Nowadays, the ongoing changes in the global economy influence all components of the local and regional economies around the World. According to by Agnew (2000 and 2001) and Haukkala et al. (1999) regions are often conceptualized as units of social-economic space characterized by production structure of all ownership forms, population, employment concentration as well as governmental institutions. Fundamentally, they are a social, cultural, political and economic interaction system (Agnew, 2000, 2001 and Haukkala et al., 1999 in Palekiene et al., 2015), which face several challenges regarding the well-being of their inhabitants. In such a setting regional development becomes more and more important, while regional and local economic development –as Simmie and Martin (2010) point out– is far from a smooth and incremental process, instead, it is the subject to all sorts of interruptions and disruptions (such as periodic economic recessions, the unpredictable rise of major competitors, unexpected plant closures, the challenges arising from technological change and the like), and the state responses answering these challenges and the degree of decentralization and the adaptive capacity of territories differs to a high extent even in the same national economy. The KRAFT (‘Creative City, Sustainable Region’) Concept developed by iASK (Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg, Hungary) is a regional development initiative, which focuses on the connectivity and cooperation of key players of the regional economy including businesses, local and regional governments and academic institutions. The current research aims at introducing the most important criteria considered during the development of the concept and the resulting KRAFT-index, a complex analytical tool suitable to demonstrate regional development tendencies, the attitude of regional players towards cooperation and their ‘creativity potential’ regarding eight specific development areas pointed out by: literature review1. economic development, 2. governance, 3. social vitality, 4. health, 5. culture, 6. networks, 7. natural and built environment, 8. education, learning.
The research paper highlights the most important steps of the development of the KRAFT-index, the methodological issues considered during its creation and will demonstrate its practical implementation in Veszprém, a middle sized town in Hungary, situated at the Pannonian Region of Hungary which is the main examination area of the iASK. We will highlight pros and cons of such development initiative in practical use and emphasize the role and importance of various stakeholder groups which were involved in the development process (mayors of the interest geographical area, specialists from data mining and sampling experts to sociologists).
Finally, we will provide a sharp analysis of the case study in the light of UN SD goals for assessing potential synergies of the methodology and the framework.
Results of the research show that while there have been efforts towards cooperation by the municipality before, there is still a large potential in creative collaboration between different stakeholders in order to foster a more balanced and sustainable development path.
6b. Urban and rural development
