Related Papers
Assessing the sustainability of urbanization at the sub-national level: The Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity accounts of the Budapest Metropolitan Region, Hungary
Zoltán Kovács
Ecological footprint calculation of the Budapest Metropolitan Region in a multi-method perspective
2019 •
Zoltán Kovács
Sustainability
Ecological Footprint as an Indicator of Corporate Environmental Performance—Empirical Evidence from Hungarian SMEs
2021 •
László Radácsi, Áron Szennay
Small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a significant role in the national economies of the EU member states. This economic activity has an inevitable environmental impact; however, environmental performance indicators are mostly measured at larger companies. Since the ecological footprint (EF) is a suitable measure of unsustainability, this paper considers it as a measure of the environmental impact of SMEs. An EF calculator for SMEs was developed that is freely available online, and it is a methodological innovation per se. Our previous research projects highlighted that the calculator must be easy-to-use and reliable; therefore, the calculator considers only the common, standardizable, and comparable elements of EF. Our results are based on validated ecological footprint data of 73 Hungarian SMEs surveyed by an online ecological footprint calculator. In order to validate and test the usefulness of the calculator, interviews were conducted with respondents, and results wer...
Resources
The Ecological Footprint of Construction Materials—A Standardized Approach from Hungary
Cecília Szigeti
Due to the large volume and mass of materials used, the construction industry is one of the sectors with the highest environmental impact. However, to provide good quality, affordable, and low-energy housing, the business case must be maintained. Accordingly, we aimed to develop and test a calculator to measure the ecological footprint of the embodied carbon in materials used in construction projects in a standardized way, without the need for environmental or even civil engineering expertise, and thus in a way that is accessible to SMEs. The novelty of our research is that although there are calculators for measuring the environmental impact (e.g., carbon footprint) of the construction industry, and there is a methodology for calculating the ecological footprint of construction, there is no free, easy-to-use, online calculator for calculating the ecological footprint of embodied carbon in materials available to all enterprises. In other words, this approach extends our previously d...
Tér és Társadalom
Differences and similarities in the expansion of suburban built-up areas around the different city regions of three Central European countries
Tamás Hardi
Examining the urban sprawl around middle-size cities in Hungary and Central Europe the rural change and suburbanization can be characterized by residential out-migration from cities and at the same time by immigration from the rural areas. These processes have intensibed in the former socialist countries after the 2000s and a number of problems have not been addressed, which have become apparent during the eighties and nineties in Western countries. A fast urban sprawl took place with a low level of special control and planning but under the pressure of economic and financial development. The rate of spatial growth often exceeds the rate of population growth, it even occurs in the absence of population growth. In Central European countries, the main destination for migration is the capital cities and their suburbs, therefore suburbanisation studies focus on these areas. However, our aim is to focus on regional centres and their agglomerations, comparing them to capital cities and ru...
Cities
Urban sprawl and land conversion in post-socialist cities: The case of metropolitan Budapest
2019 •
Attila Csaba Kondor
Land
Changes in the Patterns of Population Distribution and Built-Up Areas of the Rural–Urban Fringe in Post-Socialist Context—A Central European Case Study
Zoltan Turi
The rapid and significant expansion of urban areas is observed worldwide; however, considerable differences are detected within the characteristics of the process. The rural–urban fringe is changing most dynamically from the aspect of land use and this tends to be relevant in the case of post-socialist cities in Central Europe even with a stagnating or decreasing population. Debrecen (Hungary) and its hinterland adequately represent the migration trends of Hungarian cities and the great administrative area provided wide intra-urban suburbanization processes. The current study put the emphasis on the analysis of the spatial pattern of built-up areas and the distribution of residents. In order to discover the processes of the post-socialist transition period, detailed point layers were created to illustrate every built-up parcel in the rural–urban fringe of Debrecen (for the years 1980, 2000, and 2020). The most important characteristics were discovered with the help of GIS methods—Ke...
Land
Poorer Regions Consume More Undeveloped but Less High-Quality Land Than Wealthier Regions—A Case Study
Vladka Kirschner
Despite the efforts of developed countries to protect undeveloped land, development continues to expand beyond urban boundaries. High-quality land needed for food production is often consumed. This study aims to verify possible causes of undeveloped land and high-quality land consumption within regions (NUTS3) using a new approach to building growth monitoring. It investigates residential (RBs) and commercial buildings (retail and industrial buildings, RIBs). The development between 2006 and 2016 in the Czech Republic, a country in Central Europe, is used as a case study. Population growth and gross domestic product per capita (GDP) within regions are considered two potential causes of land consumption; this hypothesis is verified using a linear regression model. Only GDP showed statistically significant results. It correlated negatively with RBs and RBs + RIBs built on undeveloped land and positively with RBs + RIBs and either RBs or RIBs built on high-quality land. Based on the re...
Urban Planning
From a Small Village to an Exclusive Gated Community: Unplanned Suburbanisation and Local Sovereignty in Post-Socialist Hungary
Gergely Olt
In Hungary, after the regime change in 1989, one of the most important institutional changes concerning suburbanisation was the high sovereignty of local authorities, albeit without appropriate funding for sovereign operation. This type of local sovereignty made mezzo-level planning and cooperation of independent municipalities ineffective. The inherent systemic political corruption of the rapid post-socialist privatisation hindered spontaneous cooperation as well. As a result, suburban infrastructure, even in municipalities with high-status residents, remained underdeveloped (from traffic connections through waste management to water provision). Our research field, Telki, was successful in selling land because its scenic location and the absence of industrial and commercial activities made it attractive for high-status suburban settlers. These newcomers were not interested in the further functional development of the village, and, as they took local political power, they successful...
Sustainability
Measuring and Predicting Long-Term Land Cover Changes in the Functional Urban Area of Budapest
Zoltán Kovács
The loss of farmland to urban use in peri-urban areas is a global phenomenon. Urban sprawl generates a decline in the availability of productive agricultural land around cities, causing versatile conflicts between nature and society and threatening the sustainability of urban agglomerations. This study aimed to uncover the spatial pattern of long-term (80 years) land cover changes in the functional urban area of Budapest, with special attention to the conversion of agricultural land. The paper is based on a unique methodology utilizing various data sources such as military-surveyed topographic maps from the 1950s, the CLC 90 from 1990, and the Urban Atlas from 2012. In addition, the multilayer perceptron (MLP) method was used to model land cover changes through 2040. The research findings showed that land conversion and the shrinkage of productive agricultural land around Budapest significantly intensified after the collapse of communism. The conversion of arable land to artificial ...
