in Cities, or The Energy Transition in Central and Eastern Europe for by the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership). At Mobilissimus I also oversee the Secretariat of the Magyar CIVINET regional CIVITAS network.
Expert can perform Ad hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
Tamás Kállay is an expert on green spaces, circular economy and air quality. He has been working as an environmental consultant since 2002. He has recently acted as an URBACT Lead Expert of the Health&Greenspace Network that promoted health-oriented planning and management of urban green spaces. He is an UIA Expert of the CLAIRO project, that aims at improving air quality with the use of nature-based solutions. Recently he was also engaged as an UIA Expert providing support to the HOPE project of the City of Helsinki that piloted a next generation of air sensor technology using high-resolution hyperlocal air quality data. He specializes in health-oriented green space design, nature-based solutions, sustainable resource use, circular economy, industrial symbiosis, air quality, climate adaptation with a focus on combating heat stress, and policy analysis. For 10 years he was working at an international organization, the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC), where he was the leader of the Sustainable Resource Use Topic Area. Tamás was acting as a Thematic Expert of the Interreg Europe Policy Learning Platform responsible for resource efficiency and circular economy. In this role he was providing policy support to Interreg Europe projects and to local and regional authorities across Europe. He was for 6 years a contributing expert of the European Topic Centre on Sustainable Consumption and Production (ETC/SCP) of the European Environmental Agency (EEA). Tamas was involved in a large number of policy studies for the EC and EEA in the fields of resource use, air quality and industrial emissions.
Some of his key publications include a Guide on health-oriented planning and use of urban green spaces, the final journal of the UIA HOPE project, a journal of the UIA CLAIRO project, a policy brief on circular economy in cities and regions, a study on industrial symbiosis for the EC, an EEA report on resource efficiency, an EEA report on waste prevention, and a study on industrial emissions for the EC.
Expert can perform the Lead expert role and Ad hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
We can work together on...
Communications is quite often seen as only as a "must-have" "get it done" type of duty for project managers, however, in my experience, communication is key to engage the right stakeholders, deliver the right messages on the right channels and multiply the impact of any programme. As a psychologist and a sustainability communication expert, leading my communication agency "Climate Smart Elephant", I am supporting projects both on local, national and EU-level to become visible and successful. Besides a practical approach based on years of marketing and sales experience, I offer both the theoretical and psychological perspective which makes this topic intriguing.
Communications lead experience: URBACT, LIFE, EIT Food
Communications teaching experience: Scuola Superiore Mediatori Linguistici di Pisa
Education is another focus of our agency at Climate Smart Elephant. As a trained facilitator and coach I have designed and led countless of learning experiences from stakeholder meetings to large-scale conferences. I have designed learning materials for Climate-KIC, EIT Food, and Climate-Friendly Municipalities' Association in Hungary. If you need pro facilitated events, design learning materials, let me know.
Expert can perform Ad hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
Leo, also as a former mayor, has got a first hand experience in local, regional public management and developments in a wide range of "smart city" domains.
In recent years, he has originated and (co-)managed projects that involves local stakeholders from all walks of life enabling the development of local ecosystems. He has got some meaningful results in programs like public service digitalisation and horizontal networks - strategic partnerships, local innovation & development funds, co- and community (crowd) funding schemes, as well as EU-policies in energy efficiency & transition and functional design of the digitalisation of public institution functions and services.
He has been invited as an expert to evaluate and scale up various smart city excellence projects, also outside Europe, and as a research fellow in relevant researches.
Expert can perform Ad hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
My URBACT journey started over 10 years ago. Working with people from a variety of European cities, learning, being inspired by examples of urban innovations, experiencing the URBACT method in action got me hooked.
Since then I have been involved with URBACT as an ad-hoc expert in AP and TN networks (Romanet, TechRevolution 1 and TechRevolution 2), as a facilitator of National Campus seminars, as a lab manager at URBACT Summer Universities (in Dublin and in Rotterdam), trainer at e-University events. As an LE, I have supported the AP journey of 9 European cities in Thriving Streets network (focusing on sustainable urban mobility for more attractive cities), worked in capitalisation initiatives, even have been an MC at the URBACT City Festival in Lisbon.
I have seen a number of positive examples (including my own hometown’s) where being part of an URBACT network triggered an important change process in a city. Contributing to such positive changes, helping to solve specific challenges in cities is important for me and URBACT offers this opportunity.
Expert can perform the Lead expert role and Ad hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
URBACT II Lead Expert, URBACT III Thematic Programme Expert and URBACT IV Ad-hoc Expert.
I strongly believe that the exchange of practices and knowledge of cities contributes greatly to the sustainability and inclusivity of urban development across Europe. Furthermore, the process of exchange, the inclusion of citizens in governance (which is at the heart of the URBACT method), and the deepening relations between European cities with very different historical backgrounds and very different current situations contribute strongly to the fight of the growing democracy deficit – which is, unfortunately, increasingly observable in all parts of Europe. I think I can provide strong support to this exchange process, on the one hand because I am originating from one of the new member states, representing the eastern semi-periphery of the EU; and on the other because I have a long history of working with URBACT, Eurocities and other EU programmes.
In the last years, besides supervising APN networks, I acted as initiator of collaboration between cities, networks and experts. I developed together with three URBACT lead Experts the online webtool “Re-making the city”, https://remakingthecity.urbact.eu/ in which innovative practices of URBACT cities are systematically presented along key topics, such as problem mapping, outreach strategies to different stakeholders, stakeholder activation, co-production/co-design of visions, experimenting, financing, monitoring. In 2022 I was the main organizer of the Walk'n'Roll capitalization project, including the RiConnect, Space4People and Thriving Streets APN networks, discussing different approaches to calm down car traffic in cities. The final product of this collaboration is a comprehensive guidebook https://urbact.eu/sites/default/files/2023-01/walknroll.pdf
Expert can perform Ad-hoc expertise missions at network and programme level in relation to:
Az Építésügyi és Közlekedési Minisztérium, az URBACT Nemzeti Tájékoztatási Pontja február 10-én információs napot rendez az aktuális, akciótervezési hálózatok számára kiírt pályázattal kapcsolatban, amelyre ezúton szeretettel meghívjuk a városok képviselőit, szakértőket és az érdeklődőket.
A program során szó lesz az európai várospolitikáról és az URBACT IV Programról, valamint az első felhívással kapcsolatos tudnivalókról és a sikeres partnerség összeállításáról.
Időpont: 2023. február 10. 10.00
Az online rendezvényhez a Skype alkalmazás segítségével lehet csatlakozni.
Csatlakozási link: https://join.skype.com/NPisBu7DvVhR
Program
