This session offers a great opportunity to learn about and discuss the criminalisation of trespass for Gypsy-Traveller communities and the focus on rural areas in Hungary’s housing policy. The full abstracts are below.
Presentations from these authors and a live Q&A session are available to all HSA members. Book here
1. Ryan Powell and Sam Bergum Manufacturing Mandates: Gypsy-Travellers and the Criminalisation of Trespass in England and Wales
This paper explores the logics and rationalities of today's state interventions into the lives of Gypsy-Traveller groups, focusing on recent public consultations to criminalise trespass in England and Wales. We analyse the discourses, logics, symbolic representations and consultative processes that manufacture mandates for criminalisation, which can be understood as “heroic state simplifications” in James Scott’s (1988) terms. They do so by presenting policy shifts as being in the interests of Gypsy-Travellers, whilst offering a distorted representation of Gypsy-Traveller communities by selectively foregrounding hostile and racist sentiments. While this most recent policy move is but the latest in a long history of state hostility towards Gypsy-Travellers, the gradual criminalisation of trespass and the attack on nomadic heritage has implications beyond long stigmatised Gypsy-Traveller communities. It raises worrying and profound questions around the state's dismissal of justice, long-standing rights to roam, and informalized methods of securing housing. As an alternative to criminalisation, this paper suggests that recent pragmatic interventions aimed at accommodating nomadism, built on dialogue and cooperation, offer effective solutions that can be relatively easily realized.
2. Bence Kovats Origins of the rural focus of Hungary’s path-dependent housing policy
In the presentation the long-run path dependence of Hungarian housing policy is overviewed through its rather unique and strong focus on peripheral rural areas, characterising a number of measures such as the Families’ Home-Making Grant, the virtual debt relief of indebted homeowners through the National Asset Management Company, and the ban on the auction of defaulting debtors’ homes at a price lower than 90% of their estimated value. In search for explanations for the strong preference for rural areas in current Hungarian housing policy, the author analyses political debates around and the budgets of housing policy measures targeting urban and rural housing problems in the first half of the 20th.century. The paper concludes that, in contrast with most Western European core countries where housing policy served to improve housing conditions of the urban working class, in Hungary, somewhat similarly to Ireland (Aalen 1987), subsequent conservative national governments consisting of prominent members of landed aristocracy, preferred the provision of homes to landless agricultural labourers, pacifying their discontent with the land ownership structure. Such programmes acted as substitutes for a thorough land reform and with the aim of securing labour supply for the cultivation of large estates. Pertaining high share of rural population in the 20th century and the origins of housing policy have sustained a strong rural focus of Hungary’s housing policy, yet amidst sped up impoverishment of rural areas and housing price appreciation in cities, such measures may be less effective in addressing housing problems today