Over recent decades, people’s (rural and urban) communities are facing numerous social and economic changes and challenges. Some of those challenges have been increasingly addressed through the lenses of technological developments and digitalization. In this paper, we have made a review of already existing practices while focusing on the existing implementations of the Smart Village concept and the importance of digital transformation for rural areas. We give special attention to EU policies that we are using as an already existing framework for understanding our own forthcoming examples. We have shown the parallels between the findings and insights from different regions and made an evaluation of presented practices. Our main argument stems from our own previous experiences and experiences of other research approaches, and is grounded on the argument that rural areas are not uniform, and that smart rural development has to be applied in combination with place-based approach. We present the cases of Slovenian pilot practices and support our argument by proposing the FabVillage concept.

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Smart Villages: Comprehensive Review of Initiatives and Practices

Recent education reform in China reflects the global trend of education policy borrowing from Anglophone countries such as the USA. The reform in China essentially advocates shifting from knowledge reproduction and didacticism to knowledge construction by students through a learner-centredness approach. Aware of the trend of borrowing policy from ‘Western’ countries, some educators in China use the proverb ‘the West wind has overpowered the East wind’ to describe this phenomenon. This paper examines the cultural factors that influence education policy borrowing in China by drawing upon Johnson’s metaphors of the ‘politics of selling’ and the ‘politics of gelling’. This paper argues that there exist fundamental cultural differences between Western and Chinese perspectives on the nature and transmission of knowledge that make education policy transfer in China challenging. This paper further proposes that China borrow education policy judiciously by integrating foreign and indigenous sources of knowledge, t...

Education policy borrowing in China: Has the West wind overpowered the East wind?

From camaraderie to detachment: The effect of changing built environment forms on neighborhood relations in a post-communist context

ABSTRACT This paper examines the construction of green money, a civil society-based initiative in Hungary as a case study of the ‘institutional’ approach to the transition from command to market economies in East/Central Europe, which argues for the development of civil society organizations to facilitate structural changes in the economy. The paper compares programmes developed endogenously in Hungary through the diffusion of ideas about sustainability and economic democracy through international activist networks with those developed by a Hungarian NGO with support from western aid agencies. For the former, green money was a radical project aimed at developing alternative forms of livelihood through localized money networks, while for the latter it was a tool for ameliorating transition through the construction of mutual aid and community feeling. The paper points to problems in building new civil society institutions, arguing that while some of the difficulties encountered were technical problems that reflect the poor performance of green money as a development tool, other problems reflect more structural, political and cultural problems. The paper argues that over-optimistic conceptualizations of the potential of civil society in the facilitation of inclusive transition need to be more cognisant of the difficulties in constructing civil society from the outside.

Építsünk civil társadalmat? Zöld pénz a rendszerváltozás utáni "átmenet" Magyarországán" ('Constructing Civil ,Society?: green money in Transition Hungary')

Building smart communities in the Hungarian social economy

Objective: The goal of this project was to develop a systematic framework through which interventions promoting intergenerational solidarity in 11 countries could be assessed. Background: Although intergenerational solidarity—the exchange of material, social, and emotional support and care between family generations—benefits both the country's economic well-being (macro-level) and the individual's physical, mental, and social well-being (micro-level), decreasing intergenerational solidarity is evident in many industrialized countries. Interventions promoting intergenerational solidarity are increasingly being developed, but few are described in the literature. Moreover, no unifying framework describing them exists. Method: Representatives from 11 countries convened to identify interventions promoting intergenerational solidarity. After several meetings, a unifying framework was created. Representatives selected a convenience sample of programs and abstracted information based on the framework. Results: The outcome of social well-being was virtually ubiquitous in most programs. Countries appeared to take a broad view of intergenerational solidarity, focusing on interactions among generations, rather than interactions within families. Discussion and Implications: The framework enabled the systematic abstraction and assessment of programs. Most programs had no standard method of evaluating their outcomes. Longitudinal evaluations would be optimal if we want to identify the best practices in intergenerational solidarity programs.

/pdf/lessons-learned-from-11-countries-on-programs-promoting-55jpt79grn.pdf

Lessons Learned From 11 Countries on Programs Promoting Intergenerational Solidarity

Human interaction breeds conflicts and unresolved problems, which fortunately provide food for social sciences. One particular field of research, however, the theory of collective action, is concerned with the question of how people behave and act in groups when pursuing their common goals, how collective action for a collective good, that is cooperation, can - or cannot - take place. Groups are understood here, not necessarily only as political or interest groups and organizations - originally assumed by the founders of group theories in economic sociology and political science, but any social groups of individuals whose members share a common interest. This kind of broadening the scope of groups allowed the author to apply the analytical devices of the theory of collective action in a particular case, never before examined in this way. Thus the author selected the Hungarian residential condominiums, which could be regarded as communities "governing the commons" on the one hand, and groups of individuals who are part of an organization with common interests and goals on the other. In both aspects, in order to pursue their common goals they have to act collectively and to reach them successfully they have to cooperate - either formally or informally - with each other. Based on theoretical and empirical findings, the author introduced and controlled for various external (e.g. condominium regulation, political entrepreneur) and internal factors (e.g. trust and social capital) which had an influence on condominium communities' cooperative behavior.

/pdf/formal-and-informal-cooperation-in-hungarian-condominiums-47pcha0kwa.pdf

Formal and informal cooperation in hungarian condominiums

Honesty and Trust

This study examines the changes undergone by urban centers within Greater Budapest’s extension area, which was annexed to the capital of Hungary in 1950, and which is, with minor modifications, equivalent to the outer zone today. The article compares the development methods of two different political systems: state socialism (i.e., the communist regime) between 1950 and 1990, and post-socialist capitalism after 1990. Over a longer period, the urban development of Budapest has made a long but circular journey from decentralized to a decentralized–disjointed socio-spatial development system, passing through a centrally-planned communist era between 1945 and 1990. Nevertheless, closer examination of this process reveals that several paradigm shifts took place in the design methodology, which was strongly influenced by socio-economic changes. These shifts, layered upon the inherited structure, as well as the neglect or preference of different systems, caused great differences in the development histories of centers on the outskirts. Therefore, we have set up a development typology for the centers on the outskirts by summarizing the planning history at the city level. Based on how well the center was able to incorporate itself into the larger metropolis since 1950, we have distinguished the following development models: the metropolized, the transcript, the rehabilitated, and the urban village model. This typology is extended to include new urban centers that formed during state socialism (between 1950 and 1990) and post-socialist capitalism (since 1990).

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Annamária Orbán

Papers

Building smart communities in the Hungarian social economy

Lessons Learned From 11 Countries on Programs Promoting Intergenerational Solidarity

Formal and informal cooperation in hungarian condominiums

Honesty and Trust

Contemporary Decentralized Development of a Centrally Planned Metropolis: The Case of Budapest