ABSTRACT
The chapters in this book refer to a transitional period not only in the East European housing model itself, but also in the state of our knowledge about its development and future. The sociology and economics of East European housing was quite ambiguous until now when science enjoys a new freedom to express the real housing policy contradictions in the various East European countries. Even if there is a unique critical attitude in these chapters, the depth of criticism and the sharpness of the critics are rather different. A Western observer should not forget that science in Eastern Europe has always ‘enjoyed’ greater or lesser ideological control, depending of course to a different extent on the actual political climate of the given country. The uniqueness of this book largely lies in the fact that the conference for which the original papers were written was held in 1989 (in Noszvaj, Hungary) in the year of transition, but the final editing was done at the end of 1990, the year when political events were making such critical approaches into the ‘mainstream’.
