Drowning the suburb: settlement planning and climate change adaptation in a Hungarian metropolitan area

Abstract

Urban planning can contribute to reducing vulnerability to the impacts of climate change (including the expected increased occurrence of extreme weather events) in metropolitan areas. However, lack of urban governance and planning focusing on the metropolitan area as a whole, and decisions that do not take into account sufficiently the occurrence of such events, can substantially increase the cost of recovery from weather-related disasters. This policy study connects climate change adaptation, urban planning and metropolitan governance issues in the Hungarian context, focusing on the June 2010 floods in the town of Felsőzsolca, in the Miskolc metropolitan area. A review of key literature is provided on the impacts of climate change in cities and on governing climate action in metropolitan areas. Events leading up to and following the June 2010 Felsőzsolca floods are analysed from the perspective of urban planning. Based on evaluation criteria including effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, institutional capacity, transparency, political feasibility and time, four policy options are identified for climate action-related governance and planning in metropolitan areas, in the Hungarian context. Based on the above criteria, formalized horizontal partnerships between local authorities within the metropolitan area are chosen as the most favourable and currently most feasible policy option in Hungary.

Re-reuse of regenerated brownfields: Lessons from an Eastern European post-industrial city

“…The process of industrialisation was subsequently followed by similarly intensive tendencies towards deindustrialisation after the fall of the Iron Curtain that ended up in a massive abandonment of industrial sites and an occurrence of enormous numbers of brownfields after 1990 (Krzysztofik et al, 2016). In the inner structure of such cities, for example Ostrava in the Czech Republic (Nekolova et al, 2016;Rumpel and Slach, 2012), Katowice in Poland (Krzysztofik et al, 2017), Kosice in Slovakia (Stasakova and Kulla, 2016) or Miskolc in Hungary (Czako, 2013), brownfields are omnipresent and they have become a part of everyday life of the local population and communities. However, as evidenced in studies by Kunc, et al (2014b) and Rizzo et al 2015), close proximity to brownfields may contribute to socio-pathological behaviour by residents (Kunc et al, 2014b;Rizzo et al, 2015).…”

Energy-Related Carbon Emissions of China’s Model Environmental Cities

“…Climate change exacerbates urban heat island effects [43,44], increases the frequency of flooding due to rising sea levels, leads to more frequent and severe extreme weather events [45], and exacerbates water security problems by changing the amount, variability, timing, form, and intensity of precipitation [46]. For these reasons, climate change mitigation should be made a priority for all types of model environmental cities in China, not just the LowCarbon Cities.…”

Urban Pluvial Flood Management Part 1: Implementing an AHP-TOPSIS Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis Method for Stakeholder Integration in Urban Climate and Stormwater Adaptation

“…Environmental considerations are becoming commonplace within governance [5]. However, as with most policy a city needs both strong political systems and political will to support environmental policy [3,6]. Cities must increase their efforts to streamline policy guidance across their often-segregated departments and coordinate regulations across sometimes unresponsive state/regional and national governance.…”