On Thursday 19 March, a group of Planning and Environmental Management students from Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) joined GreenFormation for a short afternoon walk in Budapest to explore how degrowth donut related ideas are taking shape in the city’s neighbourhoods. The visit built on our collaboration within the Horizon Europe DAISY project, which focuses on “seeds of change” – local initiatives that already show transformative potential for biodiversity and social justice, including the Budapest Degrowth Doughnut (BDD) as a city-level adaptation of the doughnut framework through a degrowth lens.
The BDD combines ecological ceilings with social foundations for Budapest and is being prepared for practical use in city strategies and planning through refined indicators, clearer governance responsibilities and links to existing municipal processes. During the walk, students could see how these ideas translate into practice at three locations: a child-friendly school street on Trefort utca that closes to cars during school times and creates a safer, more sociable space around the school; a “healthy street” on Déri Miksa utca, redesigned with wider sidewalks, traffic calming and 59 new trees plus over 1,300 m² of green space; and Német József kert, a community garden that turns underused land into a self-governed green commons rich in plants and small habitats for urban biodiversity.
Together, these stops showed how school streets, healthy streets and community gardens can advance the aims of the Budapest Degrowth Doughnut by making neighbourhoods more liveable, solidaristic and biodiverse – and offered TU Dublin students a compact, real-world glimpse of how planning and environmental management intersect with degrowth-inspired transformation in Budapest.
Picture source: https://enbudapestem.hu/2025/09/03/egy-egeszseges-utca-egy-napja-eu-palyazat-2025
