Levente Polyák

Urbanist and policy adviser. He has worked on urban regeneration programmes for the New York, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Budapest municipalities. He taught at MOME and BUTE (Budapest) and TU Wien between 2009-2012 and was a Visiting Fellow at Columbia University and the ENSA Paris-Malaquais in 2011-2013. He obtained his PhD in Sociology at the Central European University in 2017. He is a member of KÉK (Budapest), founder of Eutropian (Rome-Vienna) and editor of the Cooperative City magazine. In the past years, he has worked as an expert in the URBACT, UIA and H2020 programmes. He is specialised in public-civic cooperation, cultural and creative industries, local civic ecosystems, local economic development, social innovation and the community-led reuse of vacant properties. He is co-author of the books Vacant City: Experiments in Inclusive Urban Regeneration (2015), Civil Város: Lakatlan ingatlanok a közösségek szolgálatában (2016), Funding the Cooperative City: Community Finance and the Economy of Civic Spaces (2017), Il rilancio dei mercati (2019), The Power of Civic Ecosystems: How community spaces and their networks make our cities more cooperative, fair and resilient (2021).