Excursion to Hungary: Exploring Northern Budapest and the Danube Bend

Row of people. Front row kneeling. Two rows in the back standing. Lawn in the foreground. Trees to the left and right. In the background view of a valley.

The competition participants with the organizing team at the Viewpoint of Visegrád (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Section of a topographical map. Three locations are marked with red circles.

Map of the competition area with the three focus areas: Szentendre, Vác and Esztergom (Source: competition brief / ESRI topographical map retrieved via arcgis.com)

Photo detail View into a river valley. Lawn in the foreground. Trees to the left and right.

The Danube from the Viewpoint at Visegrád (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail View into a river valley. Trees in the foreground. An old fortress on the left.

The Danube from the Viewpoint at Visegrád (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail of a group of people standing close together. The person on the right is holding a card.

Ass. Prof. Dr. István Valánszki (MATE) explains the situation in the focus area Vác (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail of a group of people standing close together on a gravel surface. Lawn and trees in the background.

Prof. Ingrid Schegk (HSWT) with a part of the IMLA group in Vác (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail of a paved and partially overgrown embankment. On the other side of the river trees, buildings and a landing stage. A large shrub on the right.

The Danube in Vác (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail of a small water body paved on both sides. On the right a paved path on which a person is walking, then lawn and bushes. On the left, a path leading up the hill. In the background buildings, trees, a car and people.

Site visit Szentendre (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail of a paved road and sidewalk area with bollards as a boundary. A group of people walk one behind the other on the sidewalk. Buildings on the right and in the background.

Site visit Szentendre (inner part of the city) (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo section of a river embankment. From left to right: group of people, embankment wall, overgrown embankment, path, paved embankment and river. In the background: buildings, hills, trees.

The situation of the Danube in Szentendre (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Photo detail of a group of people on a staircase. Stair railing in the foreground. River in the background.

Competition participants listening the speech of the Mayor of Szentendre (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

Detail from a landscape photograph. In the foreground an unpaved dirt road. Low vegetation to the left and right. Hills with buildings and trees in the background.

Site visit Esztergom (Photo © Stefanie Gruber)

This years' LE:NOTRE Institute International Student Competition focusses on Budapest’s northern periphery, starting at the northern edge of the city's municipal boundary, crossing various peripheral municipalities, following a 60 kilometer transect along the Danube river, up to Esztergom at the border to Slovakia.

The competition with the title

Northern Budapest and the Danube Bend

From placelessness to a radical HERE:
Imagining alternative futures for Budapest’s northern periphery

features a typical peri-urban landscape that is coping, on the one hand, with the impacts of continuous urban sprawl and suburbanization. On the other hand, this landscape is part of the Danube River corridor. For millennia, the Danube has been a transnational cultural and natural connector leaving multiple layers of identity and very specific spatial imprints on the landscape.

Current problems and local challenges are for example:

expansion of the suburbs
gentrification
mobility and transport infrastructure (car dependency)
socio-economic changes
demographic changes
loss of natural resources

The goal is to generate fresh perspectives and innovative ideas of how we might imagine alternative futures for this periphery by activating and generating its actual landscape capacity.

In a first step the students are asked to develop a landscape development vision as an overall concept for the entire competition area - by looking far into the future.

Afterwards, each team can select one of the following three competition focus areas:

the southern settlement edge of Szentendre or
Vác with its the inner periphery or
Esztergom - a natural and cultural heritage landscape under pressure

The competition takes place prior to the 14th Landscape Forum (18-21 June 2025) in Budapest which will be hosted by MATE, the Hungarian University for Agriculture and Life Sciences in Budapest, in cooperation with the local NGO KultúrAktív, other partners and of course the LE:NOTRE Institute.

For the IMLA students in the second semester the competition task is the assignment of their module 'Main Project II' in the current winter term.

Mid of October 2024 the MATE team organized a joint all-day excursion for all interested competition participants. The IMLA team with 32 students, Prof. Ingrid Schegk, Prof. Tilman Latz, Prof. Karl-Heinz Einberger and Stefanie Gruber did join this bus excursion and also spent two additional days on site to get to know the competition area.

A special thank goes to MATE, especially to Ass. Prof. Dr. István Valánszki and his team and to all other local experts for all their great support!

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