Text: Julianna Szabó PhD

In 2018, a comprehensive professional consortium managed by the Municipality of Zugló won funding from Urban Innovative Actions. The project titled “More than Housing” was targeted to build a social tenement house that, in addition to affordability, promised an exceptionally sustainable ethos and technical solutions in Hungary, and, as a social innovation, an organic residential community developed and operated with means of co-housing. The aim of Urban Innovative Actions is to support urban experiments that can serve as lessons and are educational for future urban development in Europe, and the project therefore includes the analysis and evaluation of different aspects. One of these aspects is the possible co-operation between the municipalities and the private sector in the field of non-profit housing development, and the possibilities of different 3P schemes. Based on the international literature and the experience of the project, this issue will be complemented by an analysis of the possibilities of involving the population, and more specifically future residents, in the 4P schemes.
The growing popularity of PPP development models on the international scene can be traced back to the neoliberal economic period of the 1990s. In Hungary, the idea of PPPs emerged about a decade later, in the 2000s, mainly as a result of the country’s joining the European Union. The specialist literature that was made available, the EU’s partnership principles, but especially the budget deficit constraint made the involvement of private development actors in public sector development as a reasonable economic instrument visible, but it quickly became clear that in practice these schemes generally caused significant disadvantages to the public sector instead of benefits.