Budapest-Vác Living Lab

OLA Summer School and Landscape Forum Budapest-Vác June 2025

OLA Partners for the Budapest-Vác Living Lab

• Local living lab promoters: MATE - Hungarian University for Agriculture and Life Sciences (university partner) and KulturAktív (NGO partner)
• Team members

Video Impressions of our Living Lab Activities

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Workshop with the neighbourhood of the forest in spring 2025.

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Community Forest Festival.

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Let's fill the forest with joyful experiences!

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Wishes for the Törökhegy Forest

Background of the Budapest-Vác Living Lab

Transformation of the LADDER Living Lab – OLA Focus on Vác

The LADDER Living Lab began as a platform for involving children and young people in the democratic transformation of their everyday environments. After several years of community-based schoolyard design, the Living Lab broadened its mission toward a larger goal: supporting child-friendly urban development through democratic landscape transformation.

Building on the “Shape Your School” brand and earlier schoolyard co-design projects, the Living Lab expanded its scope to engage not only individual schools but the wider community of Vác. This shift allowed us to explore how children and families experience the city and how their perspectives can actively shape urban planning.

Achievements in Vác

Deepened community involvement: The Living Lab established strong cooperation with local institutions, schools, NGOs, municipal actors, and residents. A series of community discussions, workshops, and public events brought together families, teachers, merchants, cultural institutions, environmental educators, seniors, and youth. These activities helped gather collective memories, map beloved places, and identify barriers to independent mobility and access to nature.

School-based learning and co-design: Landscape architecture students facilitated interactive sessions in several primary schools in Vác. These activities combined environmental education with participatory design, enabling children to express how they connect with nature and what improvements they envision for their school grounds and neighbourhoods. Students also conducted research to understand children’s perceptions of green spaces and the broader urban environment.

City-wide research and community mapping: The Living Lab carried out an extensive survey involving hundreds of residents to assess public perceptions of green and community spaces. This work—including interviews, questionnaires, archival research, and on-site observation—laid the groundwork for identifying key sites for future community-led planning and interventions.

Capacity building and professional training: The Living Lab developed and shared methods of participatory planning with professionals, university students, teachers, and municipal representatives. Workshops and presentations strengthened local skills for engaging youth in landscape transformation and promoted the Living Lab’s tools and approaches nationally.

Goals for the Child-Friendly Vác Project

The current phase of the Living Lab focuses on making Vác a more child-friendly, nature-oriented city. This includes:

• Exploration: Understanding how children connect with nature in different parts of Vác and identifying challenges in the urban environment.
• Visioning and Planning: Co-creating a shared vision and concrete plans that offer children more opportunities to explore, learn from, and enjoy nature in their everyday lives.
• Implementation: Introducing landscape interventions in public spaces that strengthen children’s relationship with nature and contribute to a healthier, more playful and inclusive urban environment.

Through these steps, the Living Lab aims to embed children’s voices into urban decision-making and demonstrate how democratic landscape transformation can improve community well-being. The work in Vác serves as a replicable case study showing how cities can meaningfully involve young people in shaping their surroundings and building a more livable future.

Location of the Budapest-Vác Living Lab

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OLA Workshop June 2025

The OLA Community traveled to Vác in Hungary from June 13 - 22, 2025. In total, 45 participants from all project partners attended in the roles of student participants, group supervisors and coordinators. The workshop build very well on the previous activities of the Living Lab with a clear thematic focus on the child-friendly approach and a spatial focus on the Törökhegy Forest. This small forest has been identified as a potential development area for nature play and nature experience. The forest was planted in the 1950's as a shelter for emissions of the local cement factory, together with a few other forest patches of similar size all around the eastern periphery of Vác. Today, the area is rather unused and there is little to no management of its vegetation.

The workshop was a great opportunity for re-discovering the potential of this natural area for an evolving neighborhood and its community. The activities were well balanced between discovery, analysis, empathizing, prototyping, engagement and visioning. The event was done in parallel to the annual landscape forum and created interesting synergies. An OLA multiplier event was hosted together.

Working group results

• Team 1 - Green Space Integration: Nourishing dreams under the trees
• Team 2 - Forest Management: The guardians of the forest
• Team 3 - Building belonging through play
• Team 4 - Towards a universally accessible urban forest
• Team 5 - Turning the forest into a nature-experience space

Impressions from the OLA Intensive Programme in Vác

Photos by Ellen Fetzer and Eunice Maina

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  Urban landscape diving into the forest
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  We are approaching the forest
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  Nature frames method (1)
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  Nature frames method (2)
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  Findings pathways
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  Learning from the Vac Living Lab findings (1)
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  Learning from the Vac Living Lab findings (2)
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  Mapping future forest pathways (1)
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  Mapping future forest pathways (2)
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  Mapping future forest pathways (3)
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  Children as co-scientists (1)
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  Children as co-scientists (2)
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  Transforming the forest (1)
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  Transforming the forest (2)
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  Announcing our community event (1)
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  Transfer of Vac learnings to the forum (1)
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  Transfer of Vac learnings to the forum (2)
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  Building the forest play landscape (1)
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  Building the forest play landscape (2)
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  Building the forest play landscape (3)
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  Building the forest play landscape (4)
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  Building the forest play landscape (5)
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  Magic light show in the forest
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  Final presentation in Budapest (1)
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  Final presentation in Budapest (2)

Landscape Forum and Multiplier Event

The last multiplier event of the OLA project took place at the campus of the Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences (MATE) in Budapest, Hungary, on June 18, 2025. During the event, we will presented the outcomes of the OLA ERASMUS+ Project: Democratic Landscape Transformation: Towards an Open Landscape Academy. We shared and discussed the latest version of the Charta for Democratic Landscape Transformation, we introduced our open courses on democratic landscape transformation and the OLA website, an international platform for communities and professionals to share experiences. We also presented the living labs with their stories and the specific methods they have developed.

Participants were able to explore the OLA Charta – a collection of principles to guide democratic, community-based landscape planning, to learn from real-world examples – inspiring stories and key takeaways from OLA’s living labs, tocConnect with a professional community and meet practitioners who believe in democratic landscape transformation, to discover new ideas and see how the OLA approach can apply to your own urban or rural projects. Finally, new connections where formed, helping to start something together, join idea exchanges and explore opportunities for future collaboration

The multiplier event was addressed to landscape architects, urbanists, architects and spatial planners, both professional and academic, professionals working in participatory and community-based design, civil society organizations, researchers, and university students. We invited anyone who believes in the power of community involvement and is looking for new methods.

Impressions from the OLA Multiplier Event

all Photos by Gyula Csernok | Courtesy of KultúrAktív Association

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  Briefing the table moderators
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  Welcoming the participants
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  OLA postcards for sharing
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  The events hall at the MATE campus is ideal
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  Welcoming the participants
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  Anna and Istvan opening the event
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  Playing 'Bingo' as an icebreaker
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  Sharing our publication
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  Exploring the OLA Charta
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  Anna leads the reflection process
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  Participants study the Charta for themselves first
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  Then exchange...
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  ...with people on their tables
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  ...and leave valuable comments on the Charta
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  Living Lab teams present the stories and methods from the OLA labs
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  People connect to the community and the project.
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  We harvest the findings...
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  ...to develop OLA further.

Landscape Forum Working Group Presentations

• Working Group 1: Building resilient urban peripheries
• Working Group 2: Foodscapes for Vác
• Working Group 3: Towards a Living Landscape Biography
• Working Group 4: Mobility Landscapes Vác
• Working Group 5: Landscape Democracy

Publications and Further Resources

• Tóth, E., Szilágyi-Nagy, A., Földi, Z., & Valánszki, I. (2025). Reconnecting Children with Nature in Urban Space. 4D Journal of Landscape Architecture and Garden Art, 76, 16-23. https://doi.org/10.36249/4d.76.6427
• Tóth, E., Szilágyi-Nagy (2925): Naturerfahrungen von Kindern in urbanen Räumen fördern, download poster (Conference contribution)

ERASMUS+ Programme & Partners

Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.