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Understanding Homelessness and Housing Exclusion in the New European Context
FEANTSA's European Observatory on Homelessness - European Research Conference
Budapest, Friday 17 September 2010

Draft Programme

Conference Presentations

Conference

FEANTSA’s European Observatory on Homelessness, the European Network for Housing Research Working Group on Welfare Policy, Homelessness and Social Exclusion and the Metropolitan Research Institute Budapest, are pleased to announce the 5th Annual Research Conference on Homelessness in Europe. The key theme for the 2010 Conference was “Understanding Homelessness and Housing Exclusion in the New European Context”. The conference took place in Budapest on 17 September 2010.

The Theme

Research into dimensions of homelessness and housing exclusion in Europe has been geographically uneven, with more published research emanating from Western and Northern Europe to date. This gap is gradually being addressed, and the aim of this conference is to both stimulate and consolidate research exploring homelessness and housing exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe.  We welcome in particular papers that compare dimensions of homelessness and housing exclusion across Central and Eastern Europe, but also wish to encourage the submission of papers that focus on dimensions of homelessness and housing exclusion in individual Central and Eastern European Countries.
Although a particular focus of the conference is on understanding homelessness and housing exclusion in Central and Eastern Europe, the conference will also include open sessions  on the broad theme of ‘homelessness and housing exclusion’ from across Europe. 

 Keynote Speakers

Dr.  József Hegedüs is a founding member of Metropolitan Research Institute (MRI), which was established in 1989. Dr. Hegedüs carries out research in housing policy, urban economics and municipal finance.  Besides this, he has been participating in technical assistance projects in transitional countries, and has been working on social housing reforms and social exclusion in Hungary and the region in the last two decades. In 2007, he was a consultant in the work on access to housing for vulnerable groups commissioned by the Council of Europe. More recently, he headed a research team at MRI which completed a research on housing exclusion in relation to the economic crises of 2008.

Bill Edgar is Director of European Housing Research Ltd and an honorary research fellow at the Universities of Dundee and St Andrews.  He was the research co-ordinator of FEANTSA’s European Observatory on Homelessness from 1998 to 2008. During this time he developed ETHOS – a typology of homelessness and housing exclusion – adopted widely in Europe and recently as far afield as New Zealand. Other publications include Women and Homelessness, Access to Housing and Immigration and Homelessness in Europe. He has co-ordinated a number of EU funded projects including MPHASIS - Mutual Progress on Homelessness Through Advancing and Strengthening Information Systems.