Budapest-Vác Living Lab

Background of the Budapest-Vác Living Lab

• Local living lab promoters: MATE - Hungarian University for Agriculture and Life Sciences (university partner) and KulturAktív (NGO partner)
• Upcoming OLA activities: International Student Competition (Sept 24 - Jan 25), Summer School and Landscape Forum (June 2025), and ongoing cooperation with schools

We started our Living Lab activity by reviewing the activities of our LADDER Living Lab (Laboratory with Students for Democratic Environment in Hungarian “LAboratórium Diákokkal a DEmokratikus köRnyezetért”), which has been running since 2019 within the framework of the LED2LEAP Project.

Between 2019-2022, our Living Lab focused on the community design of school environments, and kultúrAktív created the "Shape Your School" (ALakítsd az Iskolád in Hungarian) brand, under which we were able to launch 3 new school yard design projects.

During the operation of the Living Lab between 2022-2025, we want to broaden our scope of activities and explore new areas of democratic landscape transformation with children. Our slogan became the child-friendly city, and as a consequence of this decision, we saw that it was more worthwhile to work together with the community and school communities of a city.

In line with the guidelines and values of OLA, we started working on the topic with the community of Vác, where, in addition to keeping the tradition of community-based schoolyard planning alive, we began to explore the issue of the topic of a child-friendly city with the community, so that by the end of the project we could develop a case study that involves young people into the democratic transformation of the urban landscape.

So far, we have experimented with mobilizing several school communities, as well as implemented our first public participation action related to the use of green space in the city. Based on these experiences, we dreamed of a broader collaboration, in which citizens, teachers, institutions, elders, adults and young people work together to make Vác child-friendly, and to include children in its democratic landscape transformation. In the 2024 Summer Semester, we were able to mobilize the key actors of our Living Lab, and collaboratively defined the problem statement of the Living Lab.

Location of the Budapest-Vác Living Lab

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Impressions from the Living Lab Process

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  Concept Map of the Living Lab

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  Introducting the Oral History Approach in a secondary school class

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  Urban games

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  Visioning new school environments