One of the most tangible promises of the compact city is that everyday services should be reachable on foot. The service fabric of District 18, however, is patchy at several points. This article shows which concrete tools can bring the missing functions back into residential areas — along three specific objectives.

1. Increasing the accessibility of services

The district's service structure is patchy in several areas, and the existing businesses often operate in isolation, not forming a coherent network. Improving accessibility is therefore a two-step process: first you have to know what exists, and then you can supply what is missing.

• Mapping local businesses and organising them into a network. The first step is a systematic mapping — taking stock of the already operating retailers, service providers, craftspeople and hospitality venues — followed by the creation of a platform or network that makes them visible to local residents. The mapping also has a strategic benefit: it gives an accurate picture of the existing economic fabric and its gaps, thereby underpinning targeted settlement incentives and strengthening the evidence base of district action plans and main-street programmes.
• Targeted outreach to shortage professions and incentivising their settlement. The situation assessment revealed several functional gaps: some service types are entirely absent from the district, while others are present only in limited numbers and capacity. As a result, part of the population orients itself towards other urban areas, which increases the need to travel and weakens the role of the local centres. The answer is targeted settlement incentives: on the basis of the mapped gaps, the municipality actively approaches the businesses that can fill the missing functions and offers attractive conditions for settling in.

2. Strengthening mixed use

Services densify most effectively along designated lines and nodes. Strengthening mixed use is therefore also a spatial question: it is about residential, commercial and community functions appearing side by side, reinforcing one another.

• Implementing a main-street programme along designated axes. The district's main axes — above all Üllői Road — and certain other road sections (for example Nemes Street) are suited to becoming the organising lines of district life. The essence of the programme is that coordinated interventions are carried out along a designated axis, between which mutually reinforcing synergies also arise:
  • improving the quality of public space,
  • increasing ground-floor activity,
  • the appearance of mixed functions,
  • developing the pedestrian and cycling environment.
  The main-street programme is not an individual, building-level intervention, but an integrated framework covering a whole axis, combining regulatory, public-space, economic-incentive, infrastructural and community elements.
• Developing local markets and commercial nodes. Alongside the axes, local markets and commercial nodes provide the other point of densification. The solution is, on the one hand, the infrastructural and functional renewal of the existing markets and, on the other, the creation of new, smaller-scale formats — seasonal producers' and community markets — in the underserved areas. These small-scale units embedded in the residential fabric support pedestrian accessibility better than the suburban large shopping centres, whose draining effect is significant.

3. Increasing the share of active ground floors

The intensity of street life is determined not by the size of the population but by the use of the ground floors. The most quickly mobilisable tool for this is municipal assets themselves.

• Making effective use of municipal retail units. The targeted use of municipally owned retail units — with preferential rental terms, a tender system or function-tied calls — can directly increase ground-floor activity and settle the missing services. The point is not merely the efficiency of asset management, but the conscious, strategic handling of the portfolio: where the service network is weak, a retail unit can play a function-settling role.
• Encouraging a change of function in housing-estate ground floors. The district's five larger housing estates are more densely populated than average, and the ground floors of their residential buildings have in many cases lost their original function. The aim is for these spaces to fill with active, service or community functions and to strengthen the local sub-centre character of the housing estates. The example of the Havanna estate shows this well: where services are concentrated along the Kondor Béla Promenade, a genuine urban public-space life develops.