A few years ago, smart cities were everywhere, but recently skepticism has grown louder. The reason: the world is realizing that innovation only makes sense when it is useful – chasing it for its own sake is pointless. This was among the topics discussed at the PropTech Hungary Conference held on May 22, 2025.
“An enormous amount of data is gathered, but what do we do with it afterwards?” – raised the question Zoltán Erő, Chief Architect of Budapest, during the roundtable discussion on the practical implementation of smart cities and the digital future of Budapest.
Erő Zoltán, Chief Architect of Budapest (Photo: Márton Fejes)
He explained that digitalization and the many possibilities it brings already cause overabundance in architecture, and the same can be true for urban digitalization. Máté Petrik, Head of IT at Városliget Zrt., emphasized that the goal-oriented operation mentioned by Zoltán Erő had already started years ago in the Liget. After defining objectives, they designed infrastructure, and to maintain focus, they even defined the smart city concept locally.
According to Bence Csaba Nagy, Business Development Manager responsible for digital channels at BKK, “smartness” is a tool that can be used well when combined with human knowledge and experience. But what about drivers? Zsolt Somogyi, CEO of Parkl, a company building smart parking and EV charging solutions, said a city becomes smart when it is a “mixture of many services operating in island mode” – meaning you cannot place the responsibility of becoming smart on a single actor, but sectors and urban stakeholders must jointly want and act for change.
Roundtable discussion: How can a city truly be smart? Where do we stand, and what is the future of Budapest in the digital age? (Photo: Márton Fejes)
In his presentation following the roundtable, Zsolt Somogyi spoke about how much can be done for liveability through office building parking. At the beginning of his presentation, he played the intro of The Jetsons, the American cartoon from the 1960s, where everyone flies cars and parking isn’t an issue because George Jetson simply folds his car into a suitcase.
Somogyi argued that the future shown in the 60-year-old cartoon is still relevant in several ways: parking the car remains a problem, and people still often take their kids to school and their partner to work in the same morning commute (or to the shopping mall, where George Jetson’s wife flies off). Parkl installs complete chargers, parking systems, and energy management – building entire infrastructure – because according to Somogyi this is the first step toward becoming smart.
Somogyi Zsolt, Parkl (Photo: Márton Fejes)
This kind of unity was also the main message of László Ocskay’s lecture. The CEO of Oander digitalization agency presented a case study of the Liget project’s smart solutions. The services of the Liget are diverse, ranging from sports to parking to family and music programs, and consequently the digital system must serve many types of customers – sometimes with overlaps. This is the essence of a unified customer experience. “We synchronize all channels in real time,” explained Ocskay. “So the ticket I buy at the cashier for an event can be purchased by someone else at the same time on mobile, and we mustn’t sell more than we have.” All services are managed by one platform, so all parties can be immediately informed about what happens.
Ocskay László, Oander (Photo: Márton Fejes)
And what else can be smart in a city besides buildings, parks, and parking lots? Among other things, trees. Gyula Fekete, CTO of GreeHill, said in his lecture that trees have a divisive role in cities: everyone desires green environments, but scattered trees can block visibility on roads or cast shadows over entire building wings. Furthermore, we don’t even have much information on how many trees exist in a given city, and without this essential data they cannot be managed effectively.
GreeHill deals with the automatic detection of trees and the management of data thus obtained: advanced machine sensing tools are used to process where trees have grown and in what condition they are. And why should we bother with greenery at all, when concrete and paving stones don’t fall on our cars after a storm? Gyula gave the clearest and healthiest answer: “You can live in a city without trees, but it’s not worth it.”
Of course, nowhere can you see as many trees as from the air. Dr. Tamás Tomor, co-owner of Envirosense Hungary Kft., spoke about perhaps the company’s most ambitious project, which has been ongoing since 2020: laser scanning the entire territory of Hungary – currently 75% complete. The national model built from the point cloud amounts to 500 terabytes, and artificial intelligence is used for processing. The aim is a complex database that produces a 3D building stock at settlement level – during the demonstration, Tomor showed how solar energy production potential can also be read from the virtual map thus built.
Dr. Tamás Tomor, Envirosense (Photo: Márton Fejes)
In the afternoon, Roland Németh, Head of Automation Development at Paulinyi & Partners Innovations, connected to this with his lecture on the practical use of space data. By analyzing ESA data, they predicted urban warming. The urban heat island effect can apply even to areas of a few hundred square meters: if concrete is denser somewhere, the asphalt heated during summer heatwaves does not cool down overnight. Németh explained that while many study surface heat islands, too few look at air temperature – even though that determines perceived heat.
Németh Roland, Paulinyi & Partners Innovations (Photo: Márton Fejes)
Of course, sometimes less is more. Anders Kallebo, Swedish founder and CEO of proptech company Myrspoven, also emphasized the importance of the relativity of values. His company, dealing with building energy optimization, set itself the goal of reducing the construction industry’s carbon footprint by 1%. “This is a small number, yet a very big challenge,” said Kallebo, who sees the solution in the use of artificial intelligence. As an analogy, he referred to the Industrial Revolution: once many people were needed to perform a task, but later, with the advent of machines, fewer but more skilled people sufficed. Construction and energy optimized with AI can thus be considered another Industrial Revolution.
Yes, but the Industrial Revolution brought immediate benefits – and we are still paying the price through climate change. But how will digitalization bring money? This was discussed at the roundtable titled The Return on Investment of Digitalization in Different Segments of the Real Estate Market, where Attila Kovács, CEO of Smart Edge Solutions, Frigyes Hollosi, owner of Smartapart, Péter Németh, co-founder of Forestay Group, Patrik Pálvölgyi, Head of Gránit-Pólus Innovation Center, and Tibor Moritz, founder of Propx Hungary, talked about ROI. Based on their words, advanced technology primarily helps in data-based decision-making – as Németh put it, it is like “when the iPhone appeared, it did nothing new, just put many things together in one,” and then came the hype.
This is, however, a dangerous weapon, as it can often mislead investors. For example, if a function is developed at great expense but residents don’t use it, many tend to keep forcing it, even though its foundation was not solid. Patrik Pálvölgyi mentioned metaverse VR shopping as an example of a hype that excited some foreign mall owners but in the end we are not doing our Christmas shopping with Meta headsets. And how quantifiable is ROI? Frigyes Hollosi said it is more of an investment that yields returns in the long run: “A lot of money has to be spent, and we spend on plenty of dead ends as well. But as an example, after we experimented with various methods for a long time with our first building, by the second we could launch everything within a month. In the long run, ROI rather comes through scalability.”