The mayor, who intends to shake things up, mostly brags about the achievements of his predecessors.
The capital's leadership reports on the changes that have begun and the development programs in their publication Greening Budapest 2030, in which they list the projects that make Budapest greener, more livable and more lovable. In addition to these, the publication that lists visual plans and the successes of the previous city administration cannot present many real, realized projects, rather it only publishes new visual plans, the time of their realization can only be expected sometime in the future.
The only thing Gergely Karácsony had to do with the projects listed here was the fact that he completed them with reduced technical content, but at a significantly higher price, and he now advertises them as his own achievements.
"I saw the publication, I think the direction is good, but the wording that "a big change took place in 2019" is deceptive and not a true statement. The projects implemented in the cycle, such as the Pünkösdfürdő Park and Blaha Lujza tér, were all the prepared results of the previous city administration, the current one just had to finish it," a landscape architect specialist working in the capital's green space maintenance told Metropol, who experienced that
momentum has stalled in the last four or five years.
Despite the fact that most of the development plans are a nice visual element, there is no real concrete behind them, he said.
The statistics of recent years show that many years pass from planning to implementation, pointed out the little reality of the greening plans of the following years, the specialist who has been working in the development of green infrastructure in the capital city for decades.
The landscape architect, who previously worked at the Capital Horticultural Company, also discovered some contradictions in the publication, as he pointed out: the current city administration sometimes boasts of thirty thousand planted trees, while in other forums it mentions only 11 thousand trees.
However, according to the expert, whichever of the two, these numbers are not a reason to brag.
Most of the planted "trees", 24,000 forestry saplings, which cannot be classified as public trees, and about 35-40 percent of them are the replacement of trees that were planted earlier, but dried up due to lack of professional maintenance and lack of irrigation - assessed the expert, who it also highlighted that
in the last five years, little more than four to five thousand new rowan trees were planted, several times more of which were planted by the previous city administration in previous years, so this number is quite low.
What Gergely Karácsony did under the name of greening is more of a so-called marketing greening without any real content, so without substantial changes, the upcoming new cycle does not promise too much hope - concluded the landscape architect.
Cover image: It's easy to decorate with someone else's pen
Source: Facebook/Gergely Kárácsony
