ReGreenX under heat dome

David Szebeni, 2026

European Urban Initiative (EUI)

There’s an extreme heatwave going on all across Europe during the writing of this article. The so-called “heat dome” is a weather phenomenon that usually lasts 2-10 days. The hot air is trapped within the dome and as clouds are missing, the sun warms the air further, and the temperature rises above 40 Celsius. The city of Szeged, Hungary is particularly affected by drought and climate warming, therefore the need for new methods of urban greening is stronger year by year. The ReGreenX project that started in December 2025 and is financed by the European Urban Initiative focuses exactly on that matter. Let’s see how it has been going since our last glance! An article by EUI Innovative Action expert Dávid Szebeni.

Short reminder: what is ReGreenX?

The ReGreenX project in the City of Szeged, Hungary, is an experimental project financed by the EUI to tackle the effects of slow desertification of the Hungarian Southern Great Plain and Homokhátság that has been spreading over the last several years. ReGreenX establishes an innovative model of urban greening to change public behaviour and improve climate resilience via the following main interconnected activities. To reach this objective, the city uses a combination of model gardens, awareness raising, community engagement botanical on-site research and IT tools.

Towards an age of new plant species

Plants are among the central elements of ReGreenX. Szeged has already constructed two model gardens on public area as an educational and information tool for citizens. The municipality monitors the status of these gardens, behaviour of the plants and gathers new data, that can be channelled into further actions. It’s an interesting demonstration that the municipality did a parallel planting of bulbous plants and climate resilient species on Széchenyi square. This way everybody can observe how these different types react to the arid, hot climate.

Of course, more model gardens are on their way, now the public procurement process is in progress. In case of delicate urban greening on this scale like this project a special problem also occurs because there can be 240 different plant species that the local government needs to purchase. It is rare that one supplier can provide all of them and this is difficult to handle due to the inflexible public procurement rules.

The City is dedicated to introduce an incentive system that helps with changing what citizens look for when they buy plants. The municipality realized that even it is able to purchase the right species to give them for free or with discount, it doesn’t have the means to store these plants for more than 3-4 days. I was more than happy to share some real world examples with Szeged from different countries where a voucher system was implemented for the same reasons. Based on the team’s own experience and the advice the City decided to prepare a voucher system. This means that the municipality provide redeemable vouchers for citizens who can use these vouchers in local floral or plant shops to purchase climate resilient species for their gardens. The local government and the shops will settle the financial part between each other through a local clearing system.

Setback or opportunity?

Both at the same time! When you implement an innovative project you can’t expect that everything happens according to the plan. But sometimes we can learn even more from the problems or failures. Therefore, it is a valuable experience that based on the tests, the unique climate resilient seed mix developed in the project for backyard gardens didn’t work well. Now professionals of Szeged examine whether the soil or some other factors cause the problems. Once they identify this, the team will be able to develop a new seed mix.

The more, the merrier

Szeged is dedicated to engage further knowledge exchange beyond the transfer partnership. The City has actively mapped and identified potential partners among other EUI beneficiaries and started to lay the foundation for an urban greening thematic City-to-City project. The team is in the process of planning a visit to a lighthouse European city so the colleagues can learn from a partner and utilize these experiences in the second half of ReGreenX project.

Besides these partnership plans, Szeged organized a local workshop as well with the colleagues of Budapest, who are responsible for maintaining the green areas of the Hungarian capital. These kind of professional meetings about the behaviour of plant species, maintaining methods or community engagement are beneficial for both cities.

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