We revived the forgotten values of Dunaújváros in a new festival. Once the Ironworks Street was the essence of the place; the elegant avenue with its colourful shop windows was filled with well-dressed families on weekend afternoons. There are many cultural treasures to be discovered here, some of which have now been forgotten. Our aim is to revive these, while also discovering new values that could shape the kind of city that locals want to live in in the future.
Local
Hungary
The initiative was implemented in Dunaújváros in cooperation with the local Municipality.
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
Yes
ERDF : European Regional Development Fund
It fas funded by the DANUrB+ Program, which is part of the Danube Transnational Program of Interreg.
No
Yes
2022-07-02
As a representative of an organization, in partnership with other organisations
Name of the organisation(s): DANUrB International Association (DIA) Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Szántó Annamária Last name of representative: Orbán, Phd Gender: Female Nationality: Hungary Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Bartók Béla út 10-12. Town: Budapest Postal code: 1111 Country: Hungary Direct Tel:+36 30 524 6857 E-mail:orbanabme@gmail.com Website:https://www.danurb.eu/
Name of the organisation(s): Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre - KÉK Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Bálint Last name of representative: Kádár, Phd Gender: Male Nationality: Hungary Function: President Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Bartók Béla út 10-12. Town: Budapest Postal code: 1111 Country: Hungary Direct Tel:+36 30 522 5994 E-mail:info@kek.org.hu Website:http://kek.org.hu/
“Sugárúti Fesztivál” – Avenue Festival was a great cultural and community event in Dunaújváros held by DIA and KÉK, in close cooperation with local institutions and NGOs in the framework of the DANUrB+ Program.
Dunaújváros was originally a small village inhabited since Roman times, until 1950s, when Hungary's first socialist city was built here. The city's greatest asset is its proximity to the Danube river and nature, but the only other heritage they can relate to comes from the socialist era. At the same time, Dunaújváros has a lot to offer, from its excellent architecture and diverse industrial activity to its rich artistic culture.
In the preceding months of the event, we have organized a series of workshops for local cultural institutions and NGOs, with the aim of finding a project which can really help with the issues of the city. Throughout the workshops, it became increasingly clear that the main issue we need to address is the rethinking of local identity and the "brand" of the city. That's when the idea of a truly sustainable and impactful community festival was born. Two principles were identified with the most active group of stakeholders: the first was to gather programmes that reflect the values of Dunaújváros and preferably reinterpret its heritage in a contemporary way. The second was to organize the event with the participation of as many citizens as possible. Therefore, in the spring, the organizers launched an open call for applications from the public, where anyone could apply with an individual program idea, a proposal or as a volunteer to organize the festival.
During the one-day festival, the main and most iconic avenue of Dunaújváros, the "Vasmű út" (Ironworks Street) was closed to car traffic. In the new pedestrian street, visitors could discover the local farmers' market, the work of the library, take urban walks and immerse themselves in the city's fascinating historical heritage dating back to the socialist era.
Post-socialist
Cultural heritage
Sustainable community building
Festival
Local identity
In terms of sustainability, the focus was on social sustainability. We wanted to create an event that would build on the city's cultural heritage and help redefine local identity. But of course, it would not work if the process stopped after just one festival. The Avenue Festival was conceived as a pilot project that should continue even after we or the DANUrB+ Program are no longer present. Therefore, the most important "rule" was to create actions together with the local community and try to strengthen existing local collaborations that could survive in the long term. We believe that this attitude can convince the community that together they can achieve real results and show the young generation what opportunities are worth staying in Dunaújváros for, or even how they can be part of creating those opportunities.
By opening up the main street to pedestrians, we have also tried to raise awareness of how our public spaces can be used in alternative, more environmentally sustainable ways. Some of the programmes were organized by the Danube Bank, highlighting the city's natural assets and the importance of water protection. (Unfortunately, the biggest factory from the socialist era is still polluting the river.)
During the festival, we tried to avoid external food vendors (e.g. food trucks). Instead, we wanted to encourage visitors to eat at the restaurants and bistros on Ironworks Street. We hope that this has made the project more economically sustainable and plan to work even more directly with local entrepreneurs in the future.
One of the greatest values of Dunaújváros is its built heritage. The quality and richness of the socialist-realist architecture is outstanding at European level. The city has its own architectural educational trail, but it is not well known outside the architectural and urbanist community. But in Hungary, the population generally does not find anything built during modernism or socialism very attractive. There are probably two main reasons for this: one is the lack of visual culture education, the other is the trauma of communism.
But even in Dunaújváros, there are many people who see the uniqueness and beauty of the local architecture and remember with fondness the vibrant life of Vasmű Street, with its museums, cinemas, boutiques and colorful neon lights. And all this not because they want to romanticize Hungarian communism, but because even from that era there are objective values worth preserving and celebrating.
Our aim with this project was to bring the main street back to life, to try to show the beauty of the city from a different perspective to the wider public, so that they can start to think positively about their heritage and start to heal the trauma of many generations.
To achieve this, the program included an open-air exhibition of archival photos of Ironworks Street, urban walks with a local art historian, tours of local legends with a journalist, a participatory game on how to bring a small square to life next to the main street, and another exhibition (based on research by an enthusiastic citizen) on the history of the changing functions of local shops.
It was important for us to involve the widest possible audience, not only in the number of participants, but also in the preparation of the festival. Many different communities worked together in this process from the preparatory stages. The involvement of local cultural, educational, tourist and public cultural operators, as well as cooperation with the municipality, has resulted in a broad inclusiveness, especially in terms of age: from university students to enthusiastic pensioners, we have had organizers as well as volunteers of high school age. One result of this was that the festival was able to reach all generations as its target audience. Different age groups were brought together in a variety of ways during the event, with a wide range of activities (exhibitions, concerts, quizzes, crafts and much more) for children, families, adults and seniors of all ages.
We wanted to create an event that was accessible not only to people of all ages, but also to people from all backgrounds. That's why all the activities were free, and commercial participants could join by offering discounts or some extra service to those who visited them.
One of our primary goals in organizing the programme was to strengthen and reshape the local identity of Dunaújváros. To this end, we involved the local community from the very beginning. We reached out to locals with the help of several institutions, mainly cultural ones and NGOs. We launched a call for ideas and stories that could be implemented in the programme. We asked people to think about the values of the place where they live and how they would like to rediscover them. We also asked for ideas for places that could be the setting for a community event (e.g. the house they live in, whether it's the front door, a window or the roof). This was the starting point for getting local people to change their perception of their environment, showing them that they can creatively change and shape it.
The thematic programmes gave visitors a new perspective on their own and the city's heritage. Our positive connection with our own and our hometown's past is extremely important and has a big impact on how we think and organize our communities in the present and the future. With the Avenue Festival's programmes, our aim was to begin to heal this connection and to guide it in valuable new directions.
What was really expressive throughout the event was how visitors changed their perceptions of how they could use the space they live in. For example, the children discovered that they could jump over the lines to get around the street, and after a few hours the whole street was full of children playing and adults walking by suddenly enjoying the space they use every day.
Along these lines, both the organizers and the participants, in addition to discovering the values and heritage of their environment, experienced a new way of thinking about it.
Designing the event the first step we took was that we organized workshops for local institutions and NGOs to map the tangible, and intangible heritage of Dunaújváros based on the experiences, memories and perceptions of local people.
These workshops focused on working together to create an event that would strengthen local identity and raise awareness of heritage. After the idea of the festival was born we initiated a call for locals to come up with programs for the day. As the main street of the city was closed for one day, it was necessary to cooperate with the municipality as well. Though for the first event we only included them in the official approval of the event, but based on the success they are now engaged in the whole implementation.
Dunaújváros is one of the 5 cities in Hungary that were part of the DANUrB+ International program that aimed to valorize heritage along the Danube by (among other methods) connecting the cities next to the river creating a cultural promenade. This helps the city to collaborate on a regional level as well as an international, European level. Channeling together the events and key stakeholders from the other 4 Hungarian and other European Danube cities gives the possibility to share experiences and knowledge transfer.
The initiative is made possible by 5 main groups: external experts, a core group of local organizers, program organizers, volunteers and architecture students.
The external expert group was basically the KÉK and DIA. Among our colleagues you can find architects, urban planners and participatory experts, and the confident knowledge of project management.
The core of the local organizers were those who were most interested in working with us. In this case, these stakeholders were mostly from cultural institutions (Institute of Contemporary Art - Dunaújváros, József Attila City Library, Intercisa Museum) and some from local media (Dunaújváros Tells a Story Blog) with the intention to participate in the cultural life of Dunaújváros. After a while, a very cooperative member of the local government came along and became a great ally for our initiative.
The program organizers were those who had responded to the Avenue Festival's open call. They were drawn from the general public, so they were extremely diverse, but all had some very specific knowledge or expertise to contribute. Many of them were musicians, comedians, researchers, educators, art historians, artists, etc.
Everybody was a volunteer (besides the “external expert” group), but there was a group of them, who just applied to help without any specific goal. They contributed a lot to the organization of the site. This was also a very diverse group, but many were from high schools.
And last but not least, we worked with architecture students from the Budapest University of Technology. They collaborated on a project, but it was quite important: in a six-month participatory design process, they worked with the local library to design a new modular community library for the Danube bank in Dunaújváros. It was built just before the event and opened to the public at the Avenue Festival.
To sum up, we were able to assemble a multidisciplinary team of organizers, which was reflected in the diversity of the programs.
The Avenue Festival took place on 2 July 2022, but it was preceded by a 3-month mapping and 5-month preparation period with workshops. After the festival, we conducted a series of evaluation interviews with local organizers and presented the results of the event at the "A Journey Connecting Communities - DANUrB+ Closing Conference".
The event was a huge success, with more than 2000 visitors from different generations filling the main street of Dunaújváros. A total of 22 programmes were organized with around 50 volunteer organizers. By creating a participatory cultural event together with local stakeholders, based on their ideas and heritage, we were able to make a real contribution to strengthening the city's identity.
The most important feedback we received from the municipality, the mayor and the organizers was that they were surprised that they were able to mobilize and interest such a large audience. They didn't believe it at the beginning, but they learned that with the right tools and methodology, it could be done and there was nothing wrong with their community. They needed our help to learn this lesson so they could continue this initiative with greater confidence and capacity.
We are also seeing practical results, as stakeholders, organizations and the municipality have already started to prepare the next event without any pressure from us. Although we will try to continue to support the community in Dunaújváros by transferring the missing professional skills (e.g. proposal writing), looking for opportunities for our cooperation and further developing their capacities.
Our approach, which we now call a "self-sustaining community festival", is unique because we help local communities to solve important issues in a very friendly way that is easy for the citizens to embrace. At first glance, these events may seem like the usual cultural festivals, but a closer look reveals that all (or most) of the programmes reflect on a theme that we and the local community have identified as important. It is very important, however, that these programmes are fun and easy to enjoy, even if the message they convey can be serious. This allows us to deliver indirect educational activities to a wide range of people.
Another key pillar of our initiative is to emphasize the ownership of the local organizer team. Because our goal is not to organize a single event ourselves, but to educate and mentor the most active stakeholders on how to effectively engage the rest of the community and take the programme forward themselves. In this way, after the first year, they will gain the knowledge and experience to continue the initiative themselves. This can have an impact not only on the organization of the festival (which is only a tool) but also on other similar initiatives, as they will be able to build up an effective network of stakeholders.
The effectiveness of our approach is shown by the fact that initially, during the first workshops, we started with 7-8 stakeholders from 4 different organizations, but by the end we had about 50 people working together to make the festival happen.
We combined two existing methodologies:
One is the “Celebration of open houses involving communities”, developed by KÉK and originally used in the Budapest100 project. The only difference was that instead of houses, we used public space as the implementation area. The most important part of this methodology is the process of engagement and the community getting to know its own heritage.
The involvement process has very clear steps:
The project management team has the role of the coordinator and mentor.
We are launching a call for volunteers and programme organizers. With the core group we will select suitable programs and consult them on their implementation. The people who came up with the idea will work on the implementation. This way the workload is shared, leading to a very democratized process.
Visitors to the event will see that the whole festival was organized by their own friends and neighbors, so they will appreciate it even more and will be more willing to join next time.
The other methodology we used is "Community-based festivals", which was developed in the DANUrB Program and is used in the Danube Days programme series. It is a special, well-adaptable series of programs that draws attention to collaboration and local values in an easy-to-understand way. In addition the methods applied can be used to explore the problems of local cultural life and learn how to find solutions to them. This method starts by mapping the local cultural heritage and stakeholders. The second step is to involve local stakeholders, NGOs and cultural institutions who are most active. Through them, we can reach out to more stakeholders and learn about existing initiatives on which we can build. The philosophy behind this is not to introduce brand new ideas into the life of a community, but to take on board existing ones. Finally, the implementation process is basically event organization, but we can offer a lot of support and capacity building to the local organizing team.
Thanks to the success of the event, the initiative has gained even more supporters in Dunaújváros compared to the beginning. The municipality has become a much more proactive actor than before, and has assured the local organizers that it will do its utmost to support the Avenue Festival next year.
We are also trying to help keep the initiative alive by seeking available funding and tenders to continue the joint work and expand the range of related activities. In the future, we envisage our role as a professional expert and mentor to help implement the initiative, while at the same time developing the capacity of local stakeholders, NGOs and institutions.
In other aspects, the development started here could be a good practice for other medium-sized post-socialist cities as well.
With the "Avenue Festival" in Dunaújváros we wanted to tackle two big challenges. One was the problem of shrinking cities, which is a major issue in all the small and medium-sized towns along the Danube. This socio-economic shrinkage we handle as a challenge and opportunity at the same time. Our main objective is the capacity building for local stakeholders in order to enable them to cooperate locally and interregionally for the valorization of their Danube related heritage with local actions under a unified brand strong enough to increase local prosperity and international tourist attractiveness.
In the case of Dunaújváros, we were faced with another very central and distinctive challenge: the post-socialist heritage. On the one hand, this aspect makes this city different from an average town on the Danube, but this does not mean that it is a unique situation, as there are many other towns along the Danube with a very similar history.
The trauma caused by the crimes of the socialist governments has remained with the Hungarian people for generations, right up to the present day. Dunaújváros is therefore in a very difficult position: all the memories of the local community are linked to these terrible historical events, so it is almost impossible to take pride in anything from that era, even though there are many valuable assets to be found alongside the bad. This situation has left the local community kind of hopeless for the future of their hometown.The importance of this issue was clear from the beginning of the workshop series. Therefore, together with local stakeholders, we decided to set the process of rethinking local identity as the main objective of our initiative. Our experience and lessons learned can be useful for other communities with a post-socialist history.
