The aim of the Bengt Turner Award is to encourage new researchers to write research papers on housing and urban issues linked to the topics of the ENHR Working Groups and to keep alive the memory of Bengt Turner, one of the founders of ENHR and its first chairman from 1988 to 2007. The Bengt Turner Award is for the best paper of the The European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) annual conference.
WINNER
Bence Kováts
Institute for Regional Studies, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies, Békéscsaba, Hungary
Title: The Conservative Housing Regime: Conditions of Its Emergence and Its Long-term Path Dependence in Hungary
Abstract: Compared to liberalism and social democracy, conservative ideology is presented in the literature to have had an ambiguous and much less significant influence on housing policy-making. The article argues that alongside measures facilitating the commodification of housing based in liberal ideology and those fostering the de-commodification of housing rooted in social democracy, the conservative idea of preserving the traditional family home as a major component of traditional life has also underlain housing policy-making in various countries and eras. Based on the theoretical works exploring the manifestation of conservatism in housing policy, characteristics of a conservative housing regime are defined. The construction, retrenchment and reconstruction of the Hungarian conservative housing regime over the past 120 years is then reviewed to trace mechanisms and conditions contributing to the enduring significance of the paradigm. The article concludes that the influence of landed aristocracy on housing policy-making at the beginning of the 20th century, the forceful retrenchment of the conservative housing paradigm during state socialism and the disillusionment with neoliberalism after the 2009 mortgage crisis are the main causes behind the (re-)construction of a markedly conservative housing regime in Hungary in the past decade
