The complex institutional, economic, and societal trends that have characterized the post-socialist transition in Central and Eastern European countries have drastically reshaped urban development. The case of Budapest shows that three decades of nearly exclusive market-driven urban policies have resulted in a variety of social, spatial and environmental deficiencies. This paper presents the paradigm of creativity-driven urban regeneration and proposes an approach to implement this paradigm, with a key role for urban design interventions, to successfully address these challenges, specifically, the regeneration of industrial brownfields, in an integrated manner and to create more inclusive, just, and sustainable cities.